Category: How to be Human

Isolation Veganism

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been eating what I’m calling an eggy vegan diet: vegan plus eggs. (On the eggs: not many, and none in the past week.)

Why am I doing this? Mainly because there has never been a better time to make radical changes to my sturdiest habits — and that definitely includes my diet.

Contrary to appearances, this post is less about veganism and more about habit making and breaking, using as an example a fundamental part of our daily lives that a lot people believe is almost impossible to change: diet.

The story begins with fragility and its opposite: antifragility.

We are all antifragile

Extreme constraints like those we face in lockdown are often seen as negatives, but without anything holding us in we’d be nothing more than puddles of carbon and water.

Constraints aren’t just fundamental to our existence; they’re the only reason we have anything worth living for: the arts, crafts, science and even play.

In golf, players have to get a little white ball into a marginally bigger hole 410 yards away. That’s the game. But skill only comes into the picture when we add the limiting constraint: the players have to move the ball with a metal stick. Without this constraint, Tiger Woods isn’t worth $640 million.

Constraints ostensibly make things harder, but in so doing make things possible.

This guiding principle explains why humans are, to borrow the neologism of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, antifragile. Fragile objects shatter when mishandled. Robust objects are impervious to mishandling. But antifragile objects actually improve with mishandling.

It’s a wild concept, but true nevertheless: press ups only make you stronger by first breaking down your muscle fibres. At school, understanding begins with confusion.

Similarly, if we adopt an antifragile mindset, the rough treatment we’re suffering under Covid-19 will make us stronger. A sudden upturning of our nest might be mistaken for a vindictive catastrophe; it is rather a ‘moment of change’.

Isolation as a global ‘moment of change’

‘Moments of change’ are occasions where the circumstances of an individual’s life change considerably within a relatively short time frame.

Remind you of any recent events?

This definition comes from a 2011 report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which summarises the ‘moments of change’ research, analysing these rare opportunities for changing our behaviour, our habits and even our most primal conceptions of who we are.

The NEF study picks out some common moments of change that happen occasionally in most lifetimes: leaving home for the first time, the transition to parenthood, moving house, retirement, energy crises and global recessions.

But I can’t think of a more dramatic moment of change in my lifetime than the Covid-19 pandemic.

Change your environment, change your behaviour

Habits, by definition, are automatic patterns of behaviour: actions we take without really thinking too much. They can be remarkably stubborn and resistant to change — but they’re also tightly bonded to our surroundings.

Think about how hard it would be trying to work down the pub compared to when you’re in the office. You’re the same person — your habits haven’t gone anywhere — but the different environments cue different routines and end up completely changing how you behave.

The opportunities presented by moments of change come about because most of our habits are actually interactions with our immediate physical and social environment.

For most of us, these interactions have been disrupted by self-isolation. The transition from your workplace to working at home is an obvious example of the disruption in environmentally cued behaviour that a lot of us are feeling right now.

But what’s happened to your shopping environment, your eating environment, your exercise environment, your socialising environment? If you’re anything like me, then everything has been thrown up in the air.

All our habitual environments have been shaken up, interrupting the routine behaviours they usually cue.

As NEF put it:

When something interrupts performance of the old behaviour, the need for some degree of conscious direction returns — and once this has happened, the behaviour may be more susceptible to change.

Right now, interruption is happening on a massive scale. Suddenly, we all have to exercise a ‘degree of conscious direction’, perhaps for the first time in many years. The habit discontinuities we’re all facing are opportunities to change our routine behaviour in our relationships, work life, consumer habits, physical fitness and — why not? — diet.

Veganism, dairy and the microbiome

I’ve experimented with vegetarianism before, and for the last five years meat hasn’t been a huge part of my diet (barring one spectacularly ill-fated experiment in 2017), so abstaining from flesh was never going to be an issue.

But then there’s dairy.

Every breakfast for the past three years, I’ve unerringly eaten 250g of high-fat Greek yoghurt, with oats, raisins and nuts. Not, you’ll note, vegan.

A large proportion of meals also came with grated cheese and I’d frequently demolish an afternoon snack of creamy nuts: that’s about 100ml of double cream in a bowl filled with nuts. Not, you’ll note — heck, that’s scarcely edible for most people, let alone vegan.

So going vegan — even eggy vegan — was not going to be easy on my gut.

Lo and behold, my first four days without dairy were peppered with splitting headaches and slothish lethargy. From previous dietary experiments, I’d been expecting this miserable side effect, so I knew how to barrel through.

I like to imagine that these headaches were my dairy-loving bacteria putting up one hell of a fight. On the fifth day, though, they are defeated: starved out of existence and replaced with bacteria that prefer to get their nutrition from celery sticks and tempeh.

This explanation, if not completely upheld by science, is at the very least ‘sciency’, as I explain in this post about quitting sugar. No matter its degree of accuracy, this ‘explanation’ eases me through the temporary fog of headaches and tiredness, out to the other side: eggy veganism.

I have taken this moment of change to try on an alternate personality that’s interested me for a while.

It doesn’t have to go any further than that, of course, but there are intriguing case studies of vegan endurance athletes, the vegan diet is currently ranked as the most nutritious, and there is good scientific evidence that a vegan diet imposes a lighter load on the planet (and no I haven’t had an avocado yet).

But will I want to maintain the diet when lockdown ends?

We don’t want ‘normal’

Historical data from the NEF report suggest that behaviour changes made under pressure don’t tend to last once the crisis is over. Indeed, the hope that everything will go back to normal is why many people are happy to temporarily surrender their usual lifestyles in the first place.

It’s almost certain that I’ll be offered meat or dairy when I return to society — most of my friends and family aren’t vegan and I’m not so wedded to this lifestyle that I’d turn down food if they’re kind enough to cook for me.

But forget other people, after lockdown I myself will be tempted to choose dairy much more frequently than I am now.

Before Covid-19, I went food shopping every couple of days; at the moment, it’s once every 7-10 days. That means I only have to ‘resist’ buying meat or dairy once a week — easy.

My shopping habits feed (pun intended) directly into my eating habits. Change my shopping environment and I change my eating environment: at home I only have eggy vegan choices now.

When society opens back up, will I maintain my new shopping habits? Will my post-lockdown shopping habits, whatever they are, support or undermine my new eggy vegan diet? I don’t know.

But those of us who have used this moment of change to try on an alternate personality — and decide that we want to keep it — must reject the almost irresistible return to normality. We don’t want to abandon our old habits temporarily. We don’t want to go back to ‘normal’ any more. We want change.

It’s one thing to build good habits in this ascetic Covid-19 environment; it’s quite another making them robust enough to survive the shock of opening up. But by anticipating the challenge of impending normality — in the way that I anticipated the headaches and lethargy of quitting dairy — we have at least a chance.

Smug as

So, the big question: how did I replace my heaped bowl of yoghurt every morning? The answer, quite simply: I didn’t — I couldn’t. What in the plant kingdom could possibly imitate animal fats? Genetically, I don’t think it’s possible.

(And, no, the answer is not ‘oat crème fraîche’. Vegetables oils are exactly that: oily. They slimily slither over the tongue and cling to a clammy palate. Dairy fats are, in contrast, fatty. They somehow sink to the bottom of the stomach, leaving a feeling of satiety and a clean taste in the mouth. Mine at least.)

The answer was to cut the Gordian Knot, remove ‘breakfast’ entirely and replace it with something even better than breakfast.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve started my day with a 30g pea and rice protein shake, which I drink while cracking on with work. The green mush is much easier to digest than a big bowl of dairy and keeps me alert throughout my new-found, vegan-inspired morning work regimen.

Smug as fuck.

We’ve. Got. Time.

It’s worth saying that habit change isn’t the same for all people, in all environments and for all behaviours.

I personally find going ‘cold turkey’ has been the best approach for changing diet and has served me well when cutting out sugar and caffeine. I didn’t want to gradually phase out dairy: it would’ve been too hard for me to resist binging. The downside is that I knew I’d have four days of headaches.

But going from zero to a sixty with press ups or running is the quickest way to fail. Run a marathon tomorrow and I’ll be injured for a month. If I’m injured, I can’t build a habit. Far better to start slow and build than to rush for the line and fall.

As well as physical limitations, there are mental limitations.

It doesn’t make sense to force myself to do yoga if I’m not enjoying it. That’s why my daily yoga habit is simply to do as much yoga as I feel like. At the beginning, nearly five months ago, that was five minutes before bed. Now it’s around 20 minutes, twice a day.

My goal is not the accomplishment of some landmark. My goal is to build a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. Cold turkey is one approach and a slow-build while only doing as much as I enjoy is another. For both, I find this mantra helpful: don’t miss twice.

Whichever approach you find most helpful, if there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the past four weeks it’s to slow down and take each day as it comes. We’ve. Got. Time.

Over to us

Kintsugi is the traditional Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. Sure — super glue also works, but kintsugi is a reminder that we can choose to see the beauty in broken things.

Our work habits are broken. Good. Our social habits are broken. Good. Our shopping habits are broken. Good. We’ve probably got another 18 months of on-and-off lockdown. What are we going to do with this fracture in our habits? Are we fragile, are we going to shatter? Or are we antifragile, are we going to fill the cracks with gold?

My eggy vegan diet isn’t nearly as smug as it sounds. After two weeks, I still get faint bouts of acid reflux and I’ve had to shelve the peanut butter. I’ve read some stuff about ‘alkalising’ my food, but until I’ve had a chance to read more studies, I’m dubious.

This is still a journey of exploration for me. Yesterday I discovered one of the great secrets of vegan cooking: miso paste — in fact, sauces in general. The hand blender has become my closest ally.

I know some of you are plant-based: if you are vegan (or close enough), then I’d love to hear what you’ve learned so far. Honestly. Please drop me an email.

Whatever you think about veganism, I hope I’ve convinced you that isolation is a rare opportunity to get inside your own head, have a rummage around, learn some cool stuff and change for the better — or at least for the more interesting.

It’s over to us now.

Fine to flounder

Following Edith Eger, I’m suddenly fascinated by choices. Particularly the way that we usually ascribe momentous deliberation to other people’s decision-making process, but know for ourselves that the process is far more chaotic and flukey.

For example: when I was a teenager, my mum decided to read for a PhD. I’d always assumed that this was the flowering of some long-held academic ambition, one rudely interrupted by the time-sink of raising kids. I assumed that the decision-making process was meticulously worked out over lists, spreadsheets and probably PowerPoint presentations with my dad.

But I’d never actually ever asked her how she came to that decision, until last weekend.

The truth is that, one day, her boss offered her a promotion that she really didn’t want. She went to sit in a cafe to think. She knew that she couldn’t simply refuse the promotion; she needed a good excuse. Then lightning struck — what better excuse than a PhD!

And there’s the chaos and fluke that we airbrush out of everyone else’s lives.

This is tremendously liberating. If everyone else is also floundering around life making decisions in much the same way that you make an omelette, then the pressure is off. It’s fine to flounder. More than fine: my mum also said that choosing to do a PhD was the best decision she ever made.

~

This conversation was inspired by another short passage in The Choice, where Eger writes about making the leap from school teacher to psychologist:

I told my principal I was considering getting my doctorate in psychology. But I couldn’t speak my dream without a caveat. “I don’t know,” I said, “by the time I finish school I’ll be fifty.” He smiled at me. “You’re going to be fifty anyhow,” he said.

Boom. Of course. We’re going to be twenty / forty / sixty / ninety anyhow, we might as well plunge.

People pleasing RIP

Coronavirus is crap. Isolation is brilliant. I’ve spent approximately thirty-seven and a half years of my life trying to please other people and now I find myself entirely alone.

I know everyone loves bigging up their own particular foibles, but of all the neuroses of humanity people pleasing is surely the most pernicious.

First of all: a definition, my definition.

‘People pleasing’ is what happens when you worry too much about what other people might think of you, your behaviour and your life choices.

People pleasing isn’t merely finding it hard to say ‘no’ or a vague desire for everyone to like you. It goes much, much deeper than that, inveigling its needy little voice into every decision you make.

Your own personal pleaszus

Personally, I hear people pleasing as an internal voice of varying pitch and volume that chirps up before, during and after almost any choice or action.

It applies to thoughts great and small — and even to things over which I have no control, like my skin colour, place of birth and fondness for the word ‘quagmire’.

People pleasing kicks in no matter whether my behaviour materially affects anyone else, and regardless of whether anyone has ever even implied that they’re judging me.

  • ‘I’m a writer’ — what do you think about that, friends?
  • ‘I might buy some oat milk’ — any objections, random stranger?
  • ‘Quagmire’ — is that okay by you, planet earth?

As you can imagine, it’s exhausting.

In my case, people pleasing tends to go alongside that ancient and noble art that counsellors admonish as ‘mindreading’ — I assume that I understand other people’s thought processes without actually asking them.

In other words, rather than double checking that the people I’m trying to ‘please’ actually give a shit, I tie my stomach up in knots trying to take into account whatever I imagine their lofty opinions might be.

You’re very welcome, people.

Please please me

Most of us — I’m including my former self — believe that people pleasing is one of three things. Moving up the scale, we think that people pleasing is either:

  1. A charming and considerate personality trait.
  2. Harmless.
  3. A total waste of time because the people you’re trying to please won’t notice, don’t care or are disfiguringly ungrateful.

People pleasing is none of these things. (It is a waste of time, but not for those reasons.)

It’s taken four weeks of living with myself, with next to zero face-to-face critical feedback or approval, for me to realise that people pleasing is nothing — nothing — but passing the buck.

People pleasing is a bullshit excuse my subconscious uses to avoid taking responsibility for my choices. End of. (It’s not the end of, there’s more — keep reading. Please?)

Mind games, forever

In life, we all have choices — or at least the illusion of choices.

Embedded in every choice is a dollop of responsibility. Some people take responsibility for their own choices and some people don’t. People pleasers fall into the second category.

A concrete example is in order.

Mind 1: People pleasing

Ooh, maybe I should drop everything and become an academic because both of my parents have PhDs and I’m sure they secretly want me to be a professor.

Note how my interior monologue is subtly passing the responsibility for my genuine, if far-fetched, choice over whether to become an academic onto my parents. It’s not really my decision, my little voice says, it’s theirs by proxy.

Worse still, this people pleasing is based on a completely fictitious version of my parents: they’ve never even hinted that they might like me to work in academia.

In this mind, I’m not choosing for myself; I’m trying to second guess what someone else might choose for me.

Mind 2: Non people pleasing

Ooh, maybe I could drop everything and become an academic! Hm. I could ask my parents what they think, particularly my mum, who got her PhD in her fifties. Why did she decide to go back to university? That’d be really helpful to know and might give me a clue as to what I could expect from academia. But we’re different people and, whatever I choose, I will choose for myself, not for her or anyone else.

Isn’t this amazingly rational? After all, there’s nothing wrong in having far-fetched ideas like dropping everything to become an academic. Ultimately, though, the decision-making buck stops with me.

After hearing Mind 2, it seems hard to believe that anyone would think like Mind 1, but believe me it happens. And if the Internet is anything to go by, it happens a lot.

The other side of the mirror

People pleasing is a two person game, although the second player is usually reluctant. The people I am supposed to be ‘pleasing’ must either accept the responsibility I’m trying to subcontract — or they can reject it.

It’s an unwinnable game with only two outcomes:

  1. I’ve not met anyone who can take bear responsibility for another adult human’s choices without buckling under the weight of expectation. The friendship is strained, the work becomes hard and everyone loses.
  2. But if player two chooses to reject the responsibility (as they must eventually), that only hurts the people pleaser — and exacerbates their anxiety to please. It’s back to square one, or it’s game over.

You see, people pleasing isn’t only damaging for the pleaser; it’s also a cruel gift for the people we’re trying to please, usually those we love the most.

This is why I say people pleasing is so pernicious: people pleasers hide behind their ‘niceness’, but in truth it’s a poisoned chalice.

