Must’ve been hard to make them all stand still for the painting.

Nelson had many close calls in his life, famously losing an arm and an eye, but his luck ran out at Trafalgar. A musket shot wedged itself in his spine, paralysing him. He was taken below decks where he faded in and out of consciousness for the next few hours, desperate to live to see his final, greatest victory. With no hope of making it, he said his last goodbyes to his fellow officers, wincing at every sway of the ship. Tears in their eyes, brothers who’d been by his side for decades knelt next to him and kissed his cheek. They then dumped his body in a barrel of brandy so it wouldn’t stink up the place.

As I listened to this heroic, and frankly disturbing story, I found myself thinking about how insane life was back then. Nelson could’ve skipped that grueling ordeal if he was born today, because we have anesthesia, reliable surgical practices, and most importantly, peace with the French (begrudgingly). I lay in bed thinking to myself “Man, life was so fucked up in the distant past”. Musket balls, cannons, Napoleon… it felt like there was an enormous chasm between the world I live in and the one I was hearing about. It then occurred to me - 1805 was really not that long ago.

I know that sounds a bit odd, but it’s true. I was born in 1996. The oldest person alive at that time, Jeanne Calment, was 121. That means, despite being only 29 years old, I was alive at the same time as someone born in 1875. That’s totally fucked! She was walking before Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb, but lived to see the release of the Nintendo 64! How can it be possible that someone saw Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, and GoldenEye LAN parties? It’s like if Archduke Franz Ferdinand knew what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were (I think his favourite would be Raphael).

So, I was just one really old person away from 1875. That means I was one really old person + one quite old person away from the Battle of Trafalgar. Yet, the world I live in and the one Nelson died in couldn’t be more different. He died in a room where people put blocks of wood in sailor’s mouths and sawed off their arms. I wake up for work, log into ChatGPT, and talk to metal and sand. Isn’t that just trouser-shittingly insane to think about? Imagine explaining to Nelson, a man who didn’t know what germs are, that we know how to organise sand in such a way that you can have a conversation with it. If his boss forced him to use a new AI app, he wouldn’t roll his eyes, he’d lose his mind and shoot himself in the face.

Historically, this is a really odd situation to be in. Most people have seen a world largely unchanged in their lifetime. If you were a medieval peasant, you’d wake up to plow the fields at 18, and you’d be doing the same shit 50 winters later. You’d teach your kid the same skills your dad taught you, because aside from which rich guy owned the land you lived on, not much changed from century to century. Send a guy from 1300 back to 1100 and I wager he’d probably do just fine.

That same thing, however, cannot be said for me. Drop me in 1825 London and no one at the dockyard would value my Notion boards. I’d live on the street and get tuberculosis for Christmas. My sleep score would be sub 50. None of my knowledge or wisdom would be useful, besides a few vague ideas about working hard, and not drinking from the Thames.

This uselessness is a reflection of how quickly the world is changing around us. The world is not only changing, but it’s changing faster and faster. It took decades for phones to be in people’s houses after they were invented, but the internet took only a fraction of that. We don’t even have house phones anymore! The “phone” is just the app we screen calls through while watching 4K video on our personal pocket bricks. Things are accelerating, and you and I are some of the first people living at the hinge point where drastic global change is visible over a single lifetime.

Despite this, we tend to think of things as being normal. I suspect we sometimes look at our childhoods and imagine that’s how the world always was, and how it always will be. For me, the early noughties were just “life”, and everything after that has been some weird corruption and bastardisation of the script. A divergence from the concrete norm that was CD Walkmans, CRT Televisions, and a war in Afghanistan.

This expectation is always quietly announcing itself around us. Millennials, for example, are notoriously mad about the fact that they can’t buy a house. We grew up expecting that if we worked hard, and were sensible with money, we’d be able to afford the odd holiday and a house with a white picket fence. We believe this, because it’s the world our parents grew up in. They could save up a deposit for a house in a few years, and move into their house in their mid 20s. We, however, have to wait until our 30s, and even then we usually need an old relative to take one for the team. We find ourselves renting, with stagnating wages that haven’t gone up in line with the costs of living.

People get mad about that (and I don’t blame them, to be clear), but behind that anger is an assumption that a world where everyone buys their own home is how things are “supposed to be”. Yet, people growing up and moving into a house of their own in their 20s is an exceptionally weird state of affairs! It’s not normal to buy a house with a few years of saving - that was a symptom of the extraordinary post war economy. Before then, people tended to live in multi-generational homes, or they rented. It only took one generation for an incredible phenomenon like easy home ownership to get taken for granted. That expectation betrays that we forget it’s not the natural order of things. The fact that your parents strolled into a 3 bed semi-detached in the late 80s was not normal. Historically, it was unheard of!

I feel a similar way when I’m told about the importance of my pension. Now, I still pay into my pension because my work matches my payments and I figure it’s free money. I’m not a finance guy, but I imagine it’s one of the better investments I can make. However, when older people talk to me about it, they see it through the lens of their personal experience. They’ve worked their whole lives, likely in the same industry, and through consistent pension investment now get to retire in their mid 60s to live it up. They stress that, were I not to invest in my retirement, I will be stuck working in a burger stop at 72 just trying to keep the lights on.

However, this assumes there’ll be any 72 year old’s working at burger stops by then. This is 2068, mind you, and I’ve spent a decent amount of this blog ranting about how we can talk to sand now. The TV I grew up with had a wooden case, and its screen gave me electric shocks. Now I’m only 29 and the machines already have souls. I don’t know what the world will look like in 2068, and I can’t say if investing in my pension will actually matter or not, but I do think the consequences of financial irresponsibility will be different to what I’m being warned about. The failures of the future will not be flipping burgers at Mcdonald’s, because I doubt anyone will be flipping burgers at McDonald’s. The only guess about the distant future that I know is wrong is that it’ll be like the world is now.

It’s when I think about all this, lying in my bed while listening to someone describe Nelson’s shattered spine, that I feel my grip on the world loosen. It’s like that brief moment, after jumping off something a bit higher than you’re used to, when your stomach begins to turn. The acceleration is unsettling, because it’s both unfamiliar and totally uncontrollable. The eye watering pace we’ve been evolving at predates me by centuries, and there really hasn’t ever been a “normal” since that kicked off. The things we think of as normal are just a passing phase we see as we transition into whatever inconceivable thing comes next. The only normal we’ve ever known is each year being weirder than the last.

“This hair! It’s GONE!”

He then gestured his hands, italianly.

I sighed in defeat. I’d noticed this losing battle over the previous years, but been silently hoping it would simply stop at a “mature” hairline. Instead, the front was collapsing before my very eyes, and what little hairs I had were fleeing Dunkirk in fishing boats. The barber sprung into action, explaining that while he too was a sufferer of male pattern baldness, he turned it around with one easy home remedy: Garlic.

I never ended up trying his advice, but I suspect it would work. Not because it’d necessarily grow my hair back, but because everyone would be too busy saying “Jesus, what the fuck is that smell?” to notice my bare temples. I’d play along and say “I dunno, but it’s definitely not the smell of my hair falling out!” and they’d nod in sincere agreement, none the wiser.

As they say in AA, the first step is admitting you have a problem, so thus started my hair regrowth journey. I first shaved my head and tried to embrace it. Fortunately, I don’t have a weirdly shaped head and can grow a beard, so didn’t look awful, but a part of me yearned. If this was happening at 46, maybe I’d have an easier time accepting it, but I was only 26! I had so much life left to live! As a man with a fully-haired brother, father, and granddad, I couldn’t help but feel shafted, so I eventually tried the various serums designed to help men in this, the most serious crisis of their lives.

Again, I was lucky, as I experienced none of the side effects people report when trying finasteride or minoxidil. However, I didn’t really grow much. I just stopped the fire, and settled at a middling, Vegeta-esque hairline.

Same hair, same body. We’re like twins!

It was fine, for a while, but the upkeep was tedious. Spraying shit on your head, and stabbing it with microneedles makes some gains, sure, but do I really want to be doing that for the rest of my life? Think of all the time it’s wasting when I could be brushing my beautiful locks near a castle balcony window, or styling Cousin Itt cosplays! There had to be another way.

Around this time I had a friend with a lifelong receding hairline suddenly appear with a young man’s head of hair. He explained that he bit the bullet and got the surgery, and you know what? He looked great! Not only that, but the main worrying part of a hair transplant - having people pick on you for having a hair transplant - basically never occurred. Most people just complimented him and went on with their lives.

So, last year, I decided to take the plunge myself.

The dog also had one. She used to look like Larry David.

I resolved to “own it” and speak freely about my surgery, and like my friend before me, was pleasantly surprised about the reaction. I imagined people would see it as vain, or perhaps insecure. In a world of body positivity and Dove ad campaigns, one group continues to endure society’s ridicule: the balding man. The vanguard, standing strong on the frontlines of acceptable bullying, taking the hits so the rest of us may live our lives in peace.

However, if anyone does feel that way I can’t say I’ve detected it. Women are almost always curious. They always start to inspect, and ask questions about the process (short version: painful!), but I’ve never had a woman I’ve dated be turned off by it. If anything I think they respect that I don’t try to downplay it.

Men, however, are the real surprise. Male friendships are usually built on a foundation of mutual bullying. Almost everything is on the table. I have a close friend whose dad abandoned him when he was a young boy, electing to choose a new family over him and his siblings. Now fatherless, he spent years unsure if he could’ve done anything differently to be worthy of his father’s love. To be worthy of anyone’s love. We still laugh about it to this day.

Hair loss, however, seems to be deathly serious. Every man sincerely hypes you up, and immediately confesses their own worries. Even men who haven’t had much hair loss start to vent, because it turns out this is something that we’re all really sensitive about. Even just a centimetre or two makes us obsess over our hairlines. We check our hands after we shampoo to look for stray hairs, get another mirror to look at our crown, and post on reddit asking if it’s “over for us”.

So when you speak about your hair transplant as freely as you would a dentist appointment, there’s a sense of relief. A quiet “You had this worry too?” comes out of other men, and fraternity begins to take shape. It gives them permission to open up about their insecurities, and legitimizes intervention. There’s a sense they start to feel they’re allowed to do something about their hair loss without feeling awkward or embarrassed. After all, if it’s happened to you, your appearance is changing drastically - it’s okay to want to do something about it!

Now, I should say it’s not like I think surgery or medication is the only solution. Some commit to the bald look, and look great. However, until recent years if you were losing your hair you only had 2 options.

1. Hang on for dear life, and have people laugh at the comb over.

2. Shave it off, learn to tank the bald jokes, and likely feel less attractive (at least until you get used to it).

2 is always the better option, but obviously it’s still no fun! I’m not surprised that I, and many other men, would avoid it if we can. So, now we live in the future and can brute force abundant side hair over to the temples and crown, it’s a tempting out!

However, in quiet moments we still have a lingering “is this pathetic?” thought clanging around our heads. The more of us that speak about our hair loss, the more that thought quiets down, and the more other men can feel comfortable exploring hair loss prevention as a legitimate option. Freedom to act how you’d like, without worrying about imagined social costs, is a good thing, I think. Although if you start buying garlic in bulk I will start picking on you.

Fast forward to my wise, sage, 30th year, and things have changed. I care way less now about almost everything. Despite this, I think I’m having a more positive impact on the world and the people around me. How is this possible? Isn’t staying informed a prerequisite for being a productive and responsible citizen? How can I ignore so much without being a selfish bastard like all the bus drivers of the world? Easy: I just care when it makes sense to.

What is Caring?

I should start by explaining exactly what I mean by “caring”, because I think there are two senses of the word.

The first sense is simply having an opinion of some kind on an issue or an event. This is pretty easy, and I wager that it’s basically impossible not to do it automatically. Anytime you read or hear anything you generate a reaction without thinking. Political scandal? Bad. Some protest you agree with? Good. Picture of me? Erotic. It all just cascades without us putting in any effort. This is not the sort of caring I think we need to ration, because I’m not sure we could if we wanted to, and even if we did we’d probably become boring slug-like creatures.

The sense of caring I’m focusing on here is the kind that involves spending a resource. Money and time count, of course, but I consider mental energy a finite resource as well. Strong emotional responses are also a limited resource. When I was younger, I’d spend an inordinate amount of time getting mad at, or overly excited by current events, and it drained me. My phone was a vampire sucking out vital life energy one sensational headline at a time. I was spending more time focusing on the outside world than my own life, and I’m not sure anyone tangibly benefitted. Nowadays, I’m more surgical with my concern, finding only the issues worth thinking about, and the skill comes in filtering out the ones that aren’t.

1. Does it matter?

Seems like an obvious thing to ask first, but you’d be surprised how much we care about things that don’t matter. Take Taylor Swift’s recent album release. People cared a lot about that! Just how many think pieces did you see on your feed? I saw more than I can count, and I only listen to Enter the Wu Tang and the Gran Turismo 3 soundtrack. There was this weird debate over whether or not she is racist (honestly, I couldn’t even tell you why people think that), and if she’s somehow abandoning women for writing love songs about her husband. Truly, it boggles the mind. (Also, I can’t mention the Taylor controversy without linking to this CHH article):

Cartoons Hate Her

I've Been Personally Victimized by MAGA Taylor Swift

As if this clusterfuckable dumbledick hogweed year wasn’t bad enough, we all have something new about which to grieve: Taylor Swift’s devastating and unmistakable turn to MAGA…

Read more

7 months ago · 431 likes · 142 comments · Cartoons Hate Her

So, what do we have to show for all that? Taylor sold a cubic shitload of albums, a bunch of fans got in a tizzy, and critics made a mound out of a molehill. It’s been a few weeks now, and did any of it actually matter in the grand scheme of things? Will any of us be thinking about it a week from now, let alone a year, or a decade? The media cycle gobbled that shit up and we moved onto the next thing almost immediately, and I wager any outrage wasted on that particular story was just lost in the void. Even the people that spent time writing about how bigoted she is probably spend zero time thinking about this now. The media vampire drained an awful lot of energy from us, and we realised no reward.

Now, I’m not saying the only sensible response was to ignore it all entirely. Maybe you’re just interested in her and like reading news about her new album - that’s cool! It’s not like you have to only focus on things that matter, and it’s okay to have interests. However, some of the responses seemed to have way more gravity behind them than was required. Fact is, if you find yourself trying to extrapolate the political views of a singer from her milquetoast pop songs and getting worked up over it, you need to put the phone down and go hug your dad or something.