So far, so depressing.

‘And with a single mighty bound, he was free!’

Lockdown has been many things for many people, but for me it has been a once-in-a-decade opportunity to sit with myself, almost in hermitage.

One thing I’ve realised is that I really look forward to seeing people — as you would expect for a people pleaser. Quite often I would look at my calendar and fix on some future social event: going for a group run or ride, writing Foiled with my co-writer or going up to Bristol to play Frisbee with friends.

And then I’d just sort of fill time until then.

Yes, I would do some tasks that to the untrained eye might look productive, but often I hadn’t really taken responsibility for those tasks. I would do them competently, but mechanically, worried that someone would be upset if I didn’t.

I would subcontract my responsibility.

But since the middle of March the coronavirus has stripped away all of the things by which I would normally mark time. With the empty months stretching out before me, I faced a stark choice — and one for which no one else could possibly take responsibility because all the people I might hope to please are in lockdown too.

Coronavirus has made people pleasing impossible.

So what on earth does the people pleaser do when he knows he’ll not see another human being for a couple of months?

There’s only one practical choice left: he must take responsibility. And not only for the work that he’s committed to for the next couple of months, but for all the choices he’s made over the past thirty-seven and a half years that have brought him to this point.

This is a tremendously liberating feeling, impossible to overstate, almost impossible to put into words. That inveigling little voice? It’s not mine. It’s an eccentric visitor, a curiosity rather than a compass, like a stock photograph on the wall of a corridor.

Edith Eger is a psychotherapist who survived the Holocaust. Her book The Choice tipped the first domino of this mindshift. Particularly this passage:

Most of us want a dictator — albeit a benevolent one — so we can pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.” But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet. A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.

I feel like I have stepped out from under someone else’s umbrella — and this whole time it wasn’t even raining.

Fascination

A fossilised tree, 140 million years old

It may feel like our days are shrinking, that our expansive social and working lives are being stolen away from us.

The reality is that our lives are now being lived in the details, and it is in the details, as any artist or scientist knows, that we find our richest rewards.

~

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl likens human suffering to gas spreading through a chamber:

[M]an’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

The same metaphor, I would argue, could apply to almost any aspect of human experience, including curiosity, fascination and excitement.

But whereas suffering expands to our limits without much effort on our part, I think most of us have to work a little harder for these positive emotions to fill our chamber.

We might feel, since lockdown, that we’ve lost the richness of experience that comes from travelling up to London for the day, cycling into the country on a weekend, or hiking the Peak District for a week.

Some of us might even pang for the forbidden pleasures of formless office meetings, or fondly remember the frustration of traffic jams that held us up, once upon a time, when we had somewhere to go.

It might feel like we’ve lost something to our days and that the nights, though sleepless, can’t come soon enough.

But those lost experiences could only ever have swollen to fill a finite chamber, the finite chamber that is our destined interval of consciousness on earth.

The experiences that Newtonian physics demands must inevitably replace those that are ‘lost’ will, if we only get out of the way of ourselves, swell to fill an identical space in our soul.

The only thing we need is a little fascination for the details.

~

Rather than the broad strokes of outlandish living, rather than the transcontinental love affairs, the nights out on the dancefloor, the boozy Sunday roasts with friends and family, we choose to exist for now on a smaller scale, in among the overlooked details of our lives.

Be like the mycologist, who could happily spend a dozen lifetimes exploring the thousands of fungi that inhabit a handful of soil.

From where I stand at my desk, I can see sun-facing rooftops covered in bright yellow lichen — Xanthoria parietina (‘grows on walls’).

This week, in among the details, buried in books and podcasts and open access science papers, I learnt that lichen is not one organism, but two.

Most lichens are a mutualist symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, a collaboration that dates back hundreds of millions of years.

Long before humans discovered agriculture, fungi learned to farm algae for the energy they generate from photosynthesis.

(Side note: it’s not just agriculture we have in common; fungi are more closely related genetically to humans than they are to the algae they have domesticated — or indeed to any other plant species.)

I also learnt that lichens cover eight percent of the earth’s surface — more than is covered by tropical rainforest.

Without lichens, there might be no life on earth. They mine minerals from sheer rock and form the first soils in otherwise barren ecosystems. Lichen has been found inside lumps of granite.

Lichens have given us antibiotics, Harris tweed and, as black stone flower, garam masala.

I don’t suppose that I’ll look at that rooftop in quite the same way again. Will you?

~

All about us are the tools of enquiry — our senses, our curiosity and vast repositories of knowledge waiting to be dusted off and discovered. (I’m talking about the Internet.)

Has anyone else noticed how quiet the world is now? How ripe for observation?

That photograph at the top of the page, of the 140 million year old fossilised tree: I would never have noticed that staggering lump of palaeontology if it weren’t for the ‘boredom’ of lockdown.

There is an openness to the world right now. In our long days, we have time to notice the things that were once drowned out by the clamour of ‘business as usual’.

Rather than asking, ‘What’s on Netflix?’, we find ourselves asking instead, ‘How does the haze form, that makes this sunset so beautiful?’

Like the lichen on the rooftops opposite, everywhere we look there are questions that could seed many lifetimes of fascination, with each new discovery opening up new tunnels of exploration like the hyphae that forage and fracture to create the mycelium network that breaks up and becomes the soil beneath our feet.

Fascination is built from the combination of curiosity and imagination; given those ingredients, it is boundless. If you’re not sure, check the ingredients list on your garam masala.

~

I’m currently reading Edith Eger’s book The Choice. Like Viktor Frankl, Eger also survived the Holocaust. Like Frankl, Eger also moved to the US, also became a psychologist and also wrote a fascinating book about her experiences.

In April 1944, crammed into a cattle carriage with a hundred other Jews, destined for the gas chambers and smoke stacks of Auschwitz, Eger’s mother told her:

“Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”

These words sustained Eger during the year of captivity and abuse that almost killed her a dozen times over.

Our self-isolation is nothing remotely like what Eger and Frankl experienced during the Second World War, but Eger’s mother’s message holds true: it’s time to fill our minds.

~

You could do a lot worse over the next few weeks than to fill your mind with either The Choice or Man’s Search for Meaning.

If you want a companion for the latter — or if you fancy a shortcut, then shuffle on over to my website, where I have picked out my favourite passages from Frankl’s book and split them over 28 days of remarkable reading.

Bafflingly, there is no Wikipedia entry for Edith Eger. An isolation activity for someone you know?

Extravagant Enthusiasm

There’s always another way of looking at things.

After finishing an online game of Codenames on Tuesday night, my friends said goodnight, put down the phone and went their separate ways. I was left alone.

The nothingness swept into the emptiness and I had to sit down.

There’s nothing I look forward to more than seeing my friends. So, for the next couple of months, I have nothing to look forward to.

That was my thinking.

I undressed for an early night, hoping for consolation between the sheets of my bed, between pages of a book.

Then the phone rang. I looked at the unknown number, and unexpectedly answered.

It was a good friend I hadn’t spoken to for four, five years and my thinking was thrown on its head.

When life looks loneliest, there are people thinking and caring about you. Sometimes they’ll ring at that precise moment; sometimes they won’t and you’ll never realise unless you look at things in another way.

Sometimes these thoughtful people are friends, old or new; sometimes they’re people you barely knew, who crossed your path but once on the streets of New York, who you know can never find you or call you, but who are thinking about you with a smile, singing a song for you nonetheless.

~

Am I alone? There’s always another way of looking at things.

Here in Bournemouth, hundreds of people are drawn to the seafront. Keeping to the two-metre rule is difficult and demands nimble, if not outright acrobatic footwork.

This could be annoying. It could be an inconvenience. Or it could be the end of perceived isolation. How can I be alone on such a busy beach?

On Wednesday morning, during a half-hour run, I instituted a new rule: say good morning to every person I pass.

Yesterday, I started counting. I ran past 42 people and 32 of them, much surprised, said good morning back, making me fist-pump with pleasure.

(The other 10 mostly had headphones on so probably didn’t notice me.)

Perhaps now the time is ripe for extravagant enthusiasm: for us to go beyond everyday norms and stake out the boundaries of the world we want to see, rather than the world penned by the apparent limits of quarantine.

Extravagant: to wander out of bounds; fantastically absurd, flagrantly excessive behaviour. Also: a choice, a way of seeing things.

Enthusiasm: possession by a god; inspired greatness; a deifying of terrestrial behaviour. Also: a choice, a way of seeing things.

After all, I’d rather be known as the guy who says good morning to everyone than as the guy who… well, almost anything else, right? Perhaps this is the fourth sign of ageing: a contraction of ambition to the point where being known for decency is the pinnacle of heroism, but still…

A poster has recently been put up on Bournemouth seafront. It’s a crowdfunding campaign to buy a stroller for an elderly dog. The dog, the poster informs us, usually accompanies a man who has picked tonnes of litter from the beach over the years of daily exercise.

I don’t know anything about this man, except that he is known for his prodigious litter picking, for his extravagant enthusiasm for making our world more pleasant.

~

In isolation and loneliness, extravagant enthusiasm is a classic Stoic intervention: working within stringent limitations to explore hidden expanses of freedom.

~

Some ideas for extravagant enthusiasm:

  • Greet everyone. No exceptions. If you’re overtaking, then wait until you’re level or slightly ahead and then turn: most people will look at you.
  • Establish eye contact well in advance. This is not a drive-by; this is a firm, positive connection.
  • Speak up.
  • Smile.
  • It doesn’t have to be ‘good morning’. ‘Alright?’, ‘Beautiful day!’ and similar all work. Vary your game if you get bored.
  • Don’t be intimidated by groups or people in conversation: be confident and cheerful. You’re not interrupting; you’re like the weather: warm, sunny and just there.
  • Maintain eye contact after speaking. People will be surprised and think that you can’t possibly be wishing them well. Disabuse them of this notion.
  • If it gets weird, add a nod or a thumbs up.
  • Thumbs up is the perfect sign language for people wearing headphones and people at a greater distance as well.
  • Feel free to continue the chat at a safe distance.
  • If all else fails, pick litter.

Habit (re)formation in a time of crisis

These moments are rare.

An opportunity to change ourselves forever.

You know why big retailers have loyalty cards, don’t you? Yep — so they can build a picture of your shopping habits and the shopping habits of three generations of humankind and use all this data to sell you more stuff. Cool.

The data these cards collect is a significant revenue stream for supermarkets.

Did you know, for example, that Tesco has its own international data analysis company, Dunhumby? They’re actually a pretty big deal, employing over three thousand people in more than thirty countries worldwide, analysing the habits of over 1.3 billion shoppers.

And their analysis can result in some terrifyingly precise marketing campaigns that exploit ‘downstream-plus-context-change’ interventions.

Your supermarket loyalty card scheme will know when you fall pregnant — sometimes before you’ve told anyone else — and will start bombarding you with advertising in an attempt to change your habits so that you’re more profitable for them.

Companies like Dunhumby know that if they can get you now, when your context is changing, when your life is in turmoil, then they stand a good chance of keeping you after the baby arrives and your shopping habits ossify once again. Cool, huh?

This is what we’re interested in.

There’s nothing sinister about downstream-plus-context-change interventions as such: they’re a powerful tool for breaking and reforming robust habits when changing your intention is no longer enough.

‘Downstream’ simply means that you’re in control of the intervention directly (rather than, say, obeying government policy imposed on you ‘upstream’) and ‘context-change’ represents those times in life when big stuff is happening: when you take a new job, move to a new city, start a family — or freak out during a global pandemic.

These are moments when you are vulnerable to substantial and enduring habit change. An opportunity to change ourselves forever. These moments are rare.

Side story: the same mechanism might be on offer during psychedelic trips. The snow globe of your mind is turned upside down and almost everything is up for grabs.

I’ll mention one hopeful grocery-based example here. Yesterday I ran out of fruit and vegetables, so I cycled along to the greengrocer. On my way there, I passed two-metre-spaced queues snaking out of a customer-restricted Tesco Express (housed, shudderingly, inside a deconsecrated church).

When I got to the greengrocer, the shelves were almost audibly complaining about the weight of colourful stacks of seasonal vegetables. Huge sacks of potatoes and other hearty roots were piled up on the cramped shop floor, as if in mocking defiance of the empty supermarket chains.

After filing up my panniers, I asked the woman at the till whether she was busier than normal. ‘A lot busier,’ she said. ‘Hopefully, after this is all over, they’ll keep coming back.’

Thanks to this context-change intervention of Covid-19, I think there’s a good chance this shopkeeper will be quietly pleased come Autumn.

Switching lanes: what other habits could we loop-the-loop with?

I’m a freelance writer, so — as I mentioned last week — my worklife hasn’t actually changed much. I still don’t go to the office, I still don’t chat to colleagues over a brew, I still don’t meet face-to-face with customers or clients.

I work mostly alone, in isolation, as normal.

What has changed, however, is my social connection. And not for the worse.

Over the past week, I have had twenty-six conversations with friends on the phone. As well as these conversations, I’ve also taken part in a virtual pub quiz with rooms full of friends, played online Codenames and Pictionary, had several massive Zoom video meetups — and, of course, cycled off on a remote Thighsolation group ride with a whole peloton of pals from around the world.

Because I need professional help, I have kept a spreadsheet of every single phone call or face-to-face meeting I’ve had with friends over the past three years. Happily, that means we can compare data.

  • Corona Isolation: 26 conversations
  • 20-26 February 2020: 8 conversations
  • 20-26 January 2020: 18 conversations
  • 20-26 March 2019: 18 conversations
  • 20-26 March 2018: 8 conversations

Three observations:

  1. Weird palindromic pattern in the non-corona numbers.
  2. Ordinarily, I’m pretty isolated, averaging less than two conversations with friends or family per day.
  3. This past week, in contrast, I have had more than three and a half conversations with friends every day.

Obviously, for most people who aren’t freelance WFH writers, this social trend will have been sharply negative. My point isn’t to brag, but to show that change is possible.

If you’re feeling disconnected, then let’s set up a fifteen minute call. What’s to lose? On Tuesday, I had a really nice connection with a friend who got in touch after seeing my Calendly message in last week’s email. Simply book a time slot any day between 6 and 9pm GMT and let’s chat.

There has never been a better time to get into better habits.

We all secretly know this, by the way. It makes me happy to look out of my window and see so many people jogging, cycling and walking past in the sunshine, all discovering what Søren Kierkegaard observed:

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

One of the corona-habits I’m pleased to have slammed back into my routine is cold showers. I would write something inspirational about the experience, but James Parker at The Atlantic has done the work for me:

The water hits, and biology asserts itself. You are not a tired balloon of cerebral activity; you are a body, and you are being challenged. You gulp air; your pulse thumps. Your brain, meanwhile, your lovely, furry old brain, goes glacier-blue with shock. Thought is abolished. Personality is abolished. You’re a nameless mammal under a ravening jet of cold water.

How else I would like to change in the crisis?

  • I’d like to smile at strangers more (not in a creepy way). I noticed last week that I was avoiding eye contact, as if eyesight was corona laser beams. It takes some courage to look someone in the eye and smile, but it’s always worthwhile, especially if you’re otherwise avoiding one another, quite literally, like the plague.
  • I’d like to spend three hours outside every day. As this isn’t really possible anymore, I’d like to make the most of the time I can spend outside: suck up the sunshine, the scents and smells.
  • Related: I’d like to do more foraging. Nature’s allotment is overflowing with three-cornered leek and wild garlic at the moment, and a friend taught me last week that the beautiful hawthorn flowers are edible, leaving a delightfully peppery, buttery aftertaste.

How are you changing?

Be more creative: read a book

Actor, comedian, dear friend and work colleague Beth Granville woke up on Sunday morning with a start: her alarm wasn’t ringing.

Fuck.

She had a sitcom recording to get to.

Fuck.