2. Am I likely to be well-informed?

Okay, so you’ve found some issue that actually matters. We’re no longer talking about pop star controversy, the marital status of porn stars (NSFW), or England losing the Euro Final anymore. We’re focusing on real issues like the national debt, some foreign war, or the marital status of me. We’re good to start caring now, right? No, you imbecile! You cretin. There’s more filtering to be done! Did you even read the subheading??

Loads of issues matter, but there are also loads of people that care about them that have bad takes. This is because it turns out the world is exceptionally complicated, and even smart experts disagree a lot on important problems. Before you consider spending any time and energy on some issue, ask yourself (honestly) how likely you are to have a well informed opinion on it.

Now, maybe you don’t have a well informed opinion on it now, but could do with a bit of research. For example: Is increasing the minimum wage economically beneficial, or does it hamper industry? You probably have an answer in the chamber already, but how confident are you in that belief? Have you actually looked at any data? Have you read any books on the subject from well-respected economists? Until then, I’d hold onto your opinions loosely, and reserve your judgement on any news story relating to it until you feel like you have a grasp on the fundamentals. Otherwise, you might find yourself despairing over some policy change, despite it actually being a good thing! You might be celebrating when the government makes the situation worse! Surely, before you start to fight for either side, you should know which side is the one worth fighting for?

Keep in mind, the economics of the minimum wage are undoubtedly complex, and only you know how much effort it’ll take you to understand it. Are you a maths nerd, who already has an interest in economics? Cool, then the price of being informed is probably quite low, and so worth your time. Do you count with your fingers when buying a pack of Tic Tacs? Then the barrier to entry is going to be a lot higher.

This ties into the previous step. Educating yourself on any issue is a trade-off, and you need to balance how much the thing actually matters vs how much effort is required for you to learn about it. Keep in mind that boring issues probably have easily accessible unbiased sources, and highly polarising, emotional issues will be inundated with propaganda. You might find that while some things matter, they require so much effort to learn about and sift through the bullshit that they aren’t worth your time. The things you should prioritise are the things that matter a lot and are easy to pick up. You’re not going to be able to inform yourself on everything that’s important, so you need to use what limited resources you have efficiently.

3. Can I do anything about it?

This is by far the most important step, and also the one that cuts out most of the noise from my life - is there anything to be done? You and I are each one person out of billions, and the influence we realistically have over global events is tiny. Almost every crazy thing you read about in the news is also something you can do fuck all about because you’re not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, you’re a teaching assistant from Middlesbrough.

This might sound defeatist, and I don’t doubt that there are many stories of ordinary people changing the world, but they are certainly the exception to the rule. For every old Irish lady bringing an end to Apartheid by protesting grapefruit, there are scores of people sharing Instagram stories into the abyss with nothing to show for it. I think Trump’s new ballroom is yet another blatant example of corruption, but what am I realistically going to do about it? I’m not even an American citizen! I suppose I could write about it to my generally left-leaning base, and have a bunch of you comment “Right again Connor! God, what an astute political analyst you are. Handsome too.” but what would that achieve besides curing my impotence?

Again, this kind of cutthroat realism might sound like you’re throwing your hands up and letting the world walk all over you - but in reality it does the opposite. Most people that care about everything do nothing. They get riled up and outraged about the new hot topic, before forgetting about it and ranting about the next. There’s no strategy to their action because they’re always having their attention pulled in every which way. They can’t focus on anything long enough for them to gain any sort of traction. It’s all just Facebook statuses and tense family dinners.

The Good News

Here’s the fun bit: there are issues that matter, you can inform yourself about, and you can influence! Take an example close to my heart, factory farming.

Does it Matter? - Seems like it! About 100 billion land animals are factory farmed each year alongside many more billions of fish. Animals feel pain and suffer, so as long as I think those are bad (which I do) then not only does this issue matter, it matters an enormous amount.

Am I likely to be well-informed? - Yes, Animal ethics is not a hard subject to understand, and I wager any adult could follow the arguments involved. The practices in factory farming are also well-documented, and undisputed.

Can I do something about it? - Certainly. There are many effective charities involved in the space that realise tangible gains. I can also volunteer at such an organisation, or change my diet.

Being a responsible and effective member of society is not about despairing at your news app, or knowing about every single thing that happened last week. Being informed means fuck all if you don’t do anything about it. At that point, you might as well just spare yourself, tune out, and focus on your own life. If you’re going to care about the world at all, you shouldn’t take a scattergun approach. Be surgical. Find the things that matter a lot, that you can understand, and that you can influence. If some problem doesn’t meet those criteria and you get worked up over it, you’re just making yourself unhappy while no one else benefits, and where’s the nobility in that?

At 10pm, as the night came to a close, we prepared for our departure, I looked at the used utensils and takeout box my food arrived in.

“Shall I take it up to the bar? No, they wouldn’t want me to leave trash on the bar. Is there a bin nearby? No. Hmm, that staff member is tidying up nearby- maybe it’s best I just leave it on the table for her to handle.”

I got up to leave. My friend swiveled her head and remarked “You just gonna leave that there??”.

My world imploded in an instant. Reputation, incinerated. I, Connor Jennings, lifelong good boy and Pupil of the Week September 17th 2004, had just thrown the good service of this fine establishment back in its face. I’d left an indelible stain on my image, marking me as the sort of scum that treats bar staff like they’re subhuman. Everyone probably thinks I click my fingers at waiters now. They think I wave my debit card to bartenders. Irredeemable. I should buy a V-neck.

I instantly grabbed my things and gestured to the bartender, desperate for his absolution. He looked at me, a roman emperor deciding my fate after gladiatorial combat.

“Yeah, anywhere’s fine”.

Such grace. He was a benevolent God.

The damage, however, was done. I’d shattered whatever good will I had among the inner circle, and lay in bed at night running it over in my head. “What were you thinking? Why not just ask? What kind of person are you? Lazy, inconsiderate, arsehole. Prick. Loser. Piece of shit. Worthless. Piece of Shit (reprise)”.

It’s only after a good two hours of this back and forth that I realised just how insane this particular brand of my neurosis is. It almost goes without saying, but literally no one involved in any of this interaction thought about it for more than 20 seconds. I, however, while dragging around the weight of a social blunder, was attaching ever larger weights along with it, as though my self-flagellation would provide some sort of redemption arc. I felt if I just beat myself up a little bit more, I’d become worthy again.

Remove the stone of shame! Attach the stone of greater, more crippling shame!

I suspect I’m particularly bad case of this sort of self-criticism (OCD, hell of a thing!), but I also wager that everyone’s worst bully is themselves. Normal people don’t talk to each other like that. Seriously, if you said to anyone else the sorts of things you say to yourself, everyone would think you’re morally bankrupt. It’s cruel to pick on someone ad nauseum for some mistake, wrongdoing, or blunder, as if moving on with their life is a luxury they’re not worthy of.

Imagine you woke up one morning, going about your business, when someone pulls back the shower curtain to announce “You forgot mother’s day 4 years ago! How dare you shower in peace!”. Obviously, you’d call the police, but you’d also think they were kind of a prick to talk to you that way - even if it’s true you forgot Mother’s day 4 years ago! Constantly reminding someone of their failures is not anyone’s idea of virtuous behaviour, yet behind the closed doors of our own minds, this scene plays out routinely. Every time we embarrass ourselves by saying the wrong thing, screw up a presentation at work, or forget a birthday, the first judge through the door and last one out is always ourselves.

It’s tempting to feel like this sort of treatment is beneficial. We imagine we’re hard on ourselves to ensure we perform better in the future. No pain, no gain. The problem with this, however, is two-fold. First, the negative impact on your quality of life is tremendous. It’s just not a nice way to exist in this world to always be looking over your shoulder, and chastising any mistake with the intensity of a violent mob. Secondly, it probably doesn’t even work! So, what can we do about our errors instead?

The answer is self-compassion, the radical and extreme idea that you should be nice to yourself when you’re having a hard time. Insane, I know, but there’s a growing body of research supporting it as a positive mental health intervention.

“The research, regardless of methods used, points mainly to the benefits of self-compassion on the therapists’ mental health and well-being; prevention of occupational stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatization as well as improvement of therapeutic competencies and professional efficacy-related aspects.”

“Self-compassion interventions led to a significant improvement across 11 diverse psychosocial outcomes compared with controls.”

“These findings suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves.”

What is Self-Compassion?

Dr Kristin Neff characterises Self Compassion pretty succinctly - it’s the practice of treating yourself the same way you would a close friend. We all observe, and maybe even call out our friends mistakes, but we tend to be tender with them as we do so. If you found out your friend told some joke that bombed at their office Christmas party, you probably wouldn’t beat them up for it. You might laugh with them and tell them it’s not a big deal, or maybe put a hand on their shoulder and be present with their stress. Whatever you do, you’d likely be kind (otherwise you probably don’t have a lot of friends to begin with). Generally, we are quite open to be compassionate to others, but far less so to ourselves. Self Compassion is simply the practice of extending that circle to include yourself.

It’s also worth noting what Self-Compassion isn’t. When first hearing about the concept, people sometimes equate it with self-pity, which is obviously going to be a negative and disabling attitude to have. There are, however, important differences between pity and compassion. Pity is isolating. When you pity yourself, you imagine you’re the only person in the world that has had this negative experience. You have a woe-is-me outlook, and think you’re a special case of suffering. However, compassion does the opposite. One of the core ideas of self-compassion is that we all screw up, and we all suffer. Your imperfection is not sui generis, and that’s what makes it easier to forgive. You are not a uniquely bad person.

Likewise, self compassion isn’t letting yourself off the hook. Again, imagine your friend said something cruel to their partner in an argument and was feeling awful about it. It’s possible to show compassion to them without saying they did no wrong. You’d maybe say something like “Well, you’ve apologised now and learned your lesson. That’s all you can do. I’m sorry you’re feeling so bad”. If you had or know any good parents, you probably see them do this sort of thing with their kids all the time. The idea that a child did something bad is compatible with the idea that they’re not a bad person, and don’t deserve to be berated for life. Making a mistake shouldn’t be a life sentence. Self-compassion is a bit like self-parenting in that sense.

How Do You Even Do It?

It’s all well and good touting the benefits of self compassion, but of course it’d be handy to know how to actually do it. Just telling yourself to be self-compassionate is unlikely to yield results, you need some sort of plan. Well, the practice of self compassion can be thought of in three parts

The first is kindness. View yourself the same way a loved one would see you. Even in the wake of a mistake, they’d recognise that you’re suffering and have a desire to alleviate it. They wouldn’t be looking at you from a place of judgment, but from a place of care. They may even take some action to help you feel better. Ask yourself: What can I do right now to make myself feel safe? This may be having a lie down, a cup of tea, or placing your hand on your heart. Even taking a small action like this can help you identify yourself as a person you want to be happy, and not an enemy you want to suffer.

Next, you should recognise your common humanity. If you ask anyone on the street if they’re perfect, they’ll say no. If you ask them if anyone in the world is perfect they’ll also say no (unless they’ve met me of course). So, it’s very common knowledge that imperfection and making mistakes is just part of the deal of being human. We all recognise this readily until something goes wrong. Suddenly, when our face is burning red, people look at us weird, or we fall on our face in failure, we become very egocentric. We start to imagine we’re the only person that ever goes through things like this. Why am I like this when everyone else has it together?! We separate ourselves from the world, which is a psychologically devastating place to be.

However, you should take time to recognise that this is obviously deluded. Your dataset is massively biased against you. You are well acquainted with every secret failure, every shortcoming, and every bad habit you have. However, you’re only acquainted with the parts of everyone else they want you to see. You’re comparing your gritty warts-and-all autobiography with everyone else’s shining biopic. It’s unfair.

Likewise, you need to notice that not only is your imperfection common, it’s also human! This is life. Things go wrong. As Dr Christopher Germer says, no one wakes up in the morning and says “Gee, I’m gonna do something today that’ll make me feel shame for the rest of my life!”. Stuff happens. It will happen again. Did you really think you were going to get through the rest of your life without ever making a faux-pas again? The only way to do that is to stay indoors forever, and I assume that’s not a tradeoff you’d be willing to make. You are imperfect. Everyone else is imperfect. That’s not going to change.

The last component of self compassion is mindfulness. In order to be compassionate to yourself, you need to notice that you’re suffering in the first place. Now, this might sound a bit strange, because when you’re suffering it’s often all you notice, so it’s not immediately clear why we’d need even need to try to be mindful. However, the pain of self-criticism is so bad precisely because it clouds our contact with our own suffering. We become so identified with the critic, that we almost don’t notice we’re the one being criticised - and it hurts! It hurts when you tell yourself you’re not good enough, or you’re a bad person, or you’ll never be the way you want to be.

Being mindful and compassionate means turning towards our pain, sitting with it, and acknowledging it. Acknowledging that you’re struggling instead of covering it up with brutal self judgement.

I’ll be honest, I do find this practice tricky, especially noticing common humanity. My lack of familiarity with other people’s mistakes makes me feel like I’m a uniquely bad case - despite the rational part of my brain knowing otherwise. Still, I know it’s an important practice. Oscar Wilde once said that “Loving yourself is the beginning of a lifelong affair” and I think that hammers home the gravity of cultivating self-compassion. You’re the only one you have to spend 24 hours a day with. Surely, it makes sense to live alongside a friend instead of a bully (even if you did do something a bit silly after a pub quiz).

Logan tries to meets them halfway and gives some lame apology, but can see before long that they’ve dug their heels in. They won’t be swayed. They’ve let their emotions cloud their business sense (if there was any to begin with), and he won’t be getting their votes. Now he’s given up hope of winning them over, he speaks freely.

“Jesus… you’re such fucking dopes. You are not serious figures. I love you, but you are not serious people”.

Now, I should start by saying that Logan Roy is not a role model. After all, the reason his kids resent him so much is the abuse and neglect they endured in their youth. Still, he’s also not wrong. That generation of the Roy family are patently unserious, and that’s basically what the entire show is about.