She grappled with her phone, eyes swimming in an abyss of darkness. An unresponsive power button; rising panic.

Luckily, it appeared that Beth’s phone was the sole victim of a vicious electromagnetic pulse attack, localised in the Wanstead area.

The rest of the capital’s telecommunications network and transport infrastructure was, thankfully, still working and Beth got to the recording studio just in time.

The only embarrassment, apart from losing the phone numbers of every comedy producer she’d met since 2018, came when Beth had to ask someone on the tube what the time was. Lucky not to be arrested, frankly.

But the black screen of death was the harbinger of an unexpected light.

Phoneless Beth picked up a book and finished it in two days.

~

As some of you know, over the last few months I’ve been much more deliberate about my reading.

Too much of my day is spent, not on my phone, but on my computer: either working or worrying that I should be working.

The computer, to me, symbolises the one true god of productivity. How poisonously wrongheaded!

This winter, I found a way around this awful bias, a way to trick myself into truly valuing the time I spend eyeballs deep in a book, without feeling guilty.

Today, I record focussed reading time as work time and ‘bill’ the hours in my working diary accordingly. (No one pays me, of course, at least not directly…)

I set my work timer for 45 minutes, sit down with a pile of sticky tabs and read, marking beautiful or fascinating passages and new words or concepts as I go.

As Beth discovered, and I readiscovered: reading is wonderful.

(Does ‘readiscovered’ work? Not sure. Let’s say yes.)

~

I’ve quoted Dr Ruth J Simmons before and I shall do so again:

If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.

Reading is restorative and relaxing in a way that computers or phones will never be.

At the end of my 45 minutes’ reading, I feel enriched in the equal and opposite way that I am exhausted by 45 minutes of browsing the same amount of material on the internet.

A couple of times this week I’ve even taken my book out to the pine woods near where I’m staying in Bournemouth, set up my hammock and gently swung through the pages for an hour or so. (Tuesday was interesting: sunshine and hail.)

This isn’t a lone response from someone who grew up reading.

Reading a book relieves stress, can help you empathise with others, and builds your vocabulary, which may help you manage your own mental health by giving you a larger palette of emotions.

Note: Fiction seems to offer more to our brains here than non-fiction.

Side note: Science fiction in particular might offer our brains something particularly valuable at the moment — the sense that the future is malleable and open to change.

~

Books also offer a counterpoint to the pell and mell of news, which I’ve written about and insulted before. As Marcel Proust said, long ago:

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

One of my reading mentors, Ryan Holiday, deliberately weights his reading choices towards ‘timeless’ books.

‘I don’t want to read things that are very quickly proven irrelevant or incorrect,’ he says in an interview with Tim Ferriss (~1h51). He continues:

You’d be better off sitting down and reading Shakespeare’s plays because they have not only had 500 years of cultural impact, but will probably have 500 more years of cultural impact.

Think of what Ryan Holiday calls ‘the halflife of information’. The news that fires itself, cannon-like, out of your radio has a halflife of perhaps a day or two: tomorrow the triviality will be forgotten.

But a book has already proven itself durable: even a book published this year has probably been a couple of years in the making. If a reputable publisher was involved, the ideas and concepts are, if not timeless, then at least enduring.

~

Too many people write reading off as unproductive and it’s true that sitting down with your head in a book can look an awful lot like doing nothing.

Inside your skull, however, your brain is doing imaginative weight-lifting.

Reading strengthens language processing areas of the brain, as you might expect, but it is also a tremendously embodied experience: we truly live the novels we read.

Explaining the results of a study that showed long-term changes in brain connectivity among 21 people forced to read a Robert Harris novel, a team of neuroscientists from Emory University wrote:

It is plausible that the act of reading a novel places the reader in the body of the protagonist, which may alter somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity. … Reading stories … affect the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions.

Humans are wonderful fabulists: reading is the next best thing to being there.

Reading itself is a creative act. Of course, good books are full of good ideas and I can’t count the number of passages that have changed the way I write, permanently.

Last week’s newsletter, for example, was built entirely out of my reading from the week.

You’d expect reading to enhance creativity in writers, of course, but reading and writing themselves are significantly correlated with creativity.

It’s the same for Beth. I don’t know what book she was reading, but when she saw this picture between its covers, she laughed out loud and added a caption that has done rather well on Twitter…

@BettyGranville

I think this one’s called ‘Dating Actors’

~

Next Thursday is World Book Day. Lots of places, like the National Trust, are putting on book-themed events, mostly for dratted kids.

World Book Day is not to be confused (as I always do) with World Book Night on 23 April.

Two whole festivals of books — eat my shorts, World Internet Day!

RIP 2010-2019: A New Davecade Begins

Some parts of the Internet don’t seem to age. My website is not one of them. This was DavidCharles.info in June 2010 (courtesy of the Wayback Machine):

There’s something unmistakeably 2010 about this image. It’s hosted on Blogspot, for one. ‘Follow me on Facebook’ and ‘My Flickr PhotoStream’ – I haven’t used these services for six years or more.

I have no idea what ‘The Knowledge’ was. Presumably not a record of my attempt to learn all 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. And the less said about this ‘powerful tool’, the better.

On the other hand, there are some corners of the Internet that don’t date. This ridiculous Gnarls Barkley cover was recorded by Don Ross in 2010 and still sounds as fresh as ever.

This man is 10 years older now and, until a couple of days ago, I’d never heard of him. The Internet, sometimes, is cool. The work we do, sometimes, is timeless.

~

At the start of the last decade, I made the decision to apply for an internship at Amnesty International, and to apply for a place at a housing cooperative in London. I was accepted for both and set off on a course that directed my daily life for most of the next six years, and that still tides the general wash of my existence today, ten years later.

Amnesty didn’t really work out. I get strangely paranoid in large office environments and end up feeling stifled and powerless – even when the work is meaningful.

The International Secretariat remains the last open-plan, filing cabinet-filled, water cooler and canteen office I have worked in.

But Amnesty showed me what I did want work to look like: creativity and the outdoors. In 2010, I wrote my first books, including a tale about hitch-hiking to Scotland, The Soles of My Shoes, which is still on sale.

The 2010s was, for me, a decade of exploration. Sanford housing cooperative gave me that formative freedom to write books, start a theatre company, study English teaching, volunteer with refugees in Calais, and cycle around the country.

It wasn’t always healthy living situation, but a housing cooperative is run for the benefit of its members, not for the profit of its landlord. Everyone had a secure tenancy and a vote on how the cooperative was run, including rent-setting.

At the time, it was one of the few places in London where you could actually cover rent with a part-time job or with housing benefit. The rest of the week, then, was ours – to study, volunteer, travel, or create. It sounds like dream fairyland, but it could be the way we organise all our housing in this country.

Could be.

~

I’m glad I left Sanford, though. What my soul needs at the end of 2019 is not the same as it craved when the decade began.

In a 2015 paper published in Psychological Science, researchers found evidence for the instinctual notion that ‘temporal landmarks’ that signal new beginnings – such as the turning of a year – strengthen our motivation to achieve our goals.

Hence New Year’s Resolutions.

But the researchers also found that the bigger the sense of a fresh start, the bigger the motivation. A fresh start puts distance between our present and our past, imperfect, selves. The fresher the start, the greater the psychological distance, and the greater optimism we feel that we can finally overwhelm our ambition.

In a couple of days, we all have the opportunity to ‘spur goal initiation’ on a scale not seen the noughties clicked over into the teens. This gives a surprising weight to these few days that can otherwise slip between the cracks in the festivities of Christmas and New Year.

Turn-of-the-decade decisions echo long in the body, mind and spirit. Those two decisions that I took in early 2010 – Amnesty and Sanford – put me on a path that I was still exploring six years later and which have given me the life I lead today.

A great wave of momentum is coming, bringing with it the freshest of fresh starts – not merely of a new year, but of a whole new decade.

So, in among the minced pies and the turkey soup leftovers, I’m going to clear some time to make a couple of decisions that will set a new course and help me ride that wave long into the twenties.

What life choices will I look back on in 2029? What can I do today to increase the probability that someone, somewhere will find my work in 2029, surprised that it’s ten years old already?

What fresh start will you make in the twenties?

Above: The earliest photo of me taken this decade that I can unearth.

52 Things I Learned in 2019

The Thighs of Steel Core Team arrive in Athens after 9 weeks and over 6,000km of cycling. This photo sums up the best of what I learned in 2019.
  1. Your gut behaves like a second brain of over 100 million nerve cells called the enteric nervous system, which can communicate with your head-brain through the vagus nerve, and also by releasing bacterial metabolites into the bloodstream. We are what we eat, in other words. Read a digest of the science on my blog.
  2. Fingerspitzengefühl is a splendid German word, literally meaning ‘finger tip feeling’ and best translated as ‘intuitive flair’ or ‘instinct’. I have no memory of where I picked this up.
  3. This year, The Guardian updated its style guide to recommend journalists use terms that more accurately reflect the science of climate change – sorry – climate breakdown. Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner says: ‘The phrase “climate change”, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.’ Words are important. Read about other word choices in The Guardian.
  4. Fires in equatorial Asia contribute 8 percent of global carbon emissions and 23 percent of methane emissions despite only accounting for 0.6 percent of the world’s burned area. That’s down to the burning of carbon-rich peatlands in countries like Indonesia. I learned a lot more while writing this article for Forests News.
  5. Rejection is joyous. Read more on my blog – or watch this TEDx talk by Jia Jiang.
  6. ‘Activity gives you more energy, not less’, one of five key ideas from the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Read the other four on my (new) blog.
  7. Millennials are the burnout generation. There is so much in this article, but here’s one idea that struck home: ‘[Burnout] takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed.’ Read the full article on Buzzfeed.
  8. In Utah there’s a 6,000 tonne quaking aspen that is between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old. I’ve learned how to age trees (without chopping the in half) twice this year and forgotten both times. Every species grows at a slightly different rate, and at different rates at different ages and in different environments, but a half decent rule of thumb is that the girth of the tree will increase by about an inch every year. I found this PDF from Wokingham District Veteran Tree Association useful.
  9. Over the past decade, about 550,000 more Britons left London than moved to the city. Read why people are leaving London on BBC News. Read why I think small is sociable on my blog.
  10. A psychedelic experience has the potential to be a Black Swan event for the individual. Read through this thought on my blog. Better yet, read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind and/or watch this video of him in conversation with Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London:
  11. As well as the amelioration of symptoms of depression, specific anxiety (not generalised) and PMS, psychedelic microdosing has been linked with physical enhancements in strength, stamina and flexibility. The talk I gave at Love Trails Festival showed me that runners are really interested in the practical application of vanishingly small amounts of psychedelic substances. Read more in Advances in Psychedelic Medicine (Google Books).
  12. Injuring your hamstring can take months and months to recover from. Bloody annoying when fifty percent of your stress-reduction strategy involves running.
  13. There are five major varieties of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers and taskmasters. The antidote to bullshit jobs and the bullshitisation of our lives is to care. We won’t be rewarded financially, but we will be rewarded in other ways, including with the intrinsic reward of being able to sleep at night. Read Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber at your local library or online for free at The Anarchist Library.
  14. People on a meat-heavy diet could shrink their food-related footprint by at least 33% by becoming vegetarian. Eat less beef, lamb and cheese. Substitute with pork, chicken, eggs and molluscs. Replace with beans, pulses, grains and soy. Read my digest of a New York Times deep dive on the subject.
  15. Reading a book is ‘forced meditation’. Please, please watch Bookstores, a documentary paeon to reading. It includes a wonderful interview with ‘total baller’ Dr Ruth J Simmons at ~29:30: ‘If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.’
  16. The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That sounds like a lot, but most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ‘drinks up’ 1,500 litres. Read my investigation into the environment demerits of showering on my blog.
  17. It takes us about 50 hours of typing to write an episode of Foiled. Read more about our process on my blog.
  18. There’s such a thing as the Celtic Media Awards! We go again next year…
  19. On 29 July, volunteers in Ethiopia planted 350 million trees across 1,000 designated sites in 12 hours. Read more on Atlas Obscura.
  20. This year, I learned how to play The Trellis by Nick Mulvey (who, incidentally, went to the same university as me – I remember watching his old band Portico Quartet in the student union). Get the TAB from Bantham Legend and play along with this video:
  21. From a standing start, fully dressed at my desk, the minimum viable swim (out to beyond my depth, plus three head dunking dives and back) takes exactly 13 minutes. Read why you should always take the swim on my blog.
  22. Climbing trees is good for you in ways that you can’t quite remember until you’re up there, looking down. ‘Trees deliver us from the banal, and reaching the top of one is like coming up for air and breaking the bubble of our timetabled lives.’ Read The Tree Climber’s Guide by Jack Cooke.
  23. On flat ground, I take 64 paces to walk 100 metres. A useful thing to know if you’re trying to navigate in low visibility (or trying to find an obscure map feature as part of your Lowland Leader Award assessment). Learn more about pacing from Mountain Safety.
  24. Fractal environments, such as those we experience in abundance when in the countryside or beside the sea, help regulate emotions and reduce stress in a similar way to music. Read The Nature Fix by Florence Williams for a full exploration on the myriad ways nature does us good – or read this Atlantic article on Why Fractals Are So Soothing.
  25. Leave love letters. Read the secret story on my blog.
  26. I really like Emmental. Also: always travel with a pat of butter. Tortilla chips slathered with butter makes for a surprisingly good cycling snack. Ignore the doubters.
  27. Neapolitan street food is dangerous. Frittatine di pasta is a depth charge of carbohydrates, macaroni, béchamel and pork weighted with enough oil to power a medium-sized caravan. Digestible only when halved, quartered, and shared to soak up limoncello. Eat more on my blog.
  28. Unlike those at liberty, asylum seekers imprisoned in detention centres are allowed to work – for the princely wage of £1 per hour. Read Michael Darko’s story of indefinite detention on my blog.
  29. Refugees and asylum seekers dress well and wear cologne because it helps them integrate into society. ‘For me, to look good and to be clean could help me in front of society. People might accept me.’ Read Mahmud’s story on my blog.
  30. The Croatian Adriatic coast is beautiful, but the Adriatic coast road will be too full of touring motorists in mid-summer for you to fully relax and enjoy the ride. As you can’t see in the photo below.
  31. Albania may very well be the most hospitable country in the world for touring cyclists. Thank you, Albania. Read the story of Thighs of Steel in Albania on my blog.
  32. Cycling around Ikaría, a Greek island home to Europe’s highest concentration of centenarians, is really fucking hard. Read the story on my blog.
  33. Diving into the sea head first can really mess you up. From a height of ten metres, you break the surface at 36.6mph and that exerts crazy force on your body as the water slows you by more than 50 percent in a fraction of a second. I guess that’s why diving is an Olympic sport. I got a dislocated shoulder, but maybe I was lucky not to get concussed. Read more about the risks of diving on SportsRec.com. Next time, I’ll be following this sage advice from Tourism On The Edge.
  34. Greek can be disturbingly similar to Spanish in the most unhelpful ways. For example: aquí in Spanish means here; εκεί in Greek means there.
  35. The maximum capacity of Samos refugee camp is 648. The current refugee population in the town is nearing 8,000. Read my Are You Syrious? Special about Samos and stay in touch with the data by subscribing to Aegean Boat Report.
  36. Some female refugees who have been raped refuse abortions because they believe pregnancy will expedite their asylum application. Read how women’s bodies are being abused by the asylum system on my blog.
  37. There is one doctor for (at the time) 6,000 refugees on Samos. Read more snippets from Samos on my blog.
  38. 17,205 people were granted asylum in the UK in 2018. Over the same period, Germany granted asylum to 139,555 people. In Turkey, there are in excess of 3,600,000 Syrian refugees, living with the limited legal rights granted under ‘temporary protection’, in the shadow of a war zone. Read my full report from İzmir on my blog.
  39. You can know a culture through its language. While in the Netherlands I learned two Dutch word-philosophies: gezellig and niksen. Gezellig is an earthier version of the Danish hygge, while niksen is doing-nothingness. Both vital. You can take two minutes of niksen using this timer – it took me two attempts to complete because I am, at heart, a millennial.
  40. The Netherlands has a border with France. Read about my trip to Urk with The Tim Traveller. Or, better still, watch this:
  41. E.M. Forster is an excellent novelist. Read my other Summer / Autumn recommendations on my blog. And ‘beware of muddle’.
  42. The best things in life are free, but some other stuff is free as well if you ask nicely. Read more about getting shit for free on my blog or check out my second look review of the free (to me at least) Punkt MP02 mobile phone.
  43. Since the Tories first came to power in 2010, admissions to A&E of homeless people has tripled. Read the horrifying absract in the BMJ. But perhaps this was the election that brought us closer together. Read why on my blog.
  44. TOTALLY UNRELATED TO THE RESULTS OF THE GENERAL ELECTION: it is theoretically possible to acquire French citizenship (and regain an EU passport) in only two years if you study for a masters in the country and have no ‘assimilation defects’. Read this petite histoire on Pret A Voyager before embarking, however.
  45. Divock Origi.
  46. I have already spent more time with friends and family in 2019 than I did last year. Yep: I keep a spreadsheet. I’ve spoken at least twice with a total of 47 people this year, 14 of whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to at least 20 times.
  47. According to my rough estimates, I have visited 59,323 web pages so far this year – that’s over 1,100 unique pages every week and a 14 percent increase on 2018. Can I think of more than a dozen web pages that have made a positive difference to my life in 2019? No, I can’t. 8 percent of unique page views were on the BBC Sport website, for example. I frequently fantasise about a life without the Internet. But then I wouldn’t be able to write you these love letters, would I?
  48. Through Spring, Summer and Autumn 2019, I lost my five-year daily habit of diary writing. Now I’m trying to trust the process again.
  49. By and large, I stuck to my No News Is Good News reading habit. I accessed almost double the number of BBC News stories as I did in 2017 – but nearly half of them were actually sports stories like ‘Enes Kanter: Turkey seeks arrest of New York Knicks star’. WTF. I have no interest in baseball (is that even baseball?) If you exclude sports stories, then I only accessed 56 ‘news’ stories in 2019. Of those, my primary interests were Brexit, the General Election and the environment.
  50. I enjoy ice skating exactly as much I suspected. I’ll try not to leave it another thirty years before my next outing. (Artwork below by my niece, aged 5.)
  51. After keeping a nightly journal of ‘5 Great Things’ since 5 February, I have learned that the greatest things in my life are quite often miniscule, and almost always related to other people. The strongest element of keeping such a journal is reflecting on past entries so here’s an incredibly mundane sample of three, picked from random days in the two notebooks I’ve filled this year:
    ‘Loads of walking >18km’
    ‘Being woken up by Django licking my face’
    ‘Sauna’
    I should say that Django is a dog. I was inspired to start the journal by this article on For The Interested.
  52. Leather trousers are surprisingly comfortable.

That’s it!

Well done for getting this far. If you’ve enjoyed reading, then I’d be thrilled if you share the link with your friends or on your social media. Thank you!

Punkt MP02: Second Look

The Punkt MP02 will liberate you from your smartphone. It’s not a smartphone-killer, but it will free you from the burden of the dreaded online default mode.

Most of us are stuck in online default mode. We need a phone for communication in the modern age and smartphones are the most flexible solution for those moments when we absolutely must get online while out and about.

I get it.

But those moments of the essential online are fewer than we think. And what we are left with is the online default mode, in which we carry around the internet in our pocket, with instant access at any time.

The Punkt MP02 relieves you of this default and replaces it with an offline default mode. The online world is still accessible, through 4G tethering to a second device – computer, tablet or smartphone – but it is never only a swipe away.

Reaching into my pocket, I’m separated from a swift fiddle with Whatsapp by a dozen key presses and a twenty second wait. This is just enough to stop me from using my smartphone when I don’t need it – but still convenient enough that going online when I need to is not a hassle.

With the Punkt MP02, I am liberated to use my technology as I need it. A good example is that I often leave the house with either one or the other, but rarely with both phones.

If I want to contact others, I can take only the Punkt and stay offline. If I want to take photographs, then I can take only my smartphone camera without being tempted to go online.

Best of all are the times when I leave both in their drawer at home!

New Model Update: Better or Worse?

This is the second MP02 that I have tested. The first model I reviewed back in April and you can read my thoughts here. Ultimately, this model was unusable long term, mainly because of the short battery life (scarcely a day) and the frequent dropped calls.

So is this new model any better? The short answer is yes, but there are still snags.

Limited battery life

Since the first edition of the MP02, the battery life has improved – but it’s still not sensational compared to other feature phones like the Nokia 3310.

I would say that my Punkt phone use is no more than moderate and I need to charge the device every 36 hours or so. Not terrible, as it was before, but not world-beating either.

As you would expect, the biggest drain on the Punkt battery is tethering. I use this feature a fair amount because I travel often and sometimes need to connect my laptop to the internet.

As a guide, 45 minutes of tethering used 10% of the battery; 70 minutes drained 19%. Sometimes I plug the Punkt in to charge and tether for longer periods, but the phone does get warm and I doubt this is particularly good for the battery life.

Unfortunately, Punkt have withdrawn the ability to tether over USB and Bluetooth connections, both of which use less power than a wifi connection. I hope these features will return in future updates, but customer support didn’t give me any cause for optimism when I mentioned it.

Dropped calls

After a month of use, I haven’t had any dropped calls. Fingers crossed that’s a vast improvement.

Home screen snags

There are still a number of glitches in the software – particularly in the way the home screen behaves – and that’s not cool in a phone that costs £295.

The main glitches are when waking up from standby. The worst of these is that the home screen frequently freezes, leaving me staring at an unresponsive phone until it recovers.

The clock also takes a couple of seconds to update – slightly annoying when you’re quickly checking to see whether you’re about to miss a train.

There are a few features that I’d expect to see that are missing, especially with contact management. The address book works in mysterious ways and there is no easy way to delete duplicate contacts, for example.

It would be wonderful if I could manage my Punkt contacts using my computer and a USB connection. Consider that a feature request!

On the plus side, it was easy to transfer contacts from my smartphone to the Punkt using Bluetooth. Full marks there.

I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises

No improvement on the old model – actually worse because my phone refuses to vibrate, despite having that option turned on. I would ordinarily rely on the vibrate to get around the obnoxious system noises that come whenever the ringtone is set up.

I’ve asked customer support about this and they appeared baffled by the desire for an audible ringtone without audible key tone presses.

In conclusion, this new model MP02 is a significant improvement on the previous edition. I can see myself using this model for the foreseeable future, but I sincerely hope that further improvements to the software are in the pipeline.

Note: Punkt sent me this new model MP02 gratis. Thank you!

You can read my review of the old model MP02 here.

Trust The Process On writing habits

Last Sunday I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. With its tawdry promise of ‘a revolutionary system to get 1 per cent better every day’, I resisted reading this book for more than a year.

I wish I hadn’t.

It’s an excellent summary of the current research on habit-building and habit-breaking.

One of the deceptively simple insights that has stayed with me is that every action you take is a vote for your future.

If you write one newsletter, then that’s one vote for becoming a newsletter-writer. If you only ever write one newsletter, you’re not going to accumulate more than one vote and you’re unlikely to become a newsletter-writer. That single vote will be swamped by all the other votes you’re constantly casting for other future selves, whether that’s ‘master carpenter’ or (in my case) ‘internet browser’.

If you keep publishing newsletters every week, then you’re regularly casting votes for ‘newsletter-writer’ – and, more than 150 Fridays later, here we all are.

~

What’s made this newsletter-writing habit stick for the past three years? I think there are, appropriately enough, three major reasons.

Firstly, and most importantly, I’m accountable to my readers. I have made a promise to write something interesting for you to read every Friday and I want to make damned sure I deliver. So thank you for sticking with me. You are my habit!

Secondly, I have a set time every week that I publish: Friday. If I miss a Friday, like I did last week, then I publish as soon as I can. Missing one Friday deadline isn’t a disaster and skipping a whole week is hardly likely to cause much of a cataclysm either, but habits like this are all too easy to let slide.

As James Clear says: don’t miss twice. I’ve now got this motto written down in the notebook where I record my work progress.

Thirdly, I enjoy writing. Writing is creative, obviously, but it’s also critical. Writing is a way of being in the world. Putting words down on paper forces me to think a lot more about what I do – and pushes me to do a lot more than I think.

Writing the scripts for Foiled is a slightly different experience. Rather than delivering content directly to an audience every Friday, the accountability for a radio series like Foiled lies in making my co-writer laugh and in regular deadlines throughout the three-month writing process: pitching story ideas, drafting story beats, writing the first and second drafts, and incorporating writers room punch-ups.

What makes a writing habit hard is when there is no one reading.

~

Since 2014 I have written a regular diary and I’ve been aiming for at least 1,000 words per day since 2015. I have more or less managed to stick to this habit, as this count shows:

  • 2014: 314,084 words across 353 entries
  • 2015: 392,241     ”           ”       354     “
  • 2016: 327,837     ”           ”       320     “
  • 2017: 248,865     ”           ”       254     “
  • 2018: 292,593     ”           ”       313     “

But in 2019 I’ve only written 159,220 words in my diary – less than half you’d expect by the beginning of December.

This year so far, I’ve skipped 141 days. On 42 percent of days, I haven’t written anything at all in my 2019 diary. Can this still be called a habit?

In comparison, during my most ‘successful’ diary year of 2015 I missed only 11 diary days, just 3 percent.

Browsing the data, it’s obvious that James Clear’s rule holds fast: don’t miss twice. It’s astonishing how quickly a habit as strong as my five-year daily diary can break down after I skip just one day.

When nothing bad seems to happen after I skip a second day, my habit easily unravels and I go one or two weeks with hardly an entry.

So don’t miss twice.

~

I say that nothing bad seems to happen, but my daily diary is where I work out all the kinks in my life, personally and professionally.

My 2015 diary was enough of a success for me to start putting together a collection of highlights.

Looking back over words that I wrote nearly five years ago, the value of this daily habit comes clear. I can watch as moments of realisation surface, like in this entry from 5 January 2015:

There is no such thing as a great writer or a great anyone. We are all partners. My story is your story. My story is only a story if you’re invested in it; the language of finance is not misplaced. You invest in my story; you become a partner – an equal partner, no less. My story cannot get off the ground if it doesn’t have outside investment. I need that, we need that, the story needs that.

Diary writing is one of the most important habits in my life. I can scarcely pinpoint what the diary does for me, but I know that I am better off when I am writing regularly for nobody but myself.

Postscript: There’s something similar going on with running. At first glance, the benefit of a running habit is that you get outdoors and stay relatively fit. But running is so much more than that. On my lunchtime run today, for example, I came up with six good ideas that I can immediately implement to save money, improve my fitness and get better at business. Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.

UPDATE 6 January 2021: In 2020, I’m pleased to report that my diary-writing habit bounced back, despite, well, everything. I wrote a total of 319,893 words over 335 days, missing only 8.5 percent of that momentous 366-day leap year.

Leave love letters

What, if anything, makes you fall in love with a person?

I reckon we can climb that fence. Yes!
Here, try this. She hands me a forkful of mozzarella.
At 2 a.m. we are still sitting out on the rocks overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Kindness where kindness is unexpected. What’s mine is yours. Sharing private moments together, even in public. Saying yes. Eye contact, smiles, easy laughter, a light touch. Conversation that burrows deep. Lingering.

There is magic in play and even more in secrets.

My companion on last week’s Neapolitan food tour was a woman from Texas. For the sake of this email, let’s call her Sylia because, quite frankly, that’s her name and it becomes impossible to conceal later on in the story…

I only knew Sylia for the 64 hours it took us to eat our way around Napoli. After our final espresso breakfast, I was travelling back to England via Milan and Paris, and she was flying to Dubrovnik before flipping over the pond back to California.

She told me that she had a layover in Paris too. In fact, less than a week separated my overnight sojourn in the City of Light and hers. We parted.

~

I walked down to the Seine to watch the sunset. I’ve been here before. Crowds milled around Notre Dame, taking selfies in the golden hour.

Below the busy streets, nowhere-steps led down to the river’s edge where a few of us enjoyed a private showing of the day’s final rites.

I sat on a polished stone wall and let the sun soothe my travel-tired face.

Then I had a thought.

Sylia felt like more than a fleeting acquaintance. For 64 hours, we behaved as if destiny played our hand and, as ever when destiny gets involved, much had gone unsaid.

For 64 hours, we had sailed that soft shoreline between the moment now and the future then, saying nothing that might come too close to broaching our pleasure.

But now I wanted to feel my feet on solid ground; and I wanted her to see me standing there too.

So what if I wrote a letter and left it for her, here, in Paris?

~

I had a notebook in my bag, but no pen. I heard an Australian voice a couple of steps down: a middle-aged woman and her Belgian lover sharing a dusky pique-nique of ham and torn bread.

‘Excuse me, do you have a pen I could borrow?

I sit back down and tear a single sheet from my notebook. I promise myself no more than one side of A5. That is surely enough for me to say what I need to say. I’m not a schoolboy any longer.

So I begin, sure that I will find the right words as a rhythm starts to flow.

Sylia – Did you know that your name means ‘If there is…’ in French? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I met you…

I fill one side of A5, but it’s half baked, scatter-brained. I promise myself the second side and turn over.

There are so many things I haven’t said here – and the ones I have, so poorly expressed…

It doesn’t quite happen on this side either. I say some things, I fill the space, but it’s not right. Oh well. My promised time is up.

I origami myself an envelope, write her name on the outside, and fold the whole into a dart of paper. Then I feel the stone walls for a crack that might hide my letter until she arrives.

I look around. Everyone is either on their phone or with their back to me. I slip the letter into the wall and smile.

I return the pen and share a few words of thanks before sitting back down on my wall.

Fuck.

It’s not right. A writer and I never found the words.

‘Sorry, I don’t suppose I could borrow your pen again, could I?’ Mild surprise, mid-mouthful. ‘I’m writing to a friend, and you know when you realise that you haven’t said a word of what you meant to…?’

I unfold the origami envelope. The inside of the envelope is blank: enough room for a dozen lines, no more. The mind is focussed and I write.

p.s…

~

I fold the envelope back over the letter and squeeze it back into the letter box, certain now that someone has seen me and is only waiting for me to leave before tearing open the letter for a laugh. I hope they return it instead of chucking the feeble paper into the softly infinite river.

But I have said almost exactly what I wanted to say to Sylia and the rest is now in the hands of fate.

I brush my hand over the wall where the secret is hidden, casting a spell. We can turn the city into a place of magic so easily. A place of games and play, of secrets and love, that stretch across time and space.

I walk back up the steps and into the gloaming night. The streets are still busy, but now everyone’s clutching at home.

As I walked, Sylia, the person at the heart of the story, became almost irrelevant. I sent her a few photos that I hoped might lead her to the location. Notre Dame in the background. A distinctive piece of graffiti. The crack in the wall. Enough that, if she wanted to find the letter, she could.

I returned to London, and then Wales for a week of writing with friends.

In among the laughter, the work and the dog walks, of course, I didn’t entirely forget about the letter, or the woman; but as time passed, the immediate sensation that we were close enough to touch faded.

I sent her a message on Saturday: Are you in Paris?

She didn’t reply.

But, then, a few days later…

I’ve just landed in LA.

Followed by a photograph…

Croissants for breakfast: Remagicking the world

The other day, I did something described as ‘so silly’.

I was passing through Paris, arriving in the afternoon, and leaving the next morning on an early Eurostar.