I’ll admit though, when I first watched it it took me a second to know exactly what he meant by “serious”. I first took it to mean “not-jokey”, and was left a little confused. It’s not exactly like the kids were doing their tight five during the tense negotiation, But, of course, he meant it in another sense. He meant they’re people that allow their emotions to influence their decision making, even if it’s to their own detriment. He meant they’ll bite off their nose to spite their face. He meant they’re incapable of doing anything other than exactly what they want right now, this second. In other words, they are not grown ups. They’re just children that got older.

I think the concept of a serious or unserious person has lingered in my mind because I’m at the perfect age to notice it. I’m 29 now, so I exist in this weird purgatory where some people my age are married with kids, and others are in the same position they were in when we left school 11 years ago. At 22, the discrepancy between the people that consistently work hard, and those that don’t is pretty small. Not enough time has passed for the rewards of good decision making to pay off. Now at 29, the returns are compounding, and you can see that some are changing gears, and leaving the rest of the pack behind. These people, are serious people.

I have a close friend that had a very similar start to adult life to me. We both had the same friends, similar grades, and similar personalities. We lived in the same unremarkable town, went to the same unremarkable school, and did the same unremarkable teenage things together. If you looked at us at 18, you’d probably have guessed that we’d be in a very similar position at 30. However, you’d be totally wrong. Sure, I’m doing pretty good. I like my life. I have good relationships, I’m a senior at work, and think I show a lot of potential. He, however, operates on a different level. He’s married, has a kid on the way, and moved to the US to run a new office for a business that he was only the 3rd employee of. He probably makes more money in a year than I make in three. In other words, he lives the life that I could have in 5 years if I continue to keep my head down.

If we started from essentially the same place, why has he squeezed so much more success in the same amount of time? Easy. He was always a serious person, and I only became one when I was like 25. He’s always done the small things that add up. He shows up on time. He fulfills his commitments even if he doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t waste his time getting involved in petty squabbles. He says what he means, and solves his problems instead of wallowing in them. He’s dependable, and knows that if he wants something, he has to go out and get it instead of waiting for the world to give it to him. He keeps a cool head in times of stress and makes prudent decisions. He’s not humourless (far from it), but he takes his life seriously - and you can tell that he does by just being around him for 5 minutes.

However, just as you can tell someone is a serious person quickly, I think you can also tell when someone is the opposite. Just recently, a guy I’ve only known for three months asked to borrow money. Literally the day after he paid me back, he asked for more. What? Why did you pay me back if you knew you were going to have no money immediately? What was the plan here? It’s as if he thought “I’ll give my last 20 quid to Connor today - oh shit, now I have nothing. Better ask Connor again!”. It’s the sort of thing that makes you roll your eyes and think “C’mon man, we’re not 16 anymore. Get your shit together”. He’s like the ghost of Christmas future if I never put the beer bottle down. I know that if he became a serious person, he could have a totally different life within a year, but he fails to see the role he plays in his situation. His circumstances are entirely the result of the external factors around him. He believes he’s powerless, and as a result, actually is.

This is the potentially worrying thing about serious and unserious people - everyone can tell which one you are. If you show up late to a meeting and laugh it off because you had a late one the night before, people may laugh with you, but they’ll know that you’re an unserious person. If you say you’ll do something, and let the deadline go by hoping that no one will notice, they will. They’ll identify you as unreliable, and politely go on, quietly deciding not to give you another opportunity. Likewise, if you show up to your life with a sense of urgency and purpose, people pick up on that. They are drawn to, and respect competence.

So I think the benefits of being a serious person are immensely valuable. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I’d rather be a serious person that was made redundant, than an unserious person that won the lottery. In ten years, I’d still bet on the serious person having a better life, because they have the means to create something good from any situation. The unserious person doesn’t create value, they just use it up, and complain when it runs out.

I regret not taking my life seriously sooner. I think back on all the adults that told me, regret in their eyes, that they wished they’d tried harder in school, and realise now that I’ve taken their place. I also want to shake teenagers and yell “Don’t your realise!? If you start putting effort in now, you’ll be king of the universe!” despite the fact that it’d almost certainly fall on deaf ears. It seems that learning to be a serious person is a class we have to take the hard way. It might be the most important thing we learn though, because if your life isn’t worth taking seriously, what is?

My work schedule is pretty great all things considered. I used to be closer to London, so would have the odd office day here or there. But now I’ve moved to the other side of the country, I need to do one full week in the office per month. This is a good deal, so I can’t really complain.

Anyway - I’d totally forgotten how much commuting 5 days in a row sucks.

No one on the bus understands me (I never talk to any of them and hate eye contact).

What’s weird is I used to do it all the time! Pre-COVID, it was normal to spend 2 hours on either side of my work day rotting on a train, watching a YouTube video buffer slowly while thinking “Boy, this tunnel is a lot longer than I expected”. I remember in my early working years, I’d make it home with just enough time to eat dinner and have a shower before going to bed. Work was such a dominant part of my life, I’d even have dreams of wandering through the office - presumably because it was the only stimulating material my brain could piece together from my recent memories. This was a normal way to live, and my dad had somehow been doing it for 35 years, but I can’t help but look back and think I was being slowly cooked alive.

I’m rudely reminded of this each month when I microdose my old life. I only have to do it for 1 week and the pains of commuting still wear my patience thin. Now I’ve been spoiled by a much more progressive work schedule, I look at the whole practice and think “How is any of this worth it?”. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I have a sneaking suspicion that long commutes aren’t the optimal way to start your work day. Before you’ve even clicked on that Outlook logo, you’ve been rudely awakened by an alarm sound that undoubtedly makes you panic when you hear it from someone else’s phone in the wild. You then spend all this time putting on presentable clothes, only to sweat them through because you have to run 30 minutes with a laptop on your back to catch the one train that gets you to work on time (you ran for nothing; it’s been cancelled due to signalling failures).

Once you do finally get on, there are no seats available. Of course, you can’t really blame the train companies for this. How could they know that so many people would travel into London between 7am and 9am? They’re not psychic! Unless, of course, you’ve chanced a seat in the empty first-class carriage, in which case the ticket inspectors sense your heartbeat through the spirit realm, and zero in on you like heat-seeking missiles. No, you’ll have to stand with your fellow sardines, pondering if you prefer the smell of the open toilet, or the armpit of the accountant standing next to you. It’s enough to make you cry, but nothing jerks tears like the poor woman who’s spent so much on her Samsung Galaxy she can’t afford a pair of headphones. You listen to her blasting Instagram reels in solidarity.

The good news is, as of right now the train company is private, which means you get all the benefits of the free market! Unhappy with the service? No problem! You can always take your business to a competitor by driving a few counties over and using one of their railways. Alternatively, you can buy a coach ticket and watch your ETA surpass the heat death of the universe. Fiery competition such as this is what keeps your provider on its toes.

Paul, ever the optimist.

There’s a video that went viral a year ago of a young woman being hit with the reality of working life. She cries and essentially makes all the same complaints I do. She wakes up early, works, gets home late, and repeats all week. Then on the weekend she has to squeeze all her life admin in with whatever rest she can before Monday. She wonders aloud how she’s ever supposed to date, socialise, or have hobbies when she has to dedicate 7am - 7pm to work.

Naturally, the video went viral because a lot of older people swooped in with the old “Welcome to the real world!” rhetoric - as if that’s any sort of argument. Replying to her grief with “That’s what work is like!” isn’t even adding anything. That’s just describing the situation?? She knows that’s what work is like! Otherwise she wouldn’t be crying!

I’ll also add, it’s kind of rich hearing this from middle-aged people, as if every film made in the 90’s wasn’t about a disillusioned twenty-something office worker struggling with the meaningless of it all. You can’t make Office Space a cult classic and mock Gen Z crying girl for saying the same thing!

Clearly, Gen X were doing just fine when they started their careers.

The main gripes that I, TikTok girl, and Gen X movies have with the office life isn’t really about work per se. Most of us can handle doing something we don’t like for a significant part of the day, otherwise nothing would ever get done. It’s more the erosion of who you are outside the job that starts to suffocate you. The sense that the person you knew with hobbies, interests, and relationships is being whittled down into someone that exclusively works. That familiar feeling of horror when someone you haven’t seen in a while asks what you’ve been up to, and you can’t even summon one interesting anecdote to reply with (because “I’ve watched one episode of The Sopranos every day for the last two months” doesn’t make for great conversation).

As someone that doesn’t commute much anymore I can say it’s not the job, it’s the damn travel! There’s a reason employee happiness goes up when they’re allowed to work from home. Those 3 weeks without commuting give me time to be an actual person, and not merely an Analyst-bot that occasionally eats, sleeps, and showers. The only reason I even get to write a blog is because I have an employer that has sensible office hours. However, those 5 days of eating breakfast on the train samples the full blown drudgery of the past, and it sucks ass. God knows how anyone endures it still -maybe it’s the Instagram reels.

I had mixed feelings when my sister suggested we see Ikiru during the long weekend. She knew it was a movie I loved, and clearly wanted to spoil me. However, while it’s a great film, it’s also 2.5 hours, shot in 4:3, black and white, and about an old man walking around Tokyo and wondering what his stupid little life was for. Not exactly an easy sell, and a poor choice for family movie night (unless you have weirdly existential kids). I hedged, hoping to offload some of the blame if the outing was a total bust.

“Depends on your tolerance for old movies” .

She scolded me.

“Who do you think I am? You’re not the only one that likes long boring films”.

Touché.

I’d seen it once before at home, but I must say that seeing it at a cinema was special. As I sat there between my sister and a Sam Elliott lookalike who would periodically snore in my ear, I got to see it how I imagine Kurosawa wanted me to. Surrounded by fellow filmgoers, in a dark room that consumed me entirely - and not on my brother’s couch, Googling facts about it and shoveling skittles in my face.

The story follows an old bureaucrat, Watanabe, whose job really just exists to stick red tape everywhere. Every request from the public isn’t acted on, but is instead passed to another section, which then passes it to another section, and so on. The office is stacked to the ceiling with papers that old men in suits move around, and mark with their little stamps, for seemingly no purpose. Everyone is constantly busy - but nothing gets done.

The narrator makes it clear from the opening moments - Watanabe is not even alive. He’s been dead for 25 years, and an empty shell of a man has been shuffling around in his place. He’s a widower who stayed in a steady job to raise his now grown son. Decades of waking up, going to work, stamping papers, going home, and repeating. He’s spent no time thinking about who he wants to be, or the value of his life. No time introspecting, or making deliberate decisions that weren’t just forced on him by circumstance. No real living at all. That is, until he discovers he has terminal stomach cancer.

This is where the inspiration from Russian literature becomes clear. Watanabe, a very ordinary man, is suddenly struck by an extraordinary situation, and his life now demands serious attention from him for the first time. He looks at the certificate on his wall for 25 years of service and any semblance of pride he had is replaced by despair. What on earth has he been doing all this time? His life is at an end, and what does he have to show for it, besides a son and a daughter-in-law who don’t even respect him?

What I like about Ikiru is that Watanabe doesn’t get his epiphany immediately. In fact, most of the movie is about him handling the news really badly. He meanders for a few days, desperately finding something to hold onto. First, he tries to make up for lost time by partying with a drifter he meets at a bar. They gamble, drink, dance with girls, and buy a new hat (God, everyone in the film is so obsessed with his new hat). For moments, it looks like it works. In fact, these scenes are the first moments you see him smiling - but his reality is always looming over him, ready to burst his bubble. Late at night, the piano man takes requests, and Watanabe brings the room to a stand still as he sings a song from his youth with tears in his eyes. Life is Brief.

It is, and he’s feeling he’s wasted it all.

The night isn’t the same after that, and drags on until Watanabe urgently asks the cab to pull over. He rushes over to an alley and vomits, as he’s been unable to keep anything down since getting ill. Until now, the drifter had been romanticising Watanabe’s situation, and painting him as a sort of enlightened hero. He imagined that he was helping him live for the first time, but the seriousness of Watanabe’s situation has now come crashing in on all parties, and made their dance and drink seem a bit frivolous in comparison.

The drifter’s spent time thinking about the idea of death, sure, but probably hasn’t seen it much with his own eyes yet - otherwise he’d probably be less upbeat. He’s ripped all his thoughts from romantic stories, and peddles the sort of trite truisms on life that would fit on a fridge magnet. He’s essentially a philosophy undergrad that’s found Nietzsche for the first time, and thinks he’s the only one that gets Fight Club. So, when he sees an old man, hunched over, puking blood in the street, and looking at him with fear in his eyes, the poetry dissolves and he sees the situation for what it is. Dire.

You might’ve experienced the same thing if you’ve ever seen a body. Death is ugly. It’s really weird seeing all that decay. I think we all quietly assume that we’ll die on a nice warm bed surrounded by our loved ones, or maybe we’ll be carried out to a lake by our hot wife like in Big Fish, but death doesn’t look like that most of the time. It’s rotten, bloody, and scary - not the sort of thing you put on a fridge magnet - and I wager the drifter walks away from the evening feeling quite humbled.

The next morning, Watanabe stumbles down the street, hungover, and bumps into a young woman from his office. She’s been chasing him down because she wants him to sign her resignation letter. He takes her back to his home and signs it, but asks that she join him for the day instead of going to work. They play pachinko, and he spoils her by buying her new stockings and sweets.

I wouldn’t say there’s a romantic infatuation with her over the coming days (although that is what his brother, and the rest of the town think). He’s just drawn to her youthful vigour, and sees her as something to spend money on. He’s been frugal for so long, and wants to use his savings on something, anything of value. I think it’s no coincidence that he’s drawn to someone that quit the job he’s wasted so much of his life on. By spoiling her, it’s as if he’s spoiling his younger self. They walk through the streets arm in arm, laughing at her jokes and the silly nicknames she has for everyone in the office.

But you can only hang out with a boring old man that buys you stuff for so long, and the relationship eventually sours. After more than a day of having her every desire satiated, the young woman becomes bored and complains to him (you can’t really blame her, as he doesn’t bring much to the table besides his wallet). Eventually, he has a breakdown and concedes that all he can see is the darkness closing in, and she is yet another thing he’s desperately trying to cling onto. Probably a wasted youth he’s trying to make up for. He asks her how she manages to stay so upbeat, and she explains that she finds meaning creating toys. Her new job is at a factory, and she makes wind up rabbits that she sees as her “children”.

This is when Watanabe finds what he’s been looking for. He’s wasted money on hedonism, and frittered away a few days living vicariously through someone else, but now he’s realised what would make his life worth living - building something for someone else. Something that lasts. As Watanabe rushes away from the lunch table, a nearby party is singing Happy Birthday to their friend. It’s only now, after decades of wasted time, that he’s actually been born.

I’ll concede that the first time I saw the film, I thought the middle was a bit slow. I knew the gist of the movie going in, and so was hoping for an inspirational flick about a guy that goes out there and does a bunch of cool stuff for his community - and it is that, eventually. However, the slow burn of these lost days are essential to the story, because that’s what life’s really like! When bad things happen, you tend not to get the epiphany right away. It’s earned, after a lot of wrong decisions and brutal stages of grief. You get to see him muddle his way through confusion for a while before you get the pay off. It humanises him.

It turns out, the same office he’s been wasting his life all these years is also the answer to his problem. He goes there immediately, and flicks through the pile of papers that’ve accrued on his desk. He finds a request to remove stagnant water from a street and build a playground. This will be his legacy. His wind up rabbit. He takes the request, puts on his coat, and alerts his colleagues that he’ll be going to inspect the site. Naturally, they all come up with reasons not to help, and suggest he instead passes the work onto someone else. He ignores them, and says to complete a report today.

“Sir, I’m not sure that’s possible”

“It is, if you’re determined”

This is the central takeaway from the movie. The old song Watanabe sang in the bar is right; life is brief. So, for God’s sake, just do the stupid thing! Adult life is filled with people standing around with their hands in their pockets. There are always a million reasons not to do something, but the main two demotivators are pure laziness, and fear. We always feel a little apprehension before putting our neck out because we worry about what others may think, or how we’ll manage if we fail. But inaction is its own kind of failure, and it’s the most insidious, because it’s the kind that leads to you feeling your life was totally pointless. Ikiru shows that we’re all free to provide real value to others, if we just remember to take a chance once in a while, and the world makes way for you if you tell it where you’re going. After all, you might as well, because you die at the end anyway!

When they arrive at the potential build site, the suits all gather around the edge of the pool of stagnant water. Watanabe, not even holding an umbrella, strides in to take a closer look. His office shoes are totally submerged in mud, while a local woman fruitlessly tries to follow him with shelter. Japan has such strict social norms but Watanabe doesn’t care anymore, because he’s become totally single minded and focused on his goal.

You’d think the next act would be about building a playground, but actually, it’s at this point he dies.

After a time jump of five months, we now see the story from the perspective of everyone around him. The other bureaucrats gather round and mourn in a painfully formal manner. It becomes apparent that while the playground project has gone through, the Deputy Mayor has taken all the credit as he’s standing for reelection.

The following scene jumps between the various section heads underplaying Watanabe’s role in building the playground and flashbacks that confirm he was, in fact, deserving of all the credit. The suits are sycophants, telling the Mayor what he wants to hear, while Watanabe’s colleagues politely nod along despite knowing the truth. In flashbacks, Watanabe’s team encounters the pains of the red tape they themselves are a part of, and understandably get angry. Except, of course, Watanabe.

“I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time”

As a viewer, you’re mad that the Mayor took the credit, but Watanabe himself didn’t care. What he cared about was the joy the playground brings the children. The years of laughter that would result once he got the project across the finish line. The sense of community he’d fostered in the neighbourhood. He could’ve died completely anonymously, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

What follows after the Deputy Mayor leaves is a familiar scene. The rest of the Watanabe’s team continues to drink, and the veneer starts to drop. They slowly concede that really, it was Watanabe that was responsible for the completion of the playground project, and resolve to learn from his example. However, this is just more office politics. It’s yet another performance that they’re getting caught up in. None of them really intend to change, and they’re only saying they will because everyone else around them is. The only people with any kind of integrity are the two men in the corner, who had the balls to say from the get go that Watanabe deserved the credit.

The next day, the romance brought on by the sake has washed away, and the office sits as it was at the start of the film. Someone comes in with a request, and the new Section Chief passes it on to another section. They all talked about following Watanabe’s example when they were caught up in emotion at the funeral, but when another ordinary day rolls around, they fall into old habits. They’ve forgotten that their life is playing out right now. It’s easy to resolve to do something bigger or better “one day”, but they’ve failed to realise that “one day” just feels like any other day, and they’ve continued to procrastinate. The movie ends with a office full of people that almost got it, but instead passed their opportunity to truly live. They’ve kicked the can down the road, the same way they pass their work to other sections.

There’s a moment during the funeral when a police officer stops by to pay his respects. He feels shame because he saw Watanabe the night he died, and didn’t help him inside. He feels responsible for his death, but clarifies that he didn’t walk on by because of laziness. Rather, he’d heard Watanabe singing, and assumed that he was fine without his assistance.

Watanabe knows he’s at the end of his time here, but the despair he had at the start of the story is gone. He gleefully swings back and forth singing Life is Brief. Where previously he’d sung it in horror at the realisation, he now sings it with gratitude. His life was brief, but he had the awareness to do something worthwhile with it. Life’s brevity is what makes each moment so special, and he’s savouring every one he has left.

It’s the only time I’ve seen a crowd clap as the credits rolled. As we funneled out, I saw a woman in the front row wipe away her tears, just as I had done while watching Watanabe on his swing. It’s a real testament to a piece of art that it can continue to speak to people so long after it’s creation, but that’s just a reflection of the timelessness of Watanabe’s story. Our daily lives constantly lull us into forgetting how to live, but Ikiru stands as a gentle reminder to come up for air, and remember what we’re here for. Maybe it’s a long boring film, but it’s a very special one.

In this particular hole, I found myself watching clips from the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies. I loved these films as a kid. Even Spiderman 3, which I now see as having crammed too many villains in, hyped me up because at that age I just thought “Venom, Sandman, and a new Green Goblin?? It’s like bad guy Christmas!”.

I have a particular soft spot for the first one. When you’re a dorky 10 year old, watching a dorky teenager get plucked from his ordinary life to become a wisecracking badass is exhilarating. Spiderman, obviously, is for everyone - but seeing Peter Parker take off those glasses and go swinging through New York hits different when you’re a skinny kid that can’t kick a football to save his life.

Predictably then, one of my favourite scenes is when he first gets his powers. After being bitten by the radioactive spider, he crashes out with a fever - only to wake up as a totally different person. He feels energised, his vision is fixed, and he runs on the wall in a way that would get me disowned if I did it at my mum’s house.

Seriously, Peter, what the fuck. You’re wearing shoes for Christ’s sake.

Most importantly for my little aspirational boy brain, he gets buff. After putting away the DVD, I’d go to sleep and hope to wake up from the same metamorphosis. A strangely muscular 10 year old, proudly front-flipping my way to school, presumably to the cheers of every girl in my year. It’s probably safe to say that Tobey Maguire in 2002 was every young boy’s goal, and convinced a lot of us to do crappy form push ups in our room at 3am.

However, in 2025 I found myself watching this old clip and thinking “Man, I don’t remember him being this small”. He’s lean, of course, and objectively looks great, but in my head I remember him looking waaaay bigger. I used to think it would take a lifetime of working out to get to the standard he reached. In reality, you could feasibly get it done in a year (depending on your starting point and expertise).

Of course, It’s not as if he really did look bigger back when I was a kid. It’s not like some Tobey hater has gone back and doctored every copy of Spiderman in an attempt to make him look smaller. What’s happened is my standard for a superhero physique has skyrocketed. Somewhere in the last 20 years we went from the above, great-looking but totally attainable body, to this:

Genuinely, not far off the cartoonish physiques of the actual comics.

Now, I’m sorry if you’ve spent money on Chris Hemsworth’s app, but no amount of push ups and dumbbell squats will get you looking like this. Maybe the genetic elite among us could look vaguely like this with years of perfect training, recent dehydration, and perfect lighting - but chances are Chris is on a little something something to get the body across the finish line.

Obviously, Spiderman and Thor are different heroes so we have different expectations of their bodies, but even Tom Holland leaves Tobey in the dust.

Algorithm is definitely going to be surfacing some interesting content after researching this article.

Clearly there’s a trend here. The bodies we expect to see on the silver screen, especially for superheroes, are leaner and bigger than they ever were when I was growing up. Maybe this is appropriate. At the end of the day these are actors being paid ridiculous money to play demigods, so it’s unsurprising they’re going to push the limit on what their body looks like (rather than just working out for 6 months before shooting, which is what Tobey Maguire did).

However, all this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the consequences are bleeding out into the real world. We find ourselves in a situation where the ideal physiques of yesteryear are considered shit by today’s standards. People like Jeff Nippard used to get fake natty accusations, and now his comment sections have people genuinely claiming he’s “mid”. A man who is a muscular 180lbs at 5’5’’ is being called mid! Madness!

The people I see levelling these criticisms, by the way, are never life long lifters interested in their health and fitness. Unfortunately, it’s young men, who have had the bad luck of growing up with the perfect conditions for body dysmorphia - they saw Chris Hemsworth when they were 9 instead of Tobey Maguire, and now everyone openly talks about their steroid use on social media.

This might shock some younger readers, but it used to be that no one spoke about taking steroids. Even in professional bodybuilding, Arnie would claim natty with a straight face and say you could get his chest too if you just “shock the muscle” or whatever dumb shit they were saying in the 70s. Now, it’s all out in the open, with young male influencers going as far as sharing videos of them injecting online. There are even a pair of brothers that literally go by the name The Tren Twins (Tren being short for Trenbolone, an anabolic steroid).

It makes you wonder how young people are supposed to have a healthy relationship with their training? I don’t think it’s bad per se to train because you want to look better (it’s why most people start), but when your standard of a good physique is necessarily androgenic, and you’re surrounded by people making needles look normal, you’re going to find it hard to settle for a body like Spiderman circa 2002. It’s no surprise then, that steroid use among young men is on the rise.

What’s particularly concerning is the speed with which people jump on gear. It used to be that people would at least train for several years before giving up their natty card, but now I’ve seen several people share their “journey” of taking steroids from day one. Their backs become cratered with acne, and their faces age several years, all to have a body that looks a bit better, a bit faster. What’s particularly alarming is if you’ve only ever trained on steroids, you will make gains no matter how crap your training is. This means you’ll never learn good practices, and you may find your only path to progress is increasing your dosage. You’re basically building in plateaus that need yet more steroids to overcome.

I imagine early steroid use is fueled by seeing fast transformations online where someone suspiciously hits their natural limit in 18 months. If you watch that while training naturally, you’re going to get impatient, because natural bodybuilding takes years. Why train hard and eat well for 5 years, when you can hop on gear now and get twice the results in half the time?

It makes me glad that I grew up when we had reasonable expectations (at least for men). A whole generation of boys are tanking their longevity because they’re stuck on a never ending treadmill of escalating and impossible standards. They never will feel big enough, because there’s always going to be someone bigger that’s willing to inject a little more than them. It’s a death spiral they’re being tempted into by our increasingly absurd idea of what you should look like with your shirt off.

Here’s the truth - Tobey Maguire in Spiderman looks fucking great. If, like me, you looked at him today and thought he looked a bit mid, you’ve just lost sight of what a naturally athletic physique looks like. Don’t believe me? Go outside! Almost no one looks like that! Comparing your body to movie stars, or people with massive followings online, is like comparing your sprint time to Usain Bolt’s. It’s irrational to be putting you, an ordinary person that likely has a job and other interests, up against people whose literal job is to train, and who are likely taking steroids. Fact is, if you eat decently well and workout even once a week, you probably look good - and you don’t need to look like Thor to give yourself permission to feel that way.

Shouldn’t have said I mostly read Non-Fiction! Idiot!

What caused the strike? Nothing crazy like an unwanted advance, or dropping a racial slur at afternoon tea. It’s benign shit like standing weirdly, having some abnormal interest, or wearing an outfit they don’t like. It feels a bit like you’re walking through a laser security room, and learning through trial and error how to warp and contort yourself to successfully make it to the other end. Every wrong move triggering an alarm, that’ll eventually result in your face being atomised via machine gun turret.

Suffice to say, this isn’t a fun experience - and I find it weird how common it’s getting. I hear about “icks” all the time now, both online and in person, and they’re always for the most ordinary and inoffensive things. Things like crossing your legs, dancing, or even having a bath. No word of a lie, I once saw someone saying their ick was when someone is looking for a chair while holding a tray of food. What a ridiculous thing to even attempt! Always find your seat before you pick up the tray, you idiot. You sexless buffoon.

I suppose icks being ordinary is kind of the point. It’d be a bit silly to describe being cruel, or cheating as an “ick”. However, I think it’s bizarre how comfortable we’re all getting with telling people what we don’t like about them. We’ve always had icks, I’m sure, but we used to just think “I find that unattractive” and then either get over it, or say no to a second date. We never announced they lost points on our test, and we didn’t do that for a simple reason - it’s mean.

Imagine you’re at a meetup to find new friends. You’re sitting at a table chatting with someone, and you order a cocktail. The person you’re with then says “oooh you’re ordering a fruity drink? I hate it when friends do that. That’s a yuck”. You’d think this person is just being weirdly rude, no? They’re entitled to that weird preference, but surely you’d expect them to just not pursue the friendship, rather than make you feel bad about drinking pink lemonade? It makes them come across like they think their friendship is this coveted prize, and they expect you to jump through strange and unknowable hoops to even be considered for it. I’d even wager you wouldn’t want to be their friend!

Yet, this is what dating feels like now. You’re treading on eggshells, gently letting your real self out, before being told to shove yourself back into the idealised mold of yourself you came with on the first date. It makes you wonder how anyone is supposed to experience true intimacy? What’s the end goal? We shave off all the rough edges of everyone we meet until they’re perfect? This is a great way to either never meet someone, or be in a cold relationship where neither side gets to let their guard down. When you tell someone you’re dating they’re being icky for trivial things, you’re teaching them to behave how they think you want them to behave. You’re incentivising them to not be themselves. Who wants to build a relationship like that? Who wants to fall in love with an avatar?

I’ll also say, it’s just weird to care about stuff like that. It’s okay to have preferences, but when you’re being turned off by someone looking for a chair while holding a food tray, you need to go outside and look at some clouds. TikTok has warped our expectations to such a degree that we’ll disqualify people just for existing, and then we wonder why it’s so hard to date. We’re already fucked. We’re already forced to meet each other by swiping left and right like people are products on a store shelf - let's not make it harder by bullying each other with these asinine conditions for our attention. You never know, you might just fall in love with someone that crosses their legs and likes a bath.