The train was due to leave Paris around about the time boulangeries open, and get into London around the time people have breakfast at their office desk.

So I messaged a friend I knew would be working in central London: ‘Fancy croissants for breakfast tomorrow?’

~

‘You’re so silly for doing this.’

~

The world can be a very prosaic place. It is full of offices and commutes and the tiresome effort of staying alive: breathing, eating, sleeping.

There is very little magic, it seems, in day-to-day life. We don’t expect it, so it never comes.

What do I mean by ‘magic’? I mean those moments when the world seems bigger and more connected than it ordinarily does.

Magic imbues the world with meaning where before there was none. And who doesn’t want to live in a world suffused with magic and meaning?

When you notice the size of the moon, when you write someone a letter, when you hand-deliver croissants from Paris.

This is magic.

It’s different for everyone, but you know magic when you feel it. There are other words we could use: ‘romantic’ is another good one, but that gets confused in our heads with sexual objectives.

Young children rarely see much that is unmagical, but for us adults, the world is often stripped bare like the lighting in our most ghastly supermarkets.

The world has been unmagicked. And by whom? All by ourselves.

~

It’s a shame because magic costs so little. As any child will tell you, the only obstacle to magic and the only limitation on your spell-casting is in the vigour of your imagination.

We get out of the habit of casting spells, so our imagination dullens, and we miss the opportunities for magic that are all around us.

What did it cost me to cast the spell of croissants for breakfast? Almost nothing; only the exercise of a little imagination.

The boulangerie was on my way to the train station. I was second in line after it opened. Not knowing how many people my friend worked with, I bought five croissants and paid an extra ten centimes for a sturdier paper bag to protect them on the journey.

Then I caught the Eurostar and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later in London. I picked up my bags and took the Underground two stops.

As I walked the eight minutes to my friend’s office, the rain fell in a drizzle. It was refreshing after a month of continental baking. I arrived at 8.50, ten minutes before my friend was due. I read the last pages of my book.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

She arrived. I handed over the croissants. She smiled. I walked to catch another train, to catch another few hours’ sleep.

The world desperately needs remagicking, but we forget that we are the magi.

~

Ingredients for spell-casting:

  • It takes practice and a little imagination to spot opportunities for magic, but they are all around, all the time.
  • We need audacity and courage to step outside of the limitations of self-imposed adulthood.
  • Magic is founded on delighted surprise and the joyful unexpected. Or silliness.
  • You’ll need empathy and thoughtfulness so your spell makes the kind of magical connection you want.

~

‘You’re a legend in my office now.’

What can actors can teach us about the good life?

Those of you who follow my thoughts to a frankly intrusive degree, will know of my fondness for Albert Camus.

Not only was he a goalkeeper of some repute (see Monty Python), but as a philosopher he had the flair of a novelist. Or as a novelist he had the flair of a philosopher. I’m not sure which. I’ve asked Jeeves and he doesn’t know either.

In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Camus lays out the logic of his practical philosophy. The argument (as pertains this newsletter) goes as follows:

  1. There is no god.
  2. So there is no ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad.
  3. Therefore the old philosophers’ hunt for ‘the good life’ has been a wild goose chase. It’s impossible to live a good life because there is no good if there is no bad.
  4. So are there no suggestions a jobbing philosopher can offer on how to live? Yes, there are – Camus proposes. To live not better, but more.

By aiming to get the most out of life we are not dependent on outcomes of subjective good and bad. Camus offers up three avenues for most living.

The actor gets the most out of life by playing hundreds of different roles, sometimes covering the entire span of a life from birth to death in a single day – twice if there’s a matinee. This is the archetype of freedom.

The conqueror – whom Camus imagines a kind of soldier – lives constantly in the shadow of death. When you deal in death, life tastes moreish. This the archetype of revolt.

The Don Juan uses romance as the road to most living. Rarely do humans feel more alive than when indulging the fiery emotions of love. This is the archetype of passion.

These are the three archetypes that Camus sketches for us, but it’s easy to imagine myriad sub-types – the paramedic and the mountaineer are sub-types of the conqueror, for example.

The Actor

My primary interest here, of course, is the actor. In fact, most of us are actors already – but perhaps we’re not getting the most out of the masks we wear. Perhaps we try our hardest to apply the same make-up and costume every day.

There are good reasons why we might want to do that. But if there is no good… What harm can come of trying another role today? It’s not forever – the actor melts into another role as easily as night follows day.

So what harm can come of trying another role for ten minutes, in the time it takes you to ride the train two stops?

Expression and Suppression

We seem to have two modes of living (here I deviate from Camus): expression and suppression. I am either expressing something or I am suppressing something.

There are good reasons, again, why I might want to suppress some impulse. And, besides, we can’t express everything all at once: that way mania lies. But the basic distinction is there: either I express or I suppress.

But if there is no good or bad, and our only philosophical position is most living, then there is nothing to be lost from expression.

So why then do we suppress? Personally, it comes down to a fear of rejection by other people. Even when there is no one in earshot, I can feel a weighty oppression from social norms.

Rejection challenges are a great way to turn such obstacles into opportunity. An obstacle isn’t a roadblock if it’s a game.

Games are areas of life around which we draw a boundary of rules. Inside, we play; outside we work. But those boundaries are arbitrary.

There is no reason why – again, given that there is no objective good or bad – that we can’t as individuals draw our boundaries in a wide compass around all of life, and play as the actor plays.

Permissive Characters

Can I give you an example?

In Foiled, Sabrina is a god-awful hairdresser with a penchant for chucking customers out of her salon. One of her favourite lines is ‘No, absolutely no way, come you – out!’ I think Camus would have approved: she says exactly what she wants to say.

It’s a role, of course. But it’s an extraordinary useful role for us in day-to-day life. Sabrina speaks the unspeakable. And she speaks in such heightened language that, with a smile, she helps us say things we could never say.

We put the words into her mouth that we dream of saying to others. And little by little we build our courage until one day some outrage is visited upon me, like I’m served a dodgy cup of tea, and I say those words: ‘No, absolutely no way…’

Sometimes we need permission to express ourselves and, in a world with no good or bad, fictional characters give us that permission. Roles like Sabrina are stepping stones that pick a path through our comfort zone.

We can try a new character on for size, change the cut of our clothes, use new language and tone of voice, take on different mannerisms. Take a peek over the other side of the wall. Try out the priest or the predator.

We have a choice. Expression or suppression, action or inaction, attraction or rejection, stasis or growth, sensitive or resistant, yang or yin.

Empathy

Acting begins with empathy. On stage, you know very quickly whether an actor is engaged empathically with the character and with you, the audience.

If all the world’s a stage, then we players must find the empathy in our roles and with each other. For empathy is the conduit that connects us and allows the plurality of experience that Camus prescribes.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.

Audacity is our only option

My last blog post on audacity got a great response. I particularly enjoyed conversations with Documentally and Beth Granville, both of whom are models of mine for more audacious living.

My call with Documentally was interesting because, as someone often audacious, he was anxious that his audacity could be draining the world of generosity.

What if his asking meant other, more needy people would miss out? And what if everyone went around acting audacious and asking for free cups of tea? What would happen then? Wouldn’t all the tea sellers go bankrupt and leave us bereft of warming beverages?

Documentally also said that he always feels an obligation to reply his debt of gratitude to the people who help him. He’d been expecting me to share the location of the beachside kiosk where I got my free tea last week.

It didn’t even cross my mind. Why not? I have no good answer to that question, and now feel like an ungrateful little swine. 🙂

still.slave.status

In my defence, the thesis of my writing was not about the kiosk – or even about generosity. Generosity is the flip side to audacity, and a story for another day.

I also never imagined that you lovely readers would ever be interested in visiting that particular kiosk, so why would I share its address?

But why ever not? Embedded in my somewhat solipsistic writing was an endorsement of a generous hearted kiosk operator. Why wouldn’t other people want to visit this kindly young man and exploit – sorry, reward his generosity? Especially as I know at least 7 people who visit Bournemouth on the regular.

So, without further analysis, if you ever find yourself in Bournemouth, then the kiosk you absolutely must visit is attached to the Versuvio restaurant on the seafront at Alum Chine. If you’re looking for What3Words, it’s still.slave.status, which is heartbreaking.

The karmic torpedo

We could enjoy an hour or two addressing Documentally’s other concerns, throwing around arguments for and against the karmic repercussions of audacity. But a story Beth told me pretty much torpedoes the whole argument.

You see, something similar happened to Beth the other day – except she really had forgotten her wallet, and really was gasping for a tea.

She was out with a friend, walking the dog, so went into the park cafe and asked if she could have a free cup of tea. The woman behind the counter said yes.

So, while she was there, Beth asked if her friend could have a tea as well – oh and these wafers look good – and how about a doggy treat for Jilly?

Think that’s taking the piss? I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Firstly because Beth offered to come back and pay – and actually did. But secondly, and I think more importantly, because of this story’s torpedo effect on Documentally’s karmic concerns.

What is normal? This is normal

Everyone has a totally different take on what defines normal behaviour. Did Beth think her ask was audacious? Maybe a little, but clearly not to the extent that I did when, knees a-knocking, I asked for my free cuppa.

For Beth this behaviour was, although not an everyday occurrence, at least within the boundaries of normal. And why ever not? She wasn’t coercing the cafe server. She didn’t act entitled (although it has been said that no one is more ready to be famous), she asked.

As long as you stay on the right side of audacity, you should have no worries over the karmic repercussions of asking.

Indeed, I’d go much, much further. I think it is vitally important – for all of us, people and planet – that you act with audacity.

Would the world be a better place if everyone were so audacious? Yes, without question, it would.

Why we need an audacious world

Audacity puts an end to all regrets (and crimes) of omission. It wouldn’t put an end to regret itself – it’s perfectly possible to do something audacious that you later regret. But we regret the things we do far less and far less frequently than we regret the things we never did.

In an audacious world, there would be zero elderly men, nodding by the fire, dreaming what might have been if only they’d asked Mary to the ball in 1953 – zero!

There would be zero working women wondering what might have been if only they’d asked for a raise ten years earlier – zero!

And there would be zero activists wondering what might have been if they’d only done something more than sign a petition – zero!

Because, in an audacious world, they would have asked. It is in our acts of audacity that we improve our lives and the lives of others. In audacity, we don’t hold back; we leave it all out there; we do our best.

Anxiety is the opposite of audacity

I’m not saying that if you ask audaciously you will always receive bounty, of course not.

But the energy we channel into our anxiety over whether we’ll be rejected would be far better spent on dealing with the rejection (if and when it comes) and then asking someone else on a date, looking for a new job, or starting a more ambitious campaign.

The opposite of audacity is not, as you might think, conventional behaviour. The opposite of audacity is anxiety.

No one goes through life thinking purely conventional thoughts. No matter how straight-laced that man you see on his office commute every morning, you can bet your life that he’s fantasised about some pretty audacious behaviour in his time.

And you can bet your afterlife that he beats himself up about his conventional existence every single day. Instead of audacity, he feels anxiety.

Why practise audacity?

Breaking our habits of convention is not easy. We focus on the pain of failure far more often than we dare to imagine success.

Some people, like Beth, are pretty well practised at asking for what they want, but the rest of us can improve by taking on low-stakes audacity challenges where our future (not to mention our fragile pride) doesn’t depend on the outcome.

These training challenges will be different for each of us. For me, it might be taking a guitar out to the beach and playing for passers-by.

For you, it might be sitting down on a park bench and talking to a stranger (wait – that one’s for me too).

For someone else, it might be leaving work unfinished and goofing off for an hour to listen to birdsong (wait – that one’s also for me).

If nothing too bad happens, then screw your courage to the sticking place and try something even more audacious.

Audacity today; audacity tomorrow

Slowly, through this practice, we hope to learn that no matter how audacious, neither our future nor our foolish pride will ever depend on the outcome of one act.

Yes, our actions today will go some way to moulding our tomorrow, but tomorrow will be as ripe for audacity as today ever was. Even if you totally mess up, you have the chance to choose again, and right your course.

So meet tomorrow’s audacious opportunities tomorrow, without looking past those coming ripe today.

The risk is that the alternative to audacity – anxiety – will keep us frozen in place. Do you want to keep on making the same mistakes tomorrow as you did today? That’s one definition of hell.

Far better to take an audacious step – in any direction – than to fall where you stand. Which reminds me of this maxim from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl:

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

Documentally made some excellent points, and it’s always helpful to stress-test any theory against the pangs of your conscience. But, in truth, we have no worthwhile alternative to audacity.

Before you ask: the cafe Beth audaciously plundered was in Grovelands Park in Winchmore Hill, Enfield. W3W: universally.wisely.woven.

The best things in life are audacious

The best thing that has ever happened to me, has just happened to me.

In the spirit of rejection therapy, I left the house with the intention of sitting out on the clifftops and writing my newsletter with a nice cup of tea.

What’s this got to do with rejection therapy? Well, I didn’t take any money with me.

And yet, here I am, sitting out on the clifftops, writing my newsletter with a nice cup of tea.

There was no queue at the beach kiosk, but I still had to stand and wait while the kiosk guy faffed with the bins, head down. Pop music was playing loudly from an old speaker.

I was just wondering whether I should make some customer-like noise or take this golden opportunity to run away and save my embarrassment, when the kiosk guy lifted his head.

‘What can I do for you, buddy?’

Here we go: ‘This is an absolutely outrageous request, but I’ve come out with no money – I couldn’t have a tea, could I?’

He didn’t answer, just smiled a wry smile, and went to the machine.

‘That’s so kind, thank you. If you give me a receipt, I’ll come back and pay another time.’

‘No, no. I’m not going to make a fuss over a bit of hot water and a teabag – it’s nothing.’

What a legend. I mean, he’s not wrong: a bit of hot water and a teabag is nothing. But still! He didn’t have to do that.

As I walked away, I thought to myself – actually, I said out loud to no one but the gulls, ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

Then I sat down on the clifftops and took a satisfied sip.

Do you think kiosk guy would mind if I went back and asked for one with no milk? No, no – forget it.

On audacity and entitlement

There is a fine line between audacity and entitlement. The distinction, I think, is in the emotions attached.

An audacious move expects rejection. As a result, rejection doesn’t lead to resentment, and acceptance gives you such a buzz of gratitude.

Audacity, somehow, brings people closer together. If you asked me right now, I’d probably give that kiosk guy my spare kidney.

Entitlement, by contrast, leaves both sides cold. Entitlement expects acceptance – or at least acquiescence. The entitled feel no such buzz of gratitude – because they’re only getting the bare minimum they reckon they’re owed by the universe.

Meanwhile, the victim of entitlement can only feel resentment that they have been plonked onto a lower station in the social hierarchy, and exploited. Were the victim to stand up against entitlement, they will face aggression, passive or explicit.

Audacity is the world as an open game of negotiation, engagement, and possibility. Entitlement, by contrast, is the world as a closed system of rules, privacy and hierarchy.

Do you dare to eat a peach?

Hot last weekend, wasn’t it?

Families were streaming to the beach in their thousands. As we pulled up to the cliffs car park, a family were relaxing in deck chairs around their camper, polishing off a barbecue lunch.

Hanging from the night before, one of our party made an audacious move: ‘Smells great, guys. Any chance you’ve got a burger going spare?’

Of course they have. The materfamilias takes delight in splitting a roll and filling it with charred meat and oleaginous relish: but who would dare ask? Who would squeeze the universe into a ball, to roll it toward some overwhelming question?

Do you dare to eat a peach?

Rebellion begins with audacity

Clearly, a burger and a cup of tea are pretty small fry. But you can’t begin by asking for the earth. Not even when you are asking for the earth.

Extinction Rebellion didn’t begin with a blockade of London. I imagine it began the same way as the US civil rights movement, the South African rebellion against Apartheid, the revolution in Egypt, and the English Civil War: with an invitation to a meeting in a small room in a flat.