It’s not surprising it has a bad rap when the early proponents in the west were new age hippies singing kumbaya around drum circles. The sort of things people say about meditation do sound awfully weird to someone who’s been born and raised in the solid, materialistic, real world. If someone says “we’re all one”, or that “you don’t exist”, it’ll understandably raise a few eyebrows.

The reputation the New Age gave meditation probably held it back a bit. It’s made us incredulous, and a lot of us dismiss meditation as nothing more than pseudoscience. We can ignore it the same way we do with palm reading, astrology, or whatever the blockchain is.

Strangely though, once you do build a habit of sitting on the cushion, you find that meditation is exceptionally scientific. We sometimes imagine meditation is a practice of concentrated wishful thinking. If you sit on a hill somewhere and say “ohm” enough times, you’ll summon a kind of delusional bliss that makes you say all the weirdly trivial things young men say after they do acid. Sounds fun, but it’s not giving any real insights. It’s just getting giddy in the Himalayas. However, meditation isn’t really about focusing ourselves into some other worldly state, it’s best understood as a form of investigation - which is precisely what us anti-superstitious westerners claim to be all about.

A Case Study on Anger

You have a mind. This mind does an awful lot of things each day. It feels, it perceives, it thinks, it expands, it contracts. It can wander off for minutes at a time, or it can be laser-focused, and function all by itself. Every little appearance interacts with the others to create this giant orchestra of stuff that hypnotises us completely. If all this was happening out in the physical world somehow, how do you think a scientist would go about understanding it? Do you think they would glance at it every now and then, and conclude they already know all there is to know about it? Probably not. I’d wager they’d observe it, and make a bunch of notes. They’d pay attention. That’s really all meditation is. It’s watching your mind in the hopes of understanding it better.

Take anger, for example. If you watch, you’ll notice the only way you can stay angry for long periods of time is by constantly restoking the fire by thinking about the thing that pissed you off. There’s probably something that’s pissing you off right now. A coworker said something rude. Someone cut you off in traffic. You read about literally anything in the news. While reading this, you may even remember an argument with an old friend, and felt that familiar heat in your chest rise up again. Tell me though, where was that heat 5 minutes ago? Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that with a consistent external world, your internal world can change drastically depending on what you’re thinking about?

Now, it might sound trivial that thinking about things that piss you off makes you angry - but if you internalise this knowledge you’ll gain the ability to get off the train before it leaves the station. I promise you, anger has a shockingly short lifespan. If something triggers you, but you have the mindfulness to observe what’s happening instead of hitching a ride on the next angry thought, you’ll find the heat in your chest dissipates in seconds. It sounds too good to be true but it is - you really do have the power to just stop being angry whenever you want. You just need to practice.

Thinking your way down the rage train tracks, visualised.

However, you’re never going to understand the inner workings of your mind if you never take the time to pay attention to it in the first place. I think it’s kind of strange that a culture that prides itself on its scientific rigour can be so incurious about the internal world. If observation is what drives our understanding of the outside, why are we so hesitant to apply the same principles to the inside? We can literally go to the lab whenever we want by sitting still for 5 minutes, but most of us just assume we know all we need to, despite never having conducted an experiment. Thinking meditation is useless is just thinking investigation is useless, which is patently unscientific.

So what?

Still, it does take a lot of effort to meditate, so what’s in it for us? Well, other than the fact it’s just cool to understand things, the instrumental value of meditation compounds dramatically over time. How many marriages have fallen apart because people consistently fail to break the chain of thought that lead to them yelling at their partner in the Mcdonald’s car park? How much trauma do kids have to endure because of a ruminating, impatient parent? It’s not hyperbolic to say understanding how your mind works can be the difference between a successful or failed relationship.

That’s also just working with one emotion; anger. There are equally transformative insights to be made about anxiety, focus, or even physical pain. The benefit of being a meditation-phobic culture is that most of us have so much upside to realise. Currently, we're are just helplessly puppeteered by whatever thought next rockets into focus.

Me vs another OCD barrage

It’s only after practice you realise how asleep you were at the wheel. When I look back at the darkest periods of my life, I see a person being beaten up by his own mind, day after day, failing to realise that he could just get out of the ring. He was really dreaming himself into unhappiness by reacting to everything, instead of watching it.

Now, it’s not like if you meditate a bit every day, you’ll never experience negative emotion again. For one, the emotion arises whether you like it or not - but it’s also not the case that you’ll always deploy mindfulness in time. However, even just knowing it’s an option is enough to improve your life. Becoming even a little more familiar with your mind can better equip you to look after it - and what’s so spooky about that?

So, I see a lot of stats, but every now and then I see something that makes me “AWOOGA” at full volume while my eyes extend three feet out of my head. There are some charts that leave a lasting impression. Some happy, some sad - these are the ones that piqued my interest recently.

Benchmark Saturation

If you’re not familiar with what an AI benchmark is, it’s essentially a test for AI models. They assess skills like software engineering, visual reasoning, speech recognition, etc. As tech progresses, benchmarks become ‘saturated’, meaning we hit diminishing returns on progress. We make our way from a score of 20% to 90%, but then things slow down a bit, and we need to make newer, more difficult tests to progress. Still, once a demanding benchmark has hit that ‘wall’ (or, perhaps, thick sludge), it’s at least an indication that the domain is being lost to machine dominance - just like chess and girlfriends did.

“Mum, she’s not a ‘doll’, she’s a pediatrician, and you will treat her with respect!”

So, saturation is not a new thing. We’ve had benchmarks for many years, and they’ve grown more difficult as AI gets more sophisticated. You want to know what’s really wild though? The speed at which we’re saturating these benchmarks is accelerating. A lot.

Benchmarks are falling very quickly these days. Take ARC-AGI for example. A notoriously difficult visual reasoning benchmark, the highest score achieved on it in January of last year was only a few percent, but by December we achieved 87.5%. In one year! Progress that once took decades is now being made in months.

One unbeaten benchmark that I think is of particular interest is OSWorld. It’s designed to test an AI model’s ability to do ordinary every day things. It tests agents, who go out and complete tasks, rather than chatbots, that just reply with answers. Agents, I imagine, are the next frontier. We know that AI can write competent code, and knows more facts than any one person does, but its utility will really begin to show when you can comfortably give it complex, open-ended tasks like a human. We want to be able to tell it to have that report on our desks by Friday, and slam our fist on the desk like we’re J. Jonah Jameson.

The sort of tasks in OSWorld are fairly simple for us. In fact, they are literally derived from real world computer use cases, and humans can achieve 72% on it. However, the highest AI score currently achieved on it is ~20% from Claude.

It’s at this point that people say “See? It’s an idiot! It can’t even use a GUI, send an email, or build a report. AI is just the next NFT fad.”. But as we spoke about earlier, that 20% percent will not sit for long. In fact, it’s not crazy to think AI will beat us at this test by the end of the year (at least if ARC-AGI in anything to go by). It’s quite daunting that this is a rate of progress we have to get used to now. Actually, it could be a rate of progress that passes us by, while a faster, much more scary rate of progress replaces it in a mere 6 months.

Animal Consumption

A sad one, with a bit of ranting, but it’s important. So, if you don’t read it, I’ll come to your house and smush your face against the screen until you do. Sorry, you signed away your face smushing rights in the terms and conditions of your subscription (right next to the butt slapping clause).

Anytime. Anywhere.

We eat a lot of animals - enough that it’s pretty hard to count. Estimates vary, but these days we think it’s something like 80 billion land animals a year, with aquatic animals in the trillions. To put that into perspective, about 100 billion humans have ever existed, and we churn through that much flesh in a matter of weeks or months.

While you’ve probably heard that statistic before, it only sinks in when you see it visually. Big numbers are hard to grasp. Once they pass a few hundred thousand, my brain just goes, “Okay, I get it - big number!” and tunes out. What really brings it home is to see it. Here’s a graph comparing the number of human deaths each year with the number of farmed land animal deaths.

I had to only include farmed land animals or it’d else just be a red circle, and you’d think this was about Japan or something.

This is why I get a little bit annoyed when people act like I’m a over scrutinizing puritan for talking about animal rights. I think on some level people think eating meat might be wrong, but it’s wrong in the same way that lying is. It’s the sort of thing that we ought not do, but hey - we’re only human!

But eating animals isn’t like that. At all. We’re talking about causing more suffering to other species than all of humanity has ever experienced every couple of years - and it’s for products we don’t even need. I haven’t lived a perfect life. Like anyone, I’ve done things I’m not proud of; but if you produced a list of my wrongdoings in order of badness, and had to add keeping a dog in a cage for 6 months, cutting off its tail, ripping out its teeth, and cutting it’s head off - it would certainly go to the top of the list! I imagine (and hope) it would be the same for anyone reading this. Yet, that’s only a fraction of the harm a single year of meat eating causes.

You might be inclined to look at the above graph and think “Well, it’s so enormous, what is one person’s changed habits going to do?”, but that’s confused. The reason it’s so enormous is because each individual’s contribution to this is also massive. If somehow all meat consumption was provided by one cow being slaughtered a year, each of us would be getting meat for the cost of an 8 billionth of a cow life. If that were the case, I’d eat meat too! However, your average American eats 7000 animals in a lifetime, 99% of them living in what can only be described as torture chambers (which you can read about here SFW).

We often turn ourselves into knots over things that are comparatively very minor. Do we use paper straws and recycle? Do we say antiquated words? Are we using our “platforms” appropriately in response to whatever news story took over the zeitgeist this week? However, doesn’t this all feel a bit ridiculous when looking at the above graph? How does our decision regarding this not totally dwarf all other moral dilemmas of our age? The only answer I hear is an appeal to species difference, but as I’ve said before, that’s a dead end.

State of the World

Okay, let’s end on a happy one. If you look at the news, things look pretty bad. Everyday there’s a shooting, a bombing, or a Jake Paul fight - it’s relentless. However, there is a bit of an illusion going on, and it’s one that I fell for pretty dramatically.

Just a few years ago, I was what you’d describe as a Doomer. There are some problems, like national debt, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification, that don’t really seem to have a solution. Well, maybe they do, but the solution would require a level of cooperation that humanity shows time and time again it’s incapable of. So, it was easy to think that things are taking a downturn. I was terminally online, and spent a decent portion of each day imagining what collapse would look like. What happens if all the fish die, or crops start to fail? How long do we have left until fossil fuels run out and we’re left in a medieval feudal state? I foresaw a future where I was standing over a burning oil drum, rubbing my hands together, trying to sell my supple body for a can of old beans.

I think I was wrong about that now, and don’t worry nearly as much. In large part because I think we’re about to make super intelligent AI, and no one really knows what will happen after that. It’s such an enormous shake up that I don’t feel confident extrapolating so much anymore. However, looking back, I can also see I fell victim to bias.

Many of us tilt toward pessimism for a few reasons. As kids, we didn’t read about bad things online, so it feels like instability is new - even though it’s not. Additionally, the news only surfaces the bad stuff because it gets more clicks than good stuff, so if you flip through the internet, you’ll more likely see an article prophesying disaster than success.

We all know this, and feel that while other people are silly rubes for falling for this ruse, we’ll rise above - but then everyone thinks that. What’s so special about you and me that we can overcome human psychology so easily? We’re human, just like everyone else, and so the barrage of negative news is going to have an effect on our world view. It’s no surprise to me that young people - the ones that spend the most time online - are also the ones that are most likely to be pessimistic about the future.

Yet, if you look at the data, a very different picture emerges from the one on the TV screen. There are a lot of issues that we’re going in the right direction on. Extreme poverty is on its way to being eradicated.

That’s incredible! It’s more than halved in my lifetime alone. It’s also not the only metric that’s improving:

Life Expectancy

Literacy

War and Peace

Our world in data reads like the utopian origin story. Yet, it doesn’t get much coverage, which I think is a shame. If people my age were as well acquainted with this as we are with all the awful shit, we may have bit more fight in us. I get why we sometimes feel like things are falling apart, but in many ways they’re just starting to build up - and that’s pretty cool!

Lightning Round

Here are some other pieces of data that I think are cool or noteworthy. Have a good weekend, everyone! I’m gonna go play Final Fantasy VIII for 9 hours.

Weight Loss drugs are pretty good these days! In the above study, the placebo wasn’t even doing nothing - it was diet and exercise. It’s promising that we could start making a serious dent in obesity rates.

The cost of sequencing the human genome is a fraction of what it used to be. This helps with all sorts of stuff, like cancer research, or building disease resistant crops.

Not particularly surprising, but it’s crazy how quickly new platforms grow now. This shows how long it took each platform to hit 1M users. Threads is number one, but I feel like it’s cheating because it basically just copied Instagram users. Still, ChatGPT totally crushed Facebook and Spotify. Household names enter our homes a lot quicker than they used to.

Notoriously, the sorts of life changing resolutions we make on January 1st are short lived. All of us have set a goal before, only to sheepishly pretend we forgot about it by the time February rolls around. I’m pretty guilty of this. When I was younger I’d set certain goals like “Run every day” or “Eat no junk food” that would inevitably fall by the wayside. Fortunately, I have a bit more success these days. I’m not a stoic sage (last night I ate an Indian takeaway alone and played Helldivers 2 for three hours), but I am better than I used to be. I have shown some semblance of progress over the course of the last decade.

I think the stickiness of my improved habits is largely because I’ve improved my mindset and how I think about things, rather than because I set a few ultra specific goals that I successfully adhered to through gritted teeth. I used to think of progress as a to-do list. If I just exercise, meditate, eat well, and get enough sleep, then I’ll be a better man. Being a better person just is a composite of all these small decisions. However, nowadays I think progress is more hazy than that. I’ve found that what progress I’ve made was really a product of living with better ideas, and not because I said I’d quit chocolate on New Year’s Day.

Be Your Own Parent

There’s two types of people in the world; those who still think someone’s coming to save them, and those who realised no one will. If you ask people which group they’re in, almost all of them will say the latter. No one goes around saying they need to be looked after by a parent at aged 26. However, sometimes if you pay attention to their actions, you’ll see something different.

At 22, I would’ve said that I was responsible for myself, sure, but I didn’t really live it. I didn’t think long term, I drank way too much alcohol, and when things went poorly for me I looked for other people to blame. My inner monologue was self pitying, and there was a tacit belief that I didn’t deserve any of the adversities I had the bad luck of running into.

Then my dad died, and I realised I was the one steering the ship.

I always thought that disciplined people just didn’t have that voice in their head telling them to take it easy. My friends who exercised had no idea how hard it is for me to go out and run. They don’t get it, when I go out to run I really don’t want to - so what am I to do??

I later learned we all have that voice, and it’s just that some people have cultivated the ability to ignore it. I’ve managed to progress now because I’ve started to see myself as a child I’m responsible for looking after. I basically had to become my own Dad. I don’t feed myself junk food every day the same way I wouldn’t feed my niece junk every day. When I start saying things like “I’ll just go to the gym tomorrow”, I hear the wailing of a school child feigning illness to get out of English class. Eventually you reach a point where the whining voice is just noise that you have to respond to with “Yeah yeah, I know, but this is what we do now. Get over it.”. You then drag yourself kicking and screaming to the fruit and veg aisle the same way your mum used to.

Crisis as Opportunity

I really hate fucking up. I also really hate when the world fucks my shit up. If there is a fuck or shit of any kind going in the direction of up, I am not a happy man. However, it turns out that those sorts of things happen from time to time because we still live in the shitty real world, instead of the Full Dive VR one I intend on spending my retirement in.

I used to have a popular, but not so useful approach to adversity - despair. When things go wrong, it’s time to start blaming. It’s time to start extrapolating into the future and seeing all the ways this bad thing has screwed things up. It’s time to start wishing for an alternate timeline where the bad thing didn’t happen and your life was perfect. It’s time to wrap yourself up in a duvet, shut the blinds, and listen to Elliott Smith for an evening. Unsurprisingly, this approach does very little except make us miserable.

So, we need a new approach. One useful way of keeping cool in stressful situations is to see them as an opportunity to test yourself instead of an insurmountable obstacle. Made a mistake a work? It’s a chance to take responsibility and show humility. Stuck in traffic? It’s an opportunity to reflect on the last few days and regroup. Need to have a tough conversation with a friend? It’s an opportunity to be couragous and show them compassion.

In 1965, James Stockdale crashed his plane in North Vietnam and ended up being held as a prisoner of war for seven and a half years. Despite living in squalid conditions, and being subjected to unspeakable torture, he managed to keep his head.

“I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Now, I hope that no one reading this is ever tested quite to that extent, but the principle is useful to all of us. When you see adversity as not only guaranteed, but necessary for a better life, then you can start to welcome it. You’ll almost be disappointed when things go too well, because you won’t get the chance to see what you’re capable of. Even pain is useful if you insist on never letting a crisis go to waste.

Habits Not Results

I'm fairly comfortable now saying that I’ve developed a gym habit, but I never used to have one. I’ve probably tried to start a habit at least 20 times if you include all the occasions I started doing push ups in my room when I was 13. Inevitably though, the habit would decay, and I would bounce back to my baseline of doing nothing.

My problem was, I’d be motivating myself to get somewhere instead of becoming someone. I’d look at videos online of people getting great results after some arbitrary amount of time, and say to myself “I want to get big” or “I want to bench X amount”. This didn’t work, because it turns out gym progress is really slow, and your initial wave of motivation doesn’t last nearly long enough. Trying to power a new habit by motivation alone is like pouring petrol into a diesel engine - it’s just the wrong type of fuel.

The only way I was ever able to make a new habit stick was to let go of what the habit was trying to achieve. Instead I made the habit itself the goal. I stopped setting the goal of looking a certain way, and instead set the goal of being the sort of person that goes to the gym. By setting the doing as the end goal instead of the result, I was able to succeed by just showing up, which in turn made me want to turn up more - which funnily enough meant I got the results I wanted.

Instead of setting impossible goals for yourself, set the intention to be the person with the habit you want. Eventually, you may find it’s harder to give up the habit than it is to keep it going.

Duty as Joy

There’s a phrase I find myself liking more and more as I get older. I don’t know who said it.

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and found that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy.”

Like the whole “not trying to get strong is actually the way to get strong” thing, this is another one of those counter intuitive ideas. If you think mostly in terms of your own wellbeing, and how you can get what you want, you always end up unhappy.

Happiness suffers from an observer effect. The more you try to get it for yourself, the more it vanishes. I think this is partially responsible for a lot of adolescent people being less happy than older people. When I was younger, I mostly thought in terms of myself, and failed to realise that wellbeing is more complex beast than procuring pleasure alone.

Wellbeing is ambient. It simmers in the background, and refuses to boil if you stare at it all day. In hindsight, there are a lot of decisions I regret that I foolishly thought would grant me lasting happiness. However, you know what I’ve never regretted? Doing something for someone else!

A pretty good correlate for wellbeing is how little you regret what you’ve done in life. If you look back and wouldn’t make different choices, chances are you’re pretty happy with how things turned out. So, it only makes sense that putting a bigger focus on other people (a thing we rarely regret) results in our own lives feeling fuller and more meaningful. It’s pretty corny and The Secret-esque, but you do basically get back what you give out in life.

I didn’t realise until my mid twenties, because until then I didn’t really consider what I owed other people and animals, but duty does have a strange way of being joy. It’s painful in the moment to sacrifice, sure, but it’s like a vaccination. The initial pain gives way to an improved ambient wellbeing and resilience. The gains in self respect translates to a mind that treats itself more kindly. By being a better friend to others, you find it easier to be a friend to yourself - and that makes for a pretty chill life.

Some habits that I’ve found improve my wellbeing this way:

• Taking the duty of charity seriously.

• Abstaining from animal products.

• Trying to be a better brother/son/uncle.

• Smiling at people more when I enter stores, receptions, etc.

• Not punching people when they stop in front of me suddenly in the street (warning: impossible).

Small things compound, I find.

Elon’s now mapped out the qualities he wants from whoever has the bad luck of working under him, and it’s the sort of thing you’d expect. He’s looking for "super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting". If that sounds like a hellish way to live, don’t worry because his new employees will also be compensated with nothing. Dreams really do come true!

Maybe I’m just a lay-about millennial who doesn’t understand how the real world works, but 80 hours a week is actually insane. Excluding holidays, that's 3840 hours a year - more than your average worker clocked in 1870.

Ahh the good old days.

80 hours a week is 11.5 hours a day if you have no days off, and 16 hours a day if you have an ordinary weekend. What does that life even look like? Genuinely, you’d have zero time to do anything you enjoy. Someone with this job would just disappear off the face of the Earth to everyone they knew. When you have a schedule that runs the risk of your employees being flagged as missing persons, you need to dial things back a bit.

What’s particularly baffling about this idea is that it’s ostensibly in the name of getting things done. Except, spending 12 hours a day sat at your desk is precisely how you don’t get things done - it’s how you get a depressed workforce of people mindlessly browsing reddit and staring out the window all day. The brain isn’t built for sustained, high-quality work over such long hours. That’s why productivity doesn’t increase after about 50 hours a week. People don’t actually work more, they just pad their time out with bullshit.

80 hours a week is an express train to inefficiency.

It’s also how you have high employee turnover. So, not only will time already be wasted, DOGE will have to spend even more manhours teaching the new joiners every month that replace the people that were found wandering Target in their pajamas after having a mental breakdown.

This is all going to be exasperated by the fact that he’ll likely expect everyone working there to come into the office. Elon previously had this to say about working from home:

“This is like some real Marie Antoinette vibes from people who say why is there no work from home. Like what about all the people that have to come to the factory and fill the cars or all people that have to go to the restaurant and make your food and deliver your food?”

Now, to go on a side tangent, this is a really bad reason to make workers come to the office. The relevant difference between office workers and restaurant workers is that office workers can work from home. If it was somehow possible for restaurant workers to work from home, I’m sure WFH advocates would include them too!

The logic that everyone should endure workplace hardships simply because some roles require them is flawed and strange. If we were consistent with this idea, we’d be able to yell at each other in the office because privates in the army have to put up with it. What’s the end goal? Make every job have all the negative aspects of every other job? Never aspire to improve things in your industry unless you can apply the change to all industries? I thought this guy was supposed to be smart!

This is how I treat new associates now. It’s only fair.

So, DOGE employees will have to work 11.5 hours every single day and commute - meaning it’s more like 12.5 hours.

I can’t imagine anyone that has self respect would apply for this sort of work. The reality is, unless he reneges on these ideas, the only sort of people he’s going to attract will be unhinged die hard Elon fans, or maybe a few people that are really passionate about government efficiency (Libertarians maybe?). These demands will likely repel talent, and undermine the very efficiency Elon wants to achieve. I hate to break it to him, but real experts tend to expect more from their bosses than child laborers did, so it’s probably worth reviewing the benefits package.

Ticket Barrier Noobs

Ticket barriers have been used in tube travel since the 1960s. Instead of having to mess around flashing a ticket to a person *gags*, we can cut out all that nonsense and breeze on through with the power of computers. Praise be to them.

Computers: It’s where all the porn is.

Despite these barriers being around for literal decades, it seems that every time I use them, I’m stuck behind someone who has never seen one before. They walk up, expecting them to part like the Red Sea by their mere presence, only to then panic and fumble through their pockets for their card. This brings the whole line to a standstill and causes much tutting (or in American English, death threats). Maybe these people are simply incapable of finding their wallet during the 100-step walk to the gate because they’re just that bad at multitasking. They probably have to pause the TV every time they scratch their arse. However, whether it’s their fault or not, they make me have to wait a few seconds, and that’s unforgivable.

Punishment: Force them to stand on the train the whole journey. Put rocks in their shoes.

Noisy People Will be Punished

I went to Japan this summer. It’s a wonderful place, that’s very different from the West. People bow, they still use fax machines, and there are strict social rules about making noise in public. Every coach is a quiet coach. If you have a phone call on public transport, you will be given the Japanese version of tutting—looking at you a bit while they think mean thoughts.

There’s a stereotype that Japan is more civilized than the rest of us. This is because they are, and the shared disapproval of anyone reminding us they’re alive by making a sound is a prime example of it. They must think we’re savages when they come here. I sometimes wonder what’s going through someone’s head when they play a game on their phone at full volume in a crowded space. What are they thinking when they set up their Bluetooth speaker on the train? I honestly don’t know what could possess me to do such a thing. If a nuke was about to go off in London, and the only way I could stop it was by blaring Reels on the bus, I would still have to think about it. Is a nuke that bad? Fallout seems kind of fun. “It’s about time we started that city over” I’ll say, as I put in my headphones that cost next to nothing because it’s 2024 and they’re available everywhere.

Punishment: Throw their phone in a nearby sewer. Tinnitus for life.

From Too Much Volume, to Too Much Volume

As some of you may know, I am a physical specimen. As I’ve started cutting, I’ve recently regained the ability to run up the stairs without running out of breath. I’m like Roger Bannister if he really applied himself.

So, I like going to the gym. Unfortunately though, every time I go, there are other people there. This is unfair and makes me punch my pillow a bunch when I get home. Now that other people are using all my stuff, I have to wait for machines to be free before I can use them (my hands are literally shaking as I type that out).

Now, usually, it’s not too bad. People are done within 5-10 minutes. However, every now and then, you find yourself up against someone who is trying to get all their leg extensions for the year done in one session. No word of a lie, I once saw a man do ten sets on the only lateral raise machine in the gym. Ten! It’s like he thought he owned the place—which he doesn’t, because I do.

Punishment: Forced to be stuck behind people who can’t use ticket barriers for a year. Pour sand in their shoes while they’re asleep.

Sharing Isn’t Caring

Trigger warning if you’re Spanish: I hate tapas. It’s not the food (although, as a cuisine, it definitely gets crushed by Italian, Indian, and Mexican food), it’s the rules. Every now and then, you sit down at a meal, and someone says the dreaded words, “Why don’t we get a bunch of small plates so we can all have a bit of everything?”. I’ll tell you why—it’s because we’re not a bunch of commies, that’s why!

I eat fast. My mum says I inhale my food, and she’s not far off. This is because I think eating is a bit of a chore, but having eaten is bliss. Nothing better than plopping that fork on the plate after a big meal and leaning back in all that serotonin. Belly bulging, belt undone, eyes glazed over. It’s like Nozick’s utility machine if it was powered by garlic bread.

Sharing food frustrates the whole process! Now, I can’t just eat all of what I actually want because I need to leave some for others. I have to leave some of the tofu bao buns and eat some stupid, ugly greens because it would be rude to hog all the carbs. I also can’t eat at my own pace because you need to go at everyone else’s speed to play this little dinner dance. It adds a whole level of complexity we don’t need! Just let me order my big plate of paella, give me a shovel, and don’t look at me for the next ten minutes. It’s in everyone’s best interests.

Punishment: Increased income tax. They have to drink everything through a really thin straw now.

9am should be a safe space

You could tie me down, pour petrol over me, and light a match in your hand. You could hold my family at gunpoint. You could hang my PS5 off the edge of a building. I will not give in. I’ll never do it. I will not book a work meeting at 9am.

This is a cardinal sin. It’s the sort of thing that inspired Kant's categorical imperative. An evil so great, it should not be undertaken under any circumstances - and yet it happens regularly. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, who are these people?? Who on this godforsaken ball we call Earth wants to spend their first 15 minutes of the day doing anything except drinking a coffee in peace and putting off reading emails? Having to be on so early in the day is the sort of fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It’s an impossible standard - it’s gonna take me at least an hour before I can coherently string together a sentence. 9am meeting bookers be damned. They are a blight on an otherwise enlightened age.

Punishment: Air horn outside their door at 4am. Unmute their microphone whenever they fart.

Except, that would be really weird wouldn’t it?

The 9-to-5 has become such an institution among the working world that questioning it is a bit shameful. You can’t help but feel you’re lazy, or somehow uncommitted for suggesting that a work schedule invented 100 years ago might be outdated. Except, on the face of it, that seems like a really sensible thing to think. The sort of work we do now is so vastly different compared to 100 years ago, that we should expect the optimum schedule be different now. Our working lives are changing so fast that everything should be up for review.