But the modesty of that first meeting doesn’t mask the audacity of the agenda.

Rebellions begin with audacity. In fact, all change – large and small, public and personal – begins with audacity: the audacity to imagine an alternative.

Asking your future partner out for a coffee for the first time. Negotiating for a job, or a raise. Dropping everything to travel overland to Australia – or buying a £550 Nissan Micra to drive to Siberia (never mind that the interior is carpeted entirely in greengrocer’s astroturf). Replacing commercial advertising billboards with more honest messages. Typing the first words into an empty script.

They say that the best things in life are free; I wouldn’t argue with that. But I think it’s more accurate to say that the best things in life are audacious.

Training audacity

My audacity at the kiosk was contrived: I knew before I left the flat that I was going to ask for a free tea. I could instead have come out with my wallet and paid for a tea that I can easily afford.

Other people don’t have it so easy. Do you think the kiosk guy would’ve been so generous to a dishevelled man who carries all his worldly goods in two stuffed plastic bags? Maybe, maybe not.

But this was never a test of my privilege. This was a test of my mettle, training my audacity for greater challenges ahead.

By asking for a tea that I didn’t really need, I tested my courage to engage and negotiate so that when I do really need audacity, I have reserves of confidence to call upon.

There are three stages to a rejection therapy challenge:

  1. Aim for rejection. Expect the answer ‘no’, but ask anyway. Don’t worry that the challenge isn’t big or clever enough – if you think you’ll be rejected, that’s plenty big and clever.
  2. Failure is success. You’ve found your limits – for now. Try the same challenge again, with different people, and different approaches.
  3. Success is failure. A cup of tea – as the kiosk guy pointed out – is nothing. Next time, be bolder, push yourself further.

Above all, if other people are involved, be charming. Smile. Be frank about the fact you’re asking something ridiculous and weird. Have a laugh about it and you might just find yourself a co-conspirator.

And when you are rejected – congratulations! – smile again, say thank you, and walk away with the deep satisfaction that you’ve pushed against your horizon of audacity, and – for now – found its limit.

What about you? Is this concept of audacity useful? How could you be more audacious right now?

By the way, the smug photo of me with my free tea was taken by an Iranian MBA student I met on the clifftops.

As well as my wallet, I came out without my camera, so I walked up to this woman and asked if she could take one on her phone and email it to me.

She took four.

She was the third person I asked.

Get shit for free

Something remarkable happened to me a few weeks ago. Thanks to the resourcefulness and generosity of my friend and spirit guide Documentally, a rather exclusive, high-end and indeed Swiss tech company sent me their new Punkt MP02 phone. For free. No strings attached.

I’ve written elsewhere about how everything is free, but I’ve never had the gumption to straight up ask people to send me stuff. But The Swiss Phone Incident has inspired me: never again will I spend significant sums of moolah, until I’ve first tried to get it (or do it) for nothing.

Of course, nothing is for nothing. I doubt Punkt would have sent me a free phone if I didn’t have some record (however modest) of writing about stuff on the internet.

The Swiss Phone Incident has made me realise that, although writing isn’t a terribly well-paid job, it does open up opportunities to supplement one’s income.

For example, some friends recently invited me to Love Trails, a running festival in Wales that sounded right up my alley – if it wasn’t for the £130+ price tag. So, in the after-glow of The Swiss Phone Incident, I emailed the organisers suggesting that I give a talk in exchange for a free ticket and travel expenses.

To my enduring surprise (I still think it was all a dream), they said yes. What’s great about this – aside from saving well over £130 – is that instead of merely going to the festival, I am the festival – or part of it, at least. My experience of Love Trails will be all the greater for not spending money on a ticket.

I have found this again and again: spending money is the simplest, but also the lowest impact way of acquiring a thing or an experience.

Hitch-hiking will always be more latent with possibility than buying a plane ticket. Skipping food from bins is so much more fraught with surprise and reward than is shopping at Lidl. Sharing tools and swapping skills with your neighbours opens up futures that are sullied by contracts and cash.

By spending a little time figuring out how we might get shit for free, we not only save money, but also become more engaged with the people and planet around us, learn new skills or practise old ones, and – above all – have more interesting stories to tell of our lives.

Digital minimalism is a niche topic, and I doubt many people can afford to spend £300 for a phone that doesn’t even take photos – but I hope that The Swiss Phone Incident inspires you to look for opportunities where you can spend a little less and live a little more.

For those of you who are interested in what I think of the Punkt MP02, the review is here.

Punkt MP02 First Look Review

Technology is a funny old bird.

We get sold on a particular feature – like the ability to make social phone calls to friends and family – but find ourselves quickly overwhelmed by myriad extraneous features that distract us from our intentions.

This is where the Punkt MP02 feature phone intervenes: adding a step between my sociable intentions and the pernicious distractions of my ‘smart’ devices.

Note: Punkt sent me this MP02 gratis. Of course, it’s lovely to receive such a kind gift, and you would be forgiven for being suspicious about this the honesty of this review. But please suspend your doubt – as you will see, I’m far too reliant on connectivity to tolerate a device that doesn’t work properly!

The Punkt MP02 as a minimum viable technology

I’ve written before about using the minimum viable technology for a task, and the Punkt MP02 fits perfectly into my buffet of devices.

The MP02 does only two things really well:

  1. Phone calls.
  2. 4G tethering.

It does a few other things, like messaging and note-taking, but it doesn’t do them very well. These features are more for emergencies than day-to-day use.

Using the Punkt MP02 in combination with my laptop and my smartphone, I can still take part in extraneous ‘connected’ activities, without turning them into reflex habits.

But, best of all, the Punkt and I now prioritise phone calls.

Has the Punkt changed my behaviour?

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, or, as the saying goes, in the device use statistics.

With the Punkt in my digital arsenal, I’ve averaged only 15 minutes a day on my smartphone. For comparison, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the week immediately pre-Punkt was around 60 minutes per day.

Looking back over the longer term, my average smartphone use – excluding phone calls – in the last two months has been about 45 minutes a day – and that’s with a conscious effort to reduce my smartphone usage after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

It seems that, with the Punkt, I could be saving 30-45 minutes a day, a remarkable return for the device thus far.

I have also made more phone calls to friends and family with the Punkt than I used to with the smartphone. In my first week with the Punkt, I made 5 ‘social’ phone calls for a total duration of 110 minutes, averaging about 22 minutes each.

In comparison, over the preceding six weeks, I made 9 similarly social calls on my smartphone, lasting a total of 180 minutes. On average, that makes only 2 calls every week.

These smartphone calls were still around 20 minutes each, which reassures me that I’m comparing apples with apples, but with the Punkt, it seems as if I’m more than twice as likely to pick up the phone and call friends and family. Brilliant.

This might, of course, be down to novelty. It’ll be interesting to see whether I continue to spend significantly less time on my smartphone, as the unnecessary habit degrades, or whether instead I begin to crave the convenience of the ‘smart’ features I do use.

Which brings me on to…

Do I still need a smartphone?

There are several features for which I know I will still use my smartphone.

  1. Maps. Connectivity is not necessary: I have downloaded maps for offline use.
  2. Camera. Wifi will be needed to transfer these from phone to computer.
  3. Whatsapp messaging. I prefer to use my computer for the actual sending of messages, but this is only possible with a ‘smart’ connection as well.
  4. Strava tracking for bike rides.
  5. Banking apps. Not strictly necessary, but I can’t be the only person who finds the mobile apps easier to use than the web equivalents.

As you can tell, none of these activities are urgent. I could survive without any of them. Does that mean I will get rid of my smartphone? No.

My smartphone is still, for better or worse, the minimum viable technology for that grab bag of low-priority, but still useful features.

I’m not going to buy a dedicated camera because I hardly ever take photos. Photography isn’t a priority for me. Likewise, I’m unlikely to buy a Garmin GPS for my bike: they’re expensive and I’m not massively into following pre-planned routes.

It remains to be seen whether the Punkt MP02 has turned the smartphone into one useful tool among many, rather than one dominant tool to rule them all (and me) – but that is the hope.

Pros, Not bothereds, Cons and a Wishlist

With the psychological and practical aspects of the review dealt with, let’s look at the phone in more detail. What works, what I don’t care about, what doesn’t work, and what could work.

Pros (for me)

  • The phone works as a phone – hallelujah! This is huge.
  • Tethering works as well as with my old smartphone (after help from the excellent customer support team). This is also huge.
  • Excellent customer support, fortunately, because the phone needs it. It can’t be easy designing and launching an entirely new genus of phone, and early adopters need support.
  • Beautifully designed and feels good in my hand. I’ve dropped it a couple of times already and it seems robust.
  • BlackBerry security. Hopefully this means that my phone can’t be hacked. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what this means in practice: presumably the protection doesn’t extend to tethered devices. I’ve written before about the leaky nature of mobile phones, and how this data is big business. It feels good to own a device that, for once, puts my privacy first.

Not bothereds (for me)

  • For a simple phone, there’s quite a going on. I can connect to other devices using Bluetooth, WiFi and a USB connection. I genuinely have no idea why the phone has GPS.
  • There are a panoply of other unobtrusive features, including messaging, calculator, calendar, alarm, world clock, stopwatch, timer, and notes with timed reminders (including recurring reminders). They all seem to work well, but I doubt I’ll use any of them much.
  • The messaging system can display emoticons and QR codes. Wowzas.

Cons (for me)

UPDATE: Punkt are currently manufacturing an update to the MP02 which will be available in July 2019. Hopefully many of the bugs listed below will be fixed – and they have kindly offered me an exchange. As I said earlier, the customer service is excellent.

You can read my updated review here.

This is quite a long list, so I’ve bolded the cons that have a significant negative impact on my day-to-day use.

  • Limited battery life. The Punkt’s battery life is currently only about a day of light to moderate use. A couple of phone calls, a couple of hours’ hotspotting, and it’s dead. Even on standby, the battery drains remarkably quickly. Overnight, on aeroplane mode, I lost 15%. Frankly, compared to other feature phones, it’s feeble – and very nearly a deal breaker. Luckily, Punkt’s engineers are working on a solution and hope to release another firmware update in June. Watch this space…
  • I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises (key-pad tones, lock and unlock tones, etc.). For a phone that sells itself on discretion, this seems very odd. The excellent customer service people don’t appear to have a solution either. What this means is that, for the sake of my sanity, I have to have the phone on silent all the time. It does vibrate, however, so I usually hear something buzz when someone calls.
  • The ringtones might be ‘the work of respected Norwegian sound artist Kjetil Røst Nilsen’, but in my humble opinion, they are all a bit weird. It’s not possible to upload my own, although they do say this might be a feature for a future update.
  • Likewise, I can’t change the alarm noise, which is unfortunate because it sounds like I’m under attack from quite a raucous seagull. Not the most relaxing way to wake up.
  • The earphones aren’t very good quality and only come with one earpiece. They are USB-C, though, so I could buy a new set, I guess.
  • You can programme shortcuts, which is handy. This would be a pro, but isn’t very well done so becomes a con, I’m afraid. The options are fairly limited and the execution isn’t always as clear as it could be. I set a shortcut to turn on tethering, but there is no notification that the shortcut has executed successfully, and I can’t set a shortcut to turn tethering off.
  • The power source is USB-C, so I can’t share chargers with most of the rest of the world yet, and heaven help me if I lose this one cable before I get a chance to buy a backup. A bit harsh to make this a con, but there we go.
  • I’ve also run into quite a few glitches:
    • I’ve experienced a few (5) dropped calls. It’s hard to say whether these were down to the Punkt or the caller’s phone. I’ll keep an eye/ear on it.
    • I had to restart after the home screen stopped working.
    • The notifications don’t always behave as they should.
    • The home screen clock takes a few seconds to update. (This bug seems to come and go.)
    • USB tethering only worked once and never again. Shame, because it could be a useful feature to keep the phone charged while using the battery-intensive hotspot.

Wishlist (for me)

  • I would love a voice note feature so that I could record notes to myself, rather than type them out, tortuously, on the predictive keypad.
  • A torch would be handy.

The Bottom Line

For me, at the moment, the Punkt MP02 just about crosses the line. After a week’s testing, I will definitely keep the Punkt in my pocket.

The annoying ring tones, the various glitches, and the more significant issue with the battery life, are still not enough to outweigh the importance of untethering myself from my smartphone.

I need a phone that keeps me in contact with friends and family, without distracting me from the way I want to spend my time. The miraculous little Punkt MP02 helps me do that.

If I were grading the phone as a whole, however, I couldn’t give it more than a B-Minus. Everything about the Punkt screams Premium – but I’d be a bit gutted if I’d shelled out the £300 asking price for a dumbphone that scarcely lasts a day, and does some pretty annoying things.

If they can sort out the myriad glitches, and significantly improve the battery life with the next firmware update, then we’ll be talking about a phone that delivers not only on the promise of digital minimalism, but also on the premium price point.

But the real test for me will be whether I decide to take the Punkt MP02 when I go travelling this summer.

When I’m out of the country, my reliance on the web increases. I’m much more likely to want to connect to look up places to go. I’m much more likely to stay in communication with friends and family over email and Whatsapp, and I’m much more likely to be away from my computer and a fixed WiFi connection.

Finally, space and weight are a consideration and, although the Punkt is small and light, every inch and every gramme counts when I’m travelling. The fact that I have no other devices that charge from a USB-C is another slight point against the Punkt.

So the Punkt has 3 months to prove itself indispensable!

Thanks a mill to Punkt for sending me this MP02, and thanks to their customer service team for helping me get it up and running. Thanks also to @documentally for putting me in touch with Punkt in the first place.

Happy Bicycle Day!

Today might be Good Friday, but it’s also Bicycle Day – the celebration of the first deliberate acid trip.

On 19 April 1943, intrigued by ‘a peculiar presentiment’ and ‘excercising extreme caution’, chemist Albert Hofmann ingested 0.25 mg of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate – ‘the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect’. Or so he thought.

Hofmann recorded the details of his experiment in that day’s lab journal:

4/19/43
16:20: 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = 0.25 mg tartrate. Taken diluted with about 10 cc water. Tasteless.
17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh. Supplement of 4/21: Home by bicycle.

What followed was a remarkable descent into horror and beauty, confronting demons and angels, and finally an experience of death and rebirth. 0.25mg of LSD, it turned out, was a pretty big dose.

The next day, Hofmann writes:

A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure. When I later walked out into the garden, in which the sun shone now after a spring rain, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.

For more about the discovery of this remarkable compound, read Hofmann’s autobiography, LSD – My Problem Child, available online, for free. The story of his first self-experiment begins on page 11.

Happy Bicycle Day!

Empathy, society, and a nice cup of tea…

I never drank tea until I went to China when I was 18. There, I had no option. Green tea was served by default at all meals, and there was always a flask by your bedside in guesthouses and hotels.

Ubiquitous doesn’t really do full justice to the omnipresence of tea in China. Although the Chinese only drink something more than a quarter of the quantity that we do in Britain, they are by far and away the largest producers of the precious plant, responsible for a third of global production.

Only after my visit did I fully comprehend the staggering contempt implied by the saying, ‘Not for all the tea in China’.

Clearly not tea, but some sort of paddy field in Yangshuo County, China. As seen from behind a Fujifilm camera in 2001.

My Chinese education explains why I take my tea with neither milk nor sugar.

I dread to imagine the state of my teeth had I starting drinking tea just a few weeks before, when I was in Egypt. In the Nile Valley, the default is tiny glasses of black tea filled halfway with white sugar and, perhaps, a sprig of mint.

It’s got more in common with a Magnum ice cream than the restorative brew I found in China.

I digress.

The point is that, since 2001, I have rarely been without tea. Often green, occasionally black if I need the astringent caffeine hit.

Just as often, though, I’ll have what the French would call a tisane, or what the more pretentious English would call a herbal infusion – a redbush, a chamomile, a peppermint, or some other preparation of dried organic matter.