In 2018, 2000 British office workers revealed how much they actually work each day. The average response was 2 hours and 53 minutes. At first glance this looks borderline despicable. These white-collar schmucks are getting paid ridiculous salaries to make a couple of Powerpoint decks and look at Reddit all day. Anyone who works a blue-collar job would probably look at this number and despair - but having worked both types of job, I totally get it.

People who work in trades, warehouses, and construction are probably productive for much larger chunks of their day. I helped fit kitchens for a while, and I can confirm that we really were using the full work day to get things done. However, this was because most of what we were doing was fairly mindless. Learning the skill wasn’t (the people I worked under spent years being educated) but we didn’t spend an enormous amount of time actually focusing. Most of the time you’re just doing physical labour. Lifting, hammering, sawing, etc. - you’ve seen Bob the Builder before.

This is made possible because it turns out the reserves of our bodies are way bigger than the reserves of our brains. There’s a reason people can run ultra marathons, but you can’t pay attention after 5 hours at your desk. The brain runs in sprints. If you know any white guys who take ice baths, you’ve probably heard of the book Deep Work. It’s on their shelf next to Atomic Habits, and their framed photo of Andrew Huberman. It suggests we’re only able to focus on cognitively taxing work for about 4 hours a day. If you’ve worked cognitively taxing jobs, that sounds about right!

There’s a moment each day where the mental cost of more thinking becomes too high. Your brain is a hot mush that needs to nap, or watch YouTube shorts until it’s dark outside. It’s like holding a light dumbbell above your head. At first, it seems pretty easy, but after a while, that 5kg feels like you’re holding a Kia Sorento. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, but this strikes me as expected. Our ancestors didn’t spend 8 hours a day doing spreadsheets. They spent most of their time walking around, scavenging, and driving cars that you power with your feet.

So, I can’t help but wonder why we’re all still pretending that this work schedule is a good fit for the modern office worker? How much time, energy, and well being is wasted each day by people staring blankly at a screen to keep up appearances in front of their boss? Why are we holding on, desperately, to Ford’s schedule as if it were carved into a marble tablet that floated down from the heavens?

Despite what hustle grind-set people may think, rest is very important for productivity. I once heard Arnie say that if you want to get ahead, you should “sleep faster” so you can work more hours of the day. That’s really dumb!

“Come with me if you want to burnout, be depressed, and do shit work.”

I think I’ll dedicate a whole post to this at some point, but sleep is so underrated. Being well rested can defend against depression, improve judgment, improve attention span, and improve physical fitness (among many other benefits, like not feeling shit all the time). Getting proper sleep is one of the closest things we have to a silver bullet for improving health. Yet, we still need to peel ourselves out of bed at 6am, to make it to the office for 9am, just to work for 4 hours over the course of the next 8. It’s lunacy!

It’s at this point where I start to feel like our commitment to this work schedule almost becomes a moral issue. An increasing number of us are engaging in Revenge Bedtime Procrastination - delaying sleep so we get some time to actually do what we want. I don’t think it’s a rare experience to feel that despite only being at work from 9-to-5, the added commute makes you feel like your entire life from Monday to Friday is dedicated to work. You wake up early, commute, work, commute, make dinner, shower, and are then left with a choice. Go to bed to start the whole cycle over, or do something you actually like and be sleep deprived. It’s unsurprising that some people choose the latter in order to feel like they have some control over their lives, but the increased stress from sleep deprivation inevitably catches up with them.

All this harm, and for what? So we can feel safe doing things how they’ve always been done? Why care about that? When the data says we can be just as productive working fewer hours, it seems like a great opportunity! We can achieve all we want, but spend more time with our loved ones. We can have hobbies. We can exercise. We can save money on childcare. We can cook better food. We can do housework without having to cram it all on the weekend. Hell, we can even just sit down and watch a show we like. These are all good things that are currently being exchanged for unproductive bullshitting.

Most of us know that in the coming years we’re going to be needed less and less in the workplace. However, we’re already needed less. We did it! Thousands of years of human toil and effort to get to a point where we can live good lives with less work, and some of us are actually there now. An irrational and dogmatic attachment to a century-old expectation of what the work day looks like is a crappy reason not to grasp such an enormous gain.

I imagine this is because of a new kind of social pressure. Neutrality no longer commands the respect it once did, and more people now adopt a 'if you’re not with us, you’re against us' attitude. If you say you’re unsure on some issue, or that you choose to have no opinion, you’re seen as lazy or even immoral. This issue, just like the last one we all cared about 4 months ago, has become a litmus test for basic human decency - and if you reserve judgement, you’ve failed in spectacular fashion.

This approach is probably unwise. It incentivises us to wade into topics that we know nothing about, because we’re terrified we’ll be abandoned by whatever group we currently align with. It sets us up to say and believe things that are probably false, with a fiery fervor that only alienates others, and makes Christmas Dinners uncomfortable.

Take a totally easy and non controversial issue - Israel and Palestine. 2 years ago, I’d wager most people I know wouldn’t even be able to point them out on a map (I’d wager most people probably still can’t). Yet, it seems everyone I know became an expert in history and geopolitics overnight. It feels like there was an unspoken agreement that everyone must pick a side, despite the fact that the war is happening thousands of miles away between two factions that most average people know nothing about.

I don’t really feel comfortable saying anything about the conflict publicly besides the fact that Hamas are clearly evil, there should be efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and I wish war didn’t happen. Why don’t I feel confident enough to say anything else? Because every source of information on the topic is going to be from someone biased, and the amount of relevant information is so enormous that it’s unlikely I’d ever get a full picture. How many books would I need to read? How many historians would I need to consult? How much would I need to study the ethics of war? Most importantly, even if I form a belief on this topic - what am I able to do about it?

I feel like before committing ourselves to some important issue, we should ask ourselves 2 things:

1. How much work is required to get true beliefs on this issue?

2. What can I do about it once I have true beliefs?

The reality is, most of us can’t influence the world as much as we’d like. Sharing an Instagram story might feel like doing something, but realistically, all we’re doing is identifying ourselves with a group. Most global issues are not ones that have any practical consequences on our lives, and require herculean amounts of effort to be confident in our beliefs on them - so why use up what limited energy we have?

This isn’t to say that you should never have an opinion - some people might be better positioned to understand the conflict in the Middle East than me, and there are going to be some issues that pass the above test for everyone. If an issue affects how you behave, and you think you can get a good grasp of it, you should spend time on it. Reflecting on animal ethics, the duty of charity, and who to vote for are all consequential in our personal lives - and it’s plausible that you can get justified beliefs on them. Sadly though, these are often issues that people spend the least amount of time thinking about. We vote for who our parents vote for, we stop at giving the occasional pound to the homeless, and assume meat eating is fine because we’ve always done it. We spend far too much time thinking about and fighting social wars that we have no influence on (and are probably confused about), and spend no time on things we can actually change.

It’s not a sin to say you have no opinion on a subject. In fact, sometimes you should! To have a strong opinion on everything is a kind of arrogance. It assumes you’re able to grasp everything that needs to be grasped about every complex issue - some of which scholars spend their entire lives trying to understand. Where does this confidence come from? A YouTube video? An article in the Washington Post? I wish it were that easy.

We don’t have a duty to chime in on everything in the news cycle. Admitting that you don’t always know enough to have an opinion isn’t weakness—it’s humility, something we could all use a bit more of.

The problem is, Substack is full of really smart people. Everyone here has a bloody PhD and serves on the International Boffin Committee or whatever, and it cultivates an impostor syndrome that paralyses you.

“Welcome to our annual IBC meeting. First order of business - we gotta make the neck holes on our shirts bigger.”

I say all this because it’s been an important lesson for me. That voice in your head that tells you to delay putting yourself out there until you’re totally certain what you’ve made will be well received is poisonous. It’s a prison that will stop you from ever doing anything interesting in your life. This is because you’ll probably never feel like you’re ready. Sorry! You’ll just have to nut up and make the leap. Either that, or lie on your death bed yelling “I could’ve been a singer! I’ve always had a song in my heart and I want to share it--uggh ugHHGHghh *farts and whatever other noises people make when they die*”.

You’d hope that if you do have the courage to put your work out there, you’ll find that, actually, all this impostor syndrome was unjustified. It turns out you really do have great ideas, you’re a smash hit, and your dad’s respected you this whole time - hooray!

However, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, this is the internet.

One of my aforementioned adoring fans.

The good news is - you know what happens after you put something out there that people don’t like? Nothing! Literally nothing. They forget about you instantly, and you can go back to your life unscathed.

A few months ago I wrote a few posts on philosophy of mind that, looking back, had some rookie errors. For example, I characterised physicalists as saying that consciousness is the brain, despite Identity Theory being a minority view among them (Cringe! I’m so cringe! Set me on fire!). Yet, miraculously, I am still alive today. No one came to my door to kick me in the nuts, or spit in my mouth. All that happened was I got some comments with some suggestions on what else I could read, and I learnt a bit more about the domain.

That’s the thing about failure, unless you work in bomb defusal or you’re cutting your own bangs, it’s completely safe. In fact, you have to endure it if you want to get better. We all want to learn enough to be presentable before we share our work, but we often have to share our work in order to learn new things. So, now I try to see my blog as less of an art gallery that I try to populate only with pristine masterpieces, and more of a crash test site. It’s a place to stress-test ideas (and let’s be honest, rant about animal rights).

This, of course, applies to whatever your thing is. It might be a blog, a song, or a job change. There’re loads of times we want to do something, but hesitate out of fear of looking a bit silly - but I’m telling you, get used to looking silly. Once you do, you’ll be able to do whatever you want. Short-term embarrassment is a small price to pay for your freedom.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” - Epictetus

Aww, thanks!

I can feel the eyes rolling already. Here comes another straight white guy who’s had everything handed to him on a silver platter complaining about some off the cuff remark. Meanwhile there are people out there with real problems! Go back to Reddit, incel, and take your Blu-Ray of Joker with you!

I get it, I do - but I’m also still right. The fact that other demographics have more serious struggles doesn’t change the fact you can shit on men as much as you want now - and that seems antithetical to the whole egalitarian project. My point is not that men have it harder than anyone else, it’s that being lazy with our disrespect towards an entire gender undermines the very values we claim to hold. It makes a hypocrite of anyone who claims that protected characteristics should hold no bearing on how we treat someone.

I’m not talking about jokes between friends, or the odd meme. When my mate says I’m “such a man” because I briefly used a campchair for furniture - that’s funny! I’m not suggesting we need to walk on eggshells around each other. I do, however, think we should drop the habit of sincere generalising, and stop pretending we can justify it.

Once I was out to dinner with a friend, and she told a story of a woman she didn’t like. At one point, she said “The only way she could’ve been worse was if she were a man”. I don’t really know how to read that as anything other than asserting being male is a negative character trait. It’s pretty wild that she felt she could say that to a man and think she wouldn’t get called out - but you know what, she was right to feel that! I didn’t say anything, because I knew she wouldn’t take it well, and it would put a dampener on the dinner. The problem is, if you speak out about this sort of bigotry, you’re labelled as “fragile”. This is a handy way of gaslighting people into thinking that calling out bad behaviour is a character flaw. It isn’t. Keeping quiet in face of prejudice is, and I should’ve spoken up.

Another example. I was once part of a large group chat that received a message from a woman who had been harassed on a night out by a man. She told the story and finished it with “I hate men”. One person objected (while extending sympathy about her ordeal, to be clear), said it’s wrong to generalise, and she shouldn’t insult all men like that. What followed was frankly, chaos. You would think, in our enlightened society, that we’d go “Yes, you’re right, it’s lazy and wrong to generalise like that. What I mean is I hate that man - or men like him”. You might even go as far to say something like “This is a problem men have disproportionately , and they should get their shit together”. Both, I think, are fine and reasonable responses.

Instead, they kicked him from the chat, and dug their heels in. They defended their right to throw hatred at men in general (in other words, be sexist) on the grounds that men have historically oppressed women. They also said something along the lines of “If you’re not that type of man, it shouldn’t bother you. You should be able to understand that I’m just using ‘men’ to mean bad men”.

We’ve probably all seen this sort of response from the left at some point. In fact the phrase “Not all men” is mocked by just about everyone on this side of the aisle. You don’t really need a counter argument to it, because if a view is sufficiently laughed at by the left, it convinces every other leftie to abandon it out of fear of “not getting it”. The objections are met with scoffs, and we’re treated as if we’re naïve to think that them saying insulting generalisations about a demographic means they believe insulting generalisations about them. What simple minded idiots we are! I’m sure they’d explain why that’s the case, but unfortunately, it’s “not their job to educate us”.

It goes without saying, I don’t think this sort of rationale works very well.

Can we freely insult people who are privileged?

One argument is that men have it good in every other domain, so this is a sort of “tax”. We get feeling safe outside and not being mansplained to, and in exchange we have to take an insult every now and then. It’s a small price to pay, right?

Well, first it’s worth pointing out that it’s not that obvious men have it loads better. I can see why we take it on faith, as the ways women are discriminated against are readily apparent, and historically the sexism women have faced has been nothing short of catastrophic. Saying that, we do also die younger, are less likely to go to university, and less likely to get custody of our kids (to name a few). My point isn’t that being a man is harder than being a woman, but rather that we have some reason to doubt that men are playing life on super easy mode.

Let’s say for sake of argument though, that society really is structured in such a way that men net benefit because of their gender, and women net lose. What does that have to do with our right to insult men again? Why does someone being privileged give us permission to call them trash? I don’t really see what the connection is. Like, at all.

Let’s say you have a friend, Frank, who comes from a rich family. He hasn’t personally done anything bad to you, but has benefitted from his circumstances enormously. He doesn’t have to work, he goes on nice holidays, and he’s even handsome to boot. Does this mean that it’s now morally permissible to insult him? If he protested, would it be appropriate to say “Well, you’re rich, so I get to call you a fuckhead if I want”. This just strikes me as silly, juvenile, and totally irrelevant. The link between someone’s privilege and the permissibility of insulting them is invisible to me.

Okay, maybe you can’t insult Frank directly, but maybe you can make generalisations about the group he’s from, especially if that group does immoral things disproportionately. Let’s say that Frank has a creepy uncle - hell, let’s say that half of his family are creepy uncles. Would you feel it was totally unproblematic to say “People from Frank’s family are trash” to his face, and to other people? Would he be stupid for saying “Hey, I’m from my family. My lovely sister who gives all her money to charity is from my family. We’re not all trash. Please don’t generalise”? I don’t think so. I think it’s fair for him to ask not be spoken about that way, even if half of the people from that group are creepy uncles.