For me, the point is not the caffeine or even the flavour, but the psychological comfort of having something to do with my hands (behave yourself) between essays at the keyboard.

In days past, writers smoked cigarettes, cigars or cigarillos; many still use alcohol. I used to chew gum and eat biscuits. But tea, I find, offers something else.

Bob Dylan: listlessly creative with a pot of tea (milk, sugar). SOURCE: Famous People Drinking Tea

I’m preaching to the choir, of course. All of my friends, bar one, drink tea in copious quantities. So why bring this up today?

Last weekend, after a day spent working on Foiled, Beth and I went dancing. On the way home, I can’t remember why, Beth was holding forth on the subject of morning tea.

She told me that, whenever she stays over at her parents’ place, her mum creeps up to her room in the morning with a fresh brew. She knocks softly on Beth’s door, lays the tea (milk, no sugar) down on her bedside table, and gently whispers: ‘There’s a tea there if you want it.’

Her mum does this all so lightly that there’s no chance of Beth waking from a deep sleep, but if she’s already drifting to the surface of consciousness, then – lo and behold – the greatest start to a morning imaginable.

How to prepare the perfect morning cuppa, according to the first page, no less, of The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

This vignette led to a discussion on the role of empathy in relationships.

The Golden Rule exhorts us to treat others as we would wish ourselves to be treated. It’s good enough so far as it goes, but in my opinion the Golden Rule does not go even nearly far enough.

Most of us, let’s be honest, treat ourselves like shit. We have such a low opinion of ourselves, that we would never in our wildest dreams imagine anyone else would ever make us a cup of tea in the morning.

If we were to follow the mere Golden Rule for our behaviour, we would likewise never think of making a morning tea for anyone else. And – lo and behold – this is how many relationships pan out.

Yesterday, the same topic came up with another friend – let’s call her Ariadne for no reason whatsoever – who lives with a couple. Ariadne told me how annoyed she was that the boyfriend would never make a morning cuppa for his girlfriend.

‘He’s up at the same time as me. I’m always in a rush; he never is. And yet he never makes her a cup of tea; I do.’

Sometimes Ariadne brings the girlfriend tea when the boyfriend is in bed kissing her goodbye. ‘You’re just shit-stirring now,’ he says.

And of course she is. But if he swallowed his pride for one second and saw how happy that morning tea made his girlfriend, then he’d see that the cognitive cost of doing something for someone else is, quelle horreur!, outweighed a hundred times over by the closer relationships we earn.

Science has shown this. Give someone a warm drink and they feel more warmly towards you – and not just metaphorically:

participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring)
Source // Guardian write-up

We need a new rule. Perhaps we can baptise it the Astatine Rule, after the rarest naturally-occurring element on earth.

The Astatine Rule says that we should treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated in our wildest fantasies of existence (behave yourself!).

This second part is crucial: unless your life has been an endless waterfall of rainbows and unicorns then there is no point merely repeating the behaviour you’ve learnt thus far.

Imagining a peak existence (or anything) greater than you’ve ever experienced is really hard; that’s why relationships all too often settle down to baseline.

We need inspiration more extraordinarily creative to set our empathic imaginations free and kick start a virtuous cycle of kindness (and cups of tea). Stories help.

The morning after our dance, I woke up before Beth. I crept into the kitchen, past where she was sleeping in the living room, and put the kettle on the hob. I caught the boil just before it whistled, loaded up her mug with black tea and milk, and stirred until it was the colour of caramel chocolate.

Then I tiptoed into the living room and laid the mug down by her bedside. ‘There’s a tea there if you want it,’ I whispered.

Small is Sociable London to Bristol

I am reaching the end of my winter sojourn in Bristol. I have been here, more or less, since October last year, and next week is my last.

Since leaving London permanently at the end of 2017, I have learned one thing beyond doubt: my local habitat plays an incalculably important role in the things I do, the people I see, and how I feel day to day.

Let me begin this piece by saying that I have enjoyed spectacularly wonderful days in London, and look forward to many more in the coming years. I particularly cherish the cacophonous abundance of nations and cultures, and the lush green patchwork of parks and gardens.

However, the accusation often levelled at London, particularly by outsiders who have never lived there, is that it is ‘too big’. After 16 years in the Big Smoke, I think I am at least qualified to agree.

Of course, many people live extraordinary lives of joy and connection in London and have no trouble bounding over its sprawling morass, or simply confining themselves to a more manageable slice of the metropolis.

I was not one of them. And, after a year apart from the old mistress, I think I understand why.

The truth isn’t earth-shattering; in fact, it’s pretty obvious if you’ve ever spent any time as a human being. In a smaller conurbation, it’s easier to be sociable and that sociability is what makes me happy.

Nowhere worth going in Bristol is more than about 20 minutes by bike from my house. The compact nature of the city has two effects on the population, each reinforced by the other, which I reckon result in a more sociable society.

In Bristol, I know that whomsoever I meet, and wherever I meet them, there’s a decent chance that they’ll live within about 20 minutes’ bike ride of my house. And this makes it likely that I’ll meet them again, either by chance or by appointment.

This likelihood has two consequences. Firstly, I’m less likely to be a dick to strangers because, chances are, our paths will cross either personally or through presently unknown mutual friends. Secondly, I’m more likely to actually meet up with people I do hit it off with, simply because it’s easy.

The second effect of smaller city size is that no one here has a commute time of more than 20 minutes – at least in theory.

Commute time is famously correlated with positive affect, or happiness. If you’re commuting for more than an hour a day, then you’re likely to be miserable. Or at least more tired and less likely to want to meet friends – old or new.

The converse is true. In a city like Bristol where commute times are short, people are more likely to go out after work to socialise and they’re less likely to want to stay in bed all weekend just recovering from work.

As a consequence, they’re more likely to have hobbies, be members of a club, or just have a local drinking haunt.

And what does that mean? You’re more likely to bump into them out and about, you’re both more likely to be feeling positive and open to new encounters, and, thanks to the size of the city, also more likely to meet up again.

In a city with an enormous population, people just don’t matter so much. You’re vanishingly likely to bump into the same stranger twice. When you spot a friend on the tube, you both react like you’ve won a million quid on the lottery.

(In fact, your chances of winning a million quid on the lottery are better. Assuming you only have one friend.)

If you’re confident that you’ll never see Joe Bloggs again, you’re hardly likely to be bursting with social bon homie – or even goddam polite, are you?

I speak primarily for myself, but that’s why we Londoners walk around with our eyes downcast, hidden behind sunglasses, or buried in newspapers and smartphones. What’s the point? Strangers aren’t important because they’re just one in ten million, all too often mere obstacles to circumnavigate on our way through the chaotic city.

In smaller towns, people are more precious. There are still 460,000 people here in Bristol, still plenty of personalities to mesh or clash with, but each one has a distinct value. I’ve bumped into countless people I know here. It happens most days I leave the house – and I’ve only been here for 4 months, remember.

Every interaction here carries higher stakes: we are both on something like our best behaviour because we both know that the social network will, more or less, hold us to account – even if we don’t get on personally.

Of course this close community has its downsides. London’s anonymity is not without its pleasures. You can do anything, be anyone, and reinvent yourself every other Tuesday if you please. But, for me, this luxury is not worth the price I pay in social isolation.

~

Talking of social isolation: here’s an interview with loneliness researcher John Cacioppo.
Talking of leaving London: apparently I’m not the only one.

Digital Minimalism Tech tips from Cal Newport

Not using computers for one day a week is fine as far as it goes, but it can’t go particularly far when you earn your crust within the confines of the information economy.

So what are we to do the other 6 days a week?

After devouring the excellent Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I’ve been flush with ideas.

I’ve written before about what I call minimum viable technology, but Cal puts it nicely:

‘The power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.’

I found Cal’s most effective recommendation was using an app called Freedom to set boundaries on the multi-tasking powers of my technology.

With Freedom I can set an automated schedule of when I’m able to check email and Whatsapp, the two major distractions from focused time in my life.

Rather than slavishly checking for superficial social interactions every five or twenty minutes, I can corral those messages into fenced-off playgrounds of digital distraction. But the playground is only open for an hour in the afternoon.

The app works across devices as well. Using Freedom I can turn my smartphone in to a single-use dumb phone at the touch of a button. I can even have the smartphone capabilities turned off by default.

The feeling is indeed one of liberation; no wonder the app is called Freedom.

If you have any sense that your devices are distracting you from the deep work that you value, I urge you to give Freedom a whirl. It is free to try, but a year’s subscription is only £13 if you use the code FOCUS40.

5 Ideas from Digital Minimalism

1. Swap phones.

When you’re with a friend, swap phones so neither of you can be lured away to the dreaded ‘third place’. Your phones are still there in an emergency, but the embarrassment of asking for your device just so that you can crush some candy will be too much.

2. Spend time alone.

Solitude is vital to our emotional balance and too little time alone leaves us feeling anxious. Finding solitude doesn’t mean ship-wrecking yourself on a desert island; you can find solitude in a busy coffee shop. Solitude is simply time spent without input from other minds. Leave your phone at home. Take a long walk. Write.

3. Use digital to facilitate real world comms.

Social media, email and messaging is not an adequate replacement for social interaction, but our brains can be fooled into thinking it is. Set up a meeting on the phone or in person.

4. Hold conversation office hours.

Tell your friends and family that you’re always free to speak on the phone at X o’clock – and be available at that time. When someone ‘pings’ you a text message or email, invite them to call you at X o’clock any day of the week. Alternatively, set up a regular time for taking coffee or a walk and invite anyone and everyone to drop by.

5. Prioritise strenuous leisure activities over passive consumption.

Activity gives you more energy, not less. When you’re tired, simply switch task. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. Become ‘handy’. Join or set up a club, community group or meeting.

No Computers And my new favourite day of the week

I have a new favourite day of the week. It’s the day that I don’t use my computer.

To be fair, it’s only been two weeks now, but still. On my first day of No Computers I went for a long bike ride with friends, and then spent the evening reading and listening to the radio.

Last week I went for a long walk before eating my bodyweight in falafel and falling sound asleep. Tomorrow, I’m going to a day-long conference on the brain with my dad.

No wonder I look forward to these days!

But what’s No Computers got to do with it? Couldn’t I have a great day while still allowing access to those gleaming bits and bytes?

I suspect not, and my results over the last fortnight seem to concur. With my computer by my side, I find it hard to switch off – literally.

My humble Acer is a gateway poison: the one keystone habit that supports (what feels like) all the stress in my life.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I am able to work at any time and from anywhere. Thanks to the wonders of late stage capitalism, it feels like I always should be.

Remove the keystone, however, and the arch comes tumbling down. Sorry, but I can’t log on, I can’t publish, I can’t reply to your email. I am not available.

It’s not like I’m bereft of technology on my No Computer days. I can use anything else from my panoply of devices:

  • My smartphone for internet, email, messaging, music, radio, camera, podcasts, maps and yoga.
  • My digital radio and MP3 player for auditory entertainment, and my speaker system for amplification.
  • My Neo typewriter for distraction-free writing.
  • My GPS watch for tracking my runs.
  • My stop watch timer for meditation, saunas and HIIT exercise.
  • My clock, thermometer and hygrometer for tuning in.

As you can see, it’s not like I’m limited in what I could do. But the tool selection changes everything.

I really don’t like responding to email on my phone, except really short replies, and I don’t like browsing the web on my phone, except really simple, factual searches.

Without preventing me from addressing anything that’s really urgent, the tool selection gently pushes me into doing other things, like getting out of the house, listening to music, or reading a book.

I can still do the type of work that really nourishes me, like writing and thinking, but I can’t do work that’s draining, or straight-up unproductive.

No Computers has been such a relief that I’d like to expand it to two days a week. Older readers might remember these kind of regular breaks – they used to be called ‘weekends’.

I’d like to end by quoting from a long article I read this week that’s consonant with these ideas: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen.

We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.

Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

Switch off.

The day after Valentine’s

If the day after Christmas is nicknamed ‘Boxing’ and the Friday before Easter is supposedly ‘Good’, then what shall we call the day after Saint Valentine’s?

Love is something of an empty word, in that it means so many different things to different people with no one agreeing on much aside from its intrinsic value.

It’s the perfect hook for a marketing campaign.

Even the local British Heart Foundation are leveraging the season to hoick donations from people looking to advertise their love in the shop window on Gloucester Road.

But what I never hear about is the relationship between love and ambition. Bear with me.

You can’t love someone unless you truly love yourself.

Not only do I disagree with this card filler, but I actually think it is much easier to love someone else than to love yourself.

Do you love yourself? I don’t. Quite a surprising revelation if you’ve never properly entertained the question.

It doesn’t mean that I loathe myself, but I don’t love myself as much as I love other people in this world.

Think of how you feel when a loved one walks into the room.

If you’re anything like me, then you’re absolutely THRILLED. Your face lights up and you feel a ripple of excitement about how the next ten minutes are going to play out.

That is not the feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. ‘Ooh, look – I’m ME again!’

No. My first thought on regaining conscious control of my higher faculties is more along the lines of: ‘Ugh. How can it be morning again already?’

If you do react with unalloyed delight every time you realise that you’re inhabiting your own skull, then all credit to you. That must be a pretty special place to be (if a little disturbing for the rest of us).

The people I love, I love unconditionally. If there’s one thing about love that we all agree on, aside from its enormous marketing potential, it’s that it should be unconditional.

No matter what your loved ones do, you’ll always give them the benefit of the doubt, you’ll always support them, you’ll always think that what they’re doing is awesome and deserves to triumph.

But hold on. Always?

Actually, no. On serious mathematical reflection, I estimate that I unconditionally love my loved ones about 95% of the time (and yes I am aware of the contradiction in that sentence).

But 95% of the time is still pretty amazing, and sufficient that we all use the shorthand ‘love’ to account for such madness.

Madnesses:

  • You wildly exaggerate their positive qualities. In particular, you overestimate their intelligence, sense of humour, beauty and profundity.
  • Pretty much all the time, you can’t see their faults. When unambiguously confronted with their faults, they’re charming – or at least off-set by the fact that they own a Lexus.
  • You unfailingly interpret their intentions as good, even when bad things happen. Again and again.
  • You talk them up to others, who may or may not roll their eyes.
  • You feel completely comfortable around them (this might be a good test for whether a feeling is love or infatuation).
  • You are astonishingly patient with them. So patient are you that you can bear to live with them in the same house. Sometimes even the same room or – in exceptional circumstances – a two-man tent.
  • You are proud of what you see as their stunning achievements. Maybe not always in their presence because no one likes a braggart, but if anyone challenges them on their stunning triumphs, you’ll knock them out.
  • You do shit for them that no one in their right mind would do for another person. You find yourself doing things that you’ve never done for anyone ever before. Like their laundry.
  • You want to be close to them, physically. You miss them when they’re gone. Sometimes this hurts, physically.
  • You believe in their dreams and are pretty confident they’ll get there, unless the universe conspires cruelly against them.

Based on this list, I reckon that I ‘unconditionally’ love myself about 30% of the time.

I definitely overplay my strengths and I’m as susceptible as anyone to the cognitive bias that makes me overlook and excuse my own faults.

I don’t, however, own a Lexus.

I also give myself a much harder time than I do the people I love. I’m less likely to cut myself some slack, trust my good intentions, or even recognise, let alone be proud of my triumphs.

However, where I think our struggle to love ourselves harms us most is in the arena of ambition, life goals or dreams, as you prefer. After all, these are the momentous things that end up changing the world.

It scares me to think of all the dreams and glorious futures that go unrealised because no one ever thought that they were worth believing in. That belief comes from love. It’s called the astronaut test.

The Astronaut Test

Someone comes to you and says: ‘One day, I’m going to become an astronaut.’