What’s particularly worrying about that rationale is that is can be used to justify the very sorts of prejudice the left despises. Here’s a worrying statistic: about half of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal. That’s obviously morally reprehensible. Does that mean we can make blanket statements like “Muslims are trash”, or even “Muslims are homophobic” now? No! It’s a harmful generalization, and we should be more nuanced when we speak. Why is it absurd to extend this same sort of respect to men when we talk about social issues?

You should know what I mean

The other objection you see is that when people make bigoted remarks about men, we should just know that the remark is aimed at problematic men, and that it’s safe to assume well behaved men are excluded. This is an insane thing to expect people to understand. Firstly, it’s not unreasonable to ask people to say what they actually mean. We have a complex language for a reason. The whole point of knowing more than 3 words is so you communicate nuanced views. You can’t speak like a toddler, and expect other people to decipher a mature viewpoint from you.

The main reason to reject this view though, is that it makes it impossible to distinguish between people who are frustrated with bad men, and people who are genuinely misandristic! It blends you in with prejudiced people, and ill equips the rest of us to push back on sexist thinking. When you say things bigots say, how can you expect anyone to think you’re anything other than a bigot? How is it unreasonable for us to conclude that you hate men when you literally say “I hate men”? Why do we have to waste mental energy translating you when you could just be specific?

You can’t be sexist to men

As we live in a patriarchy, you can’t be sexist to men. This is because sexism doesn’t actually mean “prejudice based on sex”, it means something like “prejudice based on sex against a systemically disadvantaged group”. This is something people say, but I have no idea where it came from. The left just decided that’s how the word works one day, and expected everyone to get on board. I don’t think most of us are. Words are defined by how they’re used, and most people use it to just mean “prejudice based on sex”.

No mention of systemic disadvantages here. Weird.

The dumb thing is, it doesn’t even really matter. Objecting to someone’s criticism of your behaviour by nitpicking a word choice is a waste of time and distracts from the issue. When someone calls you sexist for making insulting generalisations about men, their point is that you were doing something wrong, and you should correct the behaviour.

Imagine the word “stealing” strictly meant taking something from someone else illegally. I take your shoes, and you say “Hey you stole those from me, give them back!”. However, we happen to live in a country that has a special law that says I can take things from you without consent. The “You can’t be sexist to men” response is like saying “Actually, I can’t steal from you. That only applies to unlawful taking”.

I’m sure you’d agree that doesn’t make taking stuff from you any better. It’s just a lame and boring semantic point that aims to distract the conversation and absolve me of my immoral behaviour. Even if we can’t be sexist to men (which, again, I don’t think is true) that still doesn’t make that form of prejudice any less bad. Stop citing a fake dictionary entry that no one else uses to get out of taking responsibility.

Here’s, I think, a much more progressive way to think. It was once common sense, but sometimes it feels like it needs reiterating. Gender, race, sexuality, age, etc., are not morally relevant traits. This means it’s wrong to discriminate based on them, and insult the demographics as a whole. We should judge people, case by case, based on their character, and not based on whatever form their body happens to take. Pretty out there, right? Someone should write a speech about that some time.

The question I want to ask the left is - what’s the goal here? What’s all the fighting for social justice for anyway? I think most people would say something like “We want a world where no one is discriminated against because of gender, race, sexuality, etc”. A sensible goal, but we’re probably not going to achieve that if we’re, y’know, discriminating against people based on gender, race, or sexuality. If you have some genuine criticisms that you want to voice, fine! Men probably are disproportionately guilty of a lot of things, and it’s worth calling bad behaviour out. What’s not worth doing is using that as a excuse to insult them and alienate the very people you’re trying to get through to. Is it hard to keep our frustrations in check sometimes? Sure. Does it take effort to voice our ideas with important caveats and specificity? Absolutely! However, I’m afraid it sometimes takes effort to improve society. If we’re as serious about fighting bigotry as we say we are, we should quit the lazy generalising - It hurts the very progress we’re trying to achieve, and steers us further away from the finish line.

I don’t sneer at these videos and articles. I’ve applied a lot of the ideas in my own life with some success. There are other practices, however, that have also improved my life but don’t sound like they’re from a Youtube video on Mamba Mentality. They’re the small things that provide compounding returns. The little wins that don’t require waking up at 4am and shadow boxing down the street.

Smile at Retail Workers

I don’t know what caused me to do this the first time. I think I’d just been absent mindedly walking into shops with resting bitch face for years. Then, one day, maybe I was in a particularly good mood, I smiled broadly when I walked into a shop. The person serving me smiled back, and seemed friendlier than most of the strangers I interact with.

I decided I’d make an effort to smile and greet people properly whenever I walk into a business. 9/10 times the kindness is returned, and the interaction is more fun. This isn’t massively surprising. If you’ve worked in retail, you’ll know that most of the general public are godless heathens.

*Does one Mcdonald’s nightshift*

So, it’s probably expected that signalling “Hi! No, I’m not going to swear if you say the Mcflurry machine is broken” lends itself more to positive interactions. A lot of ordinary moments can be injected with joy if we just remember to put the effort in.

Sit outside in the morning

Not available to everyone, obviously. I used to live in a Manchester flat, and I imagine going outside there would be a less Zen experience than my current living situation. Not an excellent start to the day to watch a homeless guy shit in a bag.

Still, if you live an appropriate space - just drink your coffee on your doorstep. The Sun and air are good for you, and it stops you looking at the inner circle of hell that is social media for 5 minutes.

Keep Deodorant in your bag

There’s a scene in Seinfeld, where a Librarian chastises Jerry for not having instant coffee in his house.

You buy a jar of Folger's Crystals, you put it in the cupboard, you forget about it. Then later on when you need it, it's there. It lasts forever. It's freeze-dried. Freeze-dried Crystals.

I feel this age old wisdom also applies to deodorant. You never know when you need it on a hot day, and you find that when you whip it out, people around you ask for it too. It’s like gum for insecure sweaty people. You can become everyone’s best friend immediately, and they’ll even lift you up on a chair and chant your name. King of the peasants, you are. The Champion of Rightguard Sport.

Get an Electric Toothbrush

Embarrassingly, I didn’t do this until about 3 years ago. Total gamechanger. My mouth is so clean now, I would eat with it.

Nap when you can

I nap during my lunch hour. It’s a bit of a drag not being able to watch Youtube, or play video games, but it makes my afternoon so much better. Napping has many benefits, such as improving productivity, well being, alertness, and can even protect you against Alzheimers. Most importantly, though, it can help with your gainz.

One set of being a sleepy bunny every day.

Keep a Quotes App

I use this app on my phone. It allows you to keep a custom library of quotes, and then attach a widget to your home screen. It updates every 24 hours, or whenever you tap it. I keep quotes from philosophers, authors, politicians, monks, friends, family, books, movies - you name it! If I feel like there’s a bit of wisdom to hold onto, I stick it in the widget. Now, whenever I’m dealing with a problem, I just open my home screen and tap it until I find something relevant. It comes in handy quite often.

Wow, Ethan Hawke, so true.

What to do when it’s hot at night

This is one of those things that I’m going to label as ‘advice’, but I feel like everyone’s going to turn around and say “You didn’t already do that?”. The answer is “no”, it genuinely didn’t occur to me for 26 years. When it’s night time and your duvet is too hot, just take the duvet out and sleep with the bedsheet on it’s own. That’s it. That’s the big revelation. Feels like you’re sleeping in the Spanish Riviera.

Keep a Life Calendar

Okay, getting a bit Mamba Mentality for this one. For my 26th birthday, I got a Life Calendar. It’s a poster you keep on your wall with a grid, 52 squares across and 80 squares down. Each one represents a week in an 80 year life - and you colour them in as you go.

It sounds a bit morbid to some, but nothing primes you to focus on what matters like an awareness of death. I remember one time, I was sitting on my bed after I had just stopped dating a woman. I liked her, but things didn’t work out. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself when I looked at the calendar and noticed that the amount of time that I‘d known her took up 3 squares.

Unless we reach Longevity Escape Velocity, I’m almost dead. Hooray!

It made me realise that I’d met many people who were only around for a few squares, and I barely ever thought about them now. She and I were just another entry in each other’s 3 square person list. I regained my sanity, and the relative insignificance the situation had compared to the rest of my life put it all into perspective. I then went to the gym instead of rotting away in my bed.

Sleep to Brown Noise

This shit will knock you right out.

Feeling Depressed? Get Dressed.

I have no idea why this works. I think maybe it’s because I’m usually feeling my worst when I’ve worn nothing but PJ’s, and played Elden Ring for 3 days. Just deciding to put on some jeans and a shirt is enough to help my brain start mending itself. It’s like you’re cosplaying as a functional human. It also reduces the resistance of going outside, and makes you more likely to go do something worthwhile.

What are the things you do that make you life easier? Tell me so I can make this unrelenting charade we call life endurable.

OCD is in a bit of a transition stage right now. When I was young, it was seen as the silly condition where you had to wash your hands over and over, or flick a light switch on and off. I think most people are enlightened enough now to know that that doesn't really capture the entire condition - but they still don't know what it is like. They know enough to know the caricature is wrong, but that's about it. So, I thought it'd be good to speak about what it's like on the front lines.

My brand of OCD

The OCD I have is not mild, but also not totally debilitating. It's probably best described as medium OCD. Ready Salted. I have seen versions of it that seem more crippling than my own. I once went on a date with a woman who cleaned her hands so much she’d bleed. I also have a close friend who can't meditate because he "thinks too much about how his eyelids are touching his eyes". There are other sufferers who worry they’re pedophiles, or that they’ll kill their own children. I'm fortunate enough to not experience it this severely.

My specific brand is called Real Event OCD. This means I obsess over and ruminate on real things that happened to me - almost all embarrassing or shameful memories. I think most of us have had this experience at some point. You lay awake at night, suddenly remember how clumsy your first kiss was, and you curl up in a ball. The cringe hurts and you want the mattress to swallow you whole - but from what I hear, you then move on and think about something else.

My mind does that, but then gets stuck. It plays it over and over and over. This is because it's in problem solving mode, and it's imagining there's something I can do to fix it. I stay awake for hours, ruminating, and sometimes even invent new memories where something worse happened. I then imagine consequences that are far more severe than they actually were. "I didn't say thank you to the cashier. What if they were depressed and I pushed them over the edge? Have I killed someone? I'm a monster!". Weirdly, I saw a perfect depiction of Real Event OCD in the TV show Barry (Spoiler alert for the link). Even though it doesn’t actually depict an OCD sufferer, this is just what it’s like! - down to the swearing under your breath, and slapping your forehead.

Me, after bumping into someone on the street.

Obsessions and Compulsions

As you can probably gather from the name, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder manifests in two parts, obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions we've already spoken about. These are the worries, concerns, or urges that you keep ruminating on. In my case, it's usually moral scrupulosity, but there are a wide range of obsessions. This is where you hear stories of people thinking if they don't open and close the door exactly 10 times something bad will happen. Compulsions are the behaviour that the obsession motivates. This is the actual opening and closing of the door. OCD is really just an eternal battle of arising obsessions, and fighting the urge to do the compulsion.

Obsessions and Compulsions are often poked fun at in popular culture, and I can see why - they are a bit odd. They’re also awful. OCD is a mental illness that warps your reality. Just instead of hearing voices, you’re thinking “If I don’t do X, something terrible will happen”. Sometimes you don’t even know the specifics of the bad thing, you just get scary vibes. You’re always on the Titanic, and acting on your compulsion is the one thing keeping the ship afloat.

The alternative is to not act on the compulsion - but it's very hard to do that! It's like your skin is covered in mosquito bites and you're not allowed to scratch. Unfortunately, just like scratching, when you do eventually act on a compulsion, it often only makes you wish you hadn't. You were duped into thinking it would provide lasting satisfaction, but it never does. The itch might subside for a moment, but just comes back with more intensity.

I remember I’d just passed my driving test. I was in a car park near our train station and driving toward the exit. A taxi was pulling out of a space, and I didn't stop in time, so kept driving. He beeped his horn at me, and probably said something I can't repeat here. I drove home, distraught.

As it happened, I needed to go back to the station later that day to go somewhere. After thinking about how this poor cab driver probably had a heart attack from the stress, and his children were orphaned, I approached his car. I knocked on the window, but he gestured that I go to the next driver as it was his turn to pick up a passenger. I persisted, and told him I need to speak to him. After he rolled down the window I explained that I was the driver that didn't let him out earlier, and I was really sorry for doing so. He looked at me blankly. I wonder if he even remembered it happened. He said something like "umm...okay?" and rolled his window back up.

You would hope that I walked away from that interaction feeling finally satisfied that I had made up for my error, but instead I just felt worse. Now I had not only almost killed him, I had made him endure a slightly awkward social interaction! I spent the rest of the day in despair - I had finally done it. I was worse than Hitler. That’s the scary thing about OCD, it’s insatiable. Just when you think you’ve done the thing that will solve the obsession, another thing is added to the list. It’s an inferno that you’re trying to put out with gasoline.

This is just one example, but this sort of thing happens all the time. If you’ve been friends with me for a while, you’ve probably received a long text at some point apologising for something that I did years ago. This is my compulsion - I feel like I need to constantly atone for my sins. No punishment is grave enough for saying something dumb while drunk 8 years ago! I must repent!

If I don’t, I feel very uneasy. I invent scenarios in my head where the person I feel I have wronged is devastated. I feel like my repenting is what they need to move on, all the while forgetting they almost certainly forgot anything happened to begin with. Weirdly, OCD produces a kind of self absorption. You imagine that acting on your compulsion is the one thing preventing disaster - when in reality, you really don’t have that much influence on the world.

I‘m medicated now, so I imagine my days of sending long text messages and bothering taxi drivers is over - but I’m one of the lucky ones. My OCD could be worse, and I was responsive to drugs.

My first day on Sertraline.

Sadly, there are plenty of people that don’t have that door open to them- so I’m with Philosophy Bear when he says that OCD is deserving of more research and treatment. It’s the fourth most common diagnosis in psychiatry, and can impact wellbeing as badly as Schizophrenia. Not the goofy hand washing disease people sometimes make it out to be.