If that person is just another Joe, then you’ll say, ‘Really? That’s great. Good luck.’ And in your head you’re probably thinking, ‘As if!’

If that person is someone you love, however, then you’ll probably say something like, ‘YES YOU ARE. THAT SHIT IS AWESOME.’ And give them a massive hug.

In your head, you’re probably thinking, ‘Fucking hell, that’s amazing! I love this human!’

Further back in your head, you might also dimly recall that the last time they got on a plane they had to be stretchered off while it was still on the runway because ‘It was a little bit high up’ – but overcoming such adversity only goes to show how incredible they are.

Now. Which of those two reactions do you show yourself whenever you dream big?

If you’re anything like me, it’s hands-down the first – to such an extent that I mostly keep my dreams buried deep down in the mudflats of my heart where no one can see them, least of all myself.

That seems like a bit of a shame. It’d be cool to get my love-of-self up to more like 50% unconditional and see whether there’s a corresponding rise in ambition.

The Day After Valentine’s Day

This is where we come back to that silly homily: You can’t love someone unless you truly love yourself.

But if it’s easier for me to love another than it is to love myself, then I’d bet it works the other way around too. (Standard exclusions apply.)

Valentine’s Day is all about showing our love to others – and I’m all in favour of that. But today I’d like to dedicate to ourselves.

What dreams and ambitions could we discover and realise if we all took February 15 to recognise and actually acknowledge the love-of-ourselves in the eyes of someone else?

Is there a Saint Narcissus*?

Thanks to the PTA for conversations leading to this. Love ya!

* Narcissus would be a totally inappropriate patron saint of love-of-ourselves. Narcissus was actively disdainful of the love people showed him: the exact opposite of what I want to encourage. But I really needed a flippant sign-off to this post. Sorry.

Tame the Mane

After last week’s missive on rejection, this week I’ve dabbled in a little rejection therapy. I can’t tell you the story of what I tried on Wednesday, but I can describe what happened when I took rejection out for a spin yesterday.

Picture the scene…

Drenched on the aptly named Fishponds Road, I walk out of the rain and into a hair salon. A lone woman sits in an armchair (I can already see that it’s a special kind of salon), footling with her phone.

‘Hi there. I’ve got a bit of a strange request.’
Oh god. That sounds like I’m going to ask for a lumbar massage.
‘Well, it’s not that strange. I’ll explain. I’m a comedy writer and – ‘
Confused looks. Legitimise, legitimise!
‘It’s for the BBC.’
Back on track.
‘It’s a sitcom set in a hair salon and I like to come into salons and, you know, soak up the atmosphere.’
What am I saying? Who, you know, knows that?
‘Would you mind if I sat here for fifteen minutes, if you’re not busy – or you can get on with what your doing, I can sit in the corner while you…’

This is a definite no.

She puts her phone down: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

I’ve caught Lara at a good moment. She’s got 15 minutes before her next client – an unusual occurrence at Tame The Mane, the only all-vegan, all-natural hair salon in the UK.

Teaching English to Libyan teenagers divided by Gaddafi’s Little Green Book, Lara dreamt of escaping that dead-end and running her own business. She spent 3 years writing up a business plan to set up a cafe, before her little brother had the temerity to suggest she open a salon.

Temerity because Lara hates hairdressers and, even more so, salons. She couldn’t sleep for three nights after her brother’s infuriating suggestion.

But the barb had lodged.

‘I’ve loved hairdressing since I was five or six. I used to beg my grandmother to do her hair. Every Sunday night: Can I do your hair, can I do your hair?’

As a teenager, Lara learnt hairdressing from an Italian woman and cutting hair became a great sideline for cash right through her English degree and even while she was teaching.

Then she realised that maybe her brother had a point: she couldn’t be the only one who hated your typical salons.

Sometimes we struggle to see what was right in front of us all along.

Tame The Mane looks more like a stylish living room than a styling salon. Potted plants crawl along any available surface. The walls are decorated with portraits of colourful women – not crass posed photographs, but original oils and pastels.

Lara wanted to create an anti-salon atmosphere and thought that her all-vegan, all-natural approach would draw in an exclusively (and quite possibly penniless) hippie clientele.

There’s a record player (‘Can’t play records, though, because of all the hair – didn’t think that one through’) and a bookcase where she does book swaps.

But she was far wrong about the hippies.

The mirrors are covered with scarfs, and Lara will only remove them if a client asks. So she gets a lot of clients who suffer from anxiety in other salons. ‘I get people who haven’t set foot in a salon for years.’

(Plus it’s weird, huh, having someone watch your every move while you do your job. I hate people looking over my shoulder when I write.)

Lara passes me what looks like a laminated menu. It’s a lucid explanation about why she only uses natural products, about how the salon business is so often built on convincing customers to put crap in their hair.

She offers suggestions about how we can reduce our reliance on products that aren’t all that different to Fairy Liquid, from diluting harsh shampoos to simply using a squeeze of lemon juice.

The back of the ‘menu’ has two recipes for Lara’s products: an oat conditioner and a flax gel. They sound delicious. There are more on her blog, free for you to create for yourself. If you don’t have the time, Lara’s got her own apothecary out the back.

With a mischievous smile she suggests that, if you want a protein-enriched wash, you should really just crack an egg on your head (although not in her vegan salon). It strengthens the hair, and gives a really nice shine, she says.

As an English graduate, Lara often dreams of writing her salon stories up. I’m lucky to have the chance to turn lives like hers into, well, this. And who knows what snippets from our conversation might turn up in Series 3 of Foiled…

I believe in Rejection!

It’s not every week that I read a book cover-to-cover in under 48 hours.

Admittedly, at only 200 pages Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang is a quick read, but I absolutely guttled those pages.

Why? Because Jiang offers a creative solution to a problem that I think almost every live human being struggles with: rejection.

This video is how I first heard about Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection experiment. It’s a good primer for what follows. Enjoy.

Dave’s Short History of Rejection

My history of rejection is short not because my life has been an endless cavalcade of glorious successes, but because, for the most part, I have gone to great lengths to avoid sticking my neck out and asking for anything, you know, worthwhile.

Example 1: Romantic Rejection

It took me until 2013 before I first told someone I really liked that I really liked them. Terrifying.

They did indeed reject my approach, but frankly by that point I didn’t care. The panic over saying anything to this person far outweighed the disappointment of the negative response by about a million to one.

This million-to-one ratio is about the same for ‘Love interests I longed to approach’ against ‘Love interests I actually approached’.

Combined with my everyday fear of social rejection, the number of missed opportunities for connection with other human beings is staggering, and all because of an egotistic, and unnecessary, fear of rejection.

Example 2: Book Rejection

For the most part, I have avoided professional rejection by not taking a profession. When I have held jobs, I have tended to do the work and then go home, not doing anything that would call attention to my work and thus invite rejection (or, indeed, approbation).

I have, however, written several books. Occasionally, I have sent the manuscripts to agents and publishers and have been rejected every single time.

I think I’ve received about 5 rejection letters in my life, ever, including the following unexpectedly expensive one.

Hilariously, this rejection letter was sent without the correct postage. I had to cycle to my local Royal Mail depot and pay £0.11 in excess postage, plus a £1.00 administration fee.

J.K. Rowling famously received 12 rejections for Harry Potter alone; William Golding got 20 for Lord of the Flies; Carrie by Stephen King garnered him 30 rejections before selling over a million copies in its first year and being turned into, not one, but three feature films, and, improbably enough, a musical.

It’s pretty easy to avoid rejection if you don’t put your work out there. I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t embraced professional rejection despite knowing full well that it is an essential part of the process.

Example 3: Rejection on the Road

Hitchhiking has taught me a lot about rejection. Standing on the side of a busy road with a smile and a sign, or walking up to strangers in service stations and begging for a lift: it’s a cold recipe for relentless rejection.

Even so, somehow I’ve always managed to get where I was going. Somehow, as Jiang says, ‘rejection has a number’ and persistence usually pays off if you’re willing to be flexible.

My least successful hitchhike involved about 3 hours of rejections – but I still got a ride (after changing my approach). How’s that for rejection? Pretty good, I’d say.

In most of the rest of my life, however, I give up after a single rejection (if I even get that far). Why is that?

Example 4: Critical Rejection

When me and Beth took Foiled to Edinburgh in 2016, we wanted to be judged. So much so that we actually paid a PR company to get critics in to review our show. We positively invited rejection.

The hefty weight of that judgement was shared between us, but it still wasn’t very nice when we got a stinking review from a well-respected critic.

I don’t think we ever seriously doubted our material, and it helped that the audiences didn’t seem to either, but the review was (and still is) there in black and white on the internet. A fulsome rejection of everything we’d worked so hard to create.

In this case, there was nothing we could do except rationalise what he had to say (it’s just one opinion, it was based on a preview, and we’d already addressed some of his criticisms) and use it as motivation to make the show the best it could be.

We didn’t shut down the PR company and tell them to invite no more critics. Thankfully, the critics kept coming and Foiled ended up with a couple of phenomenal reviews, which we could use to sell the show to producers and, ultimately, to the BBC.

Phew!

Example 5: Reader Rejection

My Friday newsletter is a weekly opportunity for people to reject me and my work. The unsubscribe button is right there at the bottom of every single email.

Even if people aren’t unsubscribing, I can still see who is opening the newsletter and reading to the end. It’s usually just under half.

After over 2 years of newsletters, I have become comfortable with the fact that some people will unsubscribe and no longer read my words of comfort and joy.

I have eventually come to see unsubscribes in a positive light. It’s not that I’ve failed them, or that they are repulsed by the very essence of my being; it’s just that we weren’t a good fit for whatever reason.

Indeed, with the unsubscribers gone, my reader percentage numbers should go up – and that’s a good thing. Seen this way, unsubscribes are a gradual honing of my audience to the shape of my work.

Notice that, unlike my approach to publishing, I have persisted at newsletter-writing, drilling through the prison walls of ‘rejection’ to the green pastures of unbounded creativity.

(Whereupon I abuse my freedom and write ridiculous sentences like the foregoing.)

The lesson is that avoiding rejection can be incredibly damaging – not in the short term, perhaps, but certainly and abundantly in the long term.

What opportunities have I passed up through fear of rejection? Could I be a published novelist by now? Could I have found the loves of my lives?

Fear of rejection is a crime of omission. If you give yourself no chance of rejection, then you also have very little chance of progress.

Tolerance of rejection is the difference between the approach and avoidant mentalities described by Carol Dweck, and these mindsets spread their influence through every domain of our lives.

If we follow the society status quo, it’s pretty easy to feel accepted. But is society perfect as it is? Is the world? Is life?

I don’t think so – as much as my gut screams at me to conform or die.

So, this year, I want to put myself into situations where I am rejected. And I want those rejections to really hurt.

Painful rejections will show me that I’m doing meaningful work, that I’m opening myself up and making myself vulnerable in the places that really matter, deep down.

And, if Jia Jiang’s experiment is anything to go by, this should be fun!

UPDATE: Comedian Emily Winter has written about her own 100 Rejections challenge for the New York Times.

In pursuit of 100 rejections, I put myself forward for opportunities I’d previously thought were for smarter, funnier, cooler people. And sometimes I wasn’t rejected. I wrote for new publications, got a joke-writing gig on my favorite comedian’s radio show and interviewed guests on my podcast who I’d thought wouldn’t waste their time on me.

Emily ended the year with 101 rejections and 39 acceptances.

[O]ur experiments weren’t a magic solution. Andy is still unattached, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck. But we’ve taken more chances and come closer to getting the things we want. So I don’t regret committing to this masochistic rejection project. It made me feel embarrassed, depressed, overwhelmed and self-indulgent. But I also felt that I was moving forward instead of standing still.

This is not the only Universe

In 17th century Europe, ‘a black swan’ was a by-word for an impossibility. But it took only a single observation of such swans in Australia to undo the presumption forever.

Today, Black Swan theory uses the metaphor to describe any argument or system of thought that can be undone at a single stroke

A psychedelic experience has the potential to be a Black Swan event for the individual.

Brain scans of individuals high on the drug revealed that the chemical allows parts of the cortex to become flooded with signals that are normally filtered out to prevent information overload.

Study shows how LSD interferes with brain’s signalling (The Guardian)

By ‘switching off’ the filtering mechanism of the thalamus, psychedelic compounds can, at a single stroke, help us overturn entire systems of thought that we once presumed not only true for us, but ‘real’ and inviolable.

This might explain the seemingly paradoxical subjective effects often reported in psychedelic-induced altered states of consciousness that are characterized by increased arousal as well as a dreamlike experience, impaired cognition but at the same time reported perceived mental clarity, and psychosis-like effects combined with blissful experiences.

Effective connectivity changes in LSD-induced altered states of consciousness in humans (PNAS)

As Aldous Huxley wrote after his experience with the psychedelic mescaline:

It’s a very salutary thing to realise that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is.

Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

Thanks to DRL for the inspiration for this little piece.

I believe in not taking showers! (Or do I…?)

The first time I visited Egypt, I was struck by a notice above a sink in a hotel in the Red Sea port of Hurghada.

We live in a desert. Please don’t waste water.

I’ve never forgotten that sign and, just 18 short years later, I’ve taken action and stopped taking showers.

Or rather: I’ve stopped taking showers a bit. Like the guy I met last week who was doing ‘a bit of dry January’. He told me this in the pub. With a pint in his hand.

In the last 10 days, I’ve had 3 proper showers. Normally, I’d have had at least 10 – without really thinking about it.

Avid followers of The Charles Offensive will suspect that No Showers sounds a lot like one of my famous positive constraints.

Although I haven’t been as strict as I would be with a true positive constraint, this experiment certainly bears their most important characteristic: challenging thoughtless patterns of behaviour.

Not doing what I’ve done almost every day for the past 25 years forces me to answer questions that go deep into my psychology and ecology:

  • Why, for the last 25 years at least, have I taken a daily shower?
  • Is daily showering strictly necessary?
  • What are the consequences of daily showering for my mind, my body and the rest of the planet?
  • What could I stand to gain from not showering every day?
  • What alternatives are there to daily showering?

Why do I take a daily shower?

The simple answer is habit.

I’ve conditioned myself to feel ‘a bit gross’ if I don’t have my daily shower: it keeps me clean and wakes me up. But these are easily divorced from the gush of water from a pipe in the wall.

It is true that water on the face helps humans become alert. Nothing says WAKE THE FUCK UP! like the imminent threat of drowning.

But there are plenty of ways of getting water to face in the morning. My personal favourite is jumping in the sea, but even a wet flannel will do the job.

In fact, the best wake up call is cold water so my hot shower isn’t even optimal in that respect.

Staying clean isn’t even best done with a 5 minute hot shower either. Stripping our skins of our natural oils every day isn’t necessarily conducive to a healthy microbiome – the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in our glands and hair follicles and on our skin.

The New York Times has a story about David Whitlock, a chemical engineer who hasn’t showered for 12 years: He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest.

And, according to journalist Julia Scott, he doesn’t smell.

After a few days without a shower, however, I do. Not crazy bad – nobody swerves to avoid me on the street – but I do fail a pit sniff test. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, too soon from my surprised microbiome.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have any glorious rivers or waterfalls that I can jump into. Instead, I’m measuring out a litre of water into a bucket and using a flannel to wash. Side note: aren’t flannels great?

After a week of insipid bucket washes, I don’t feel like I’m really doing this experiment justice. I’ve only learned one thing for sure: showers aren’t necessary, but they are one heck of an aesthetic pleasure. That gushing water? It feels amazing!

I console myself with the feeling that every skipped shower saves the planet from needless water wastage. Doesn’t it?

What about the environment?

My shower takes just 10 seconds to spurt out a litre of water. The shortest shower I took in the last 10 days was 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which guzzled 21 litres of water.

According to the Guardian, the average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water.

Both these numbers sound – to me, at least – huge. Even if I was only taking those short showers every day then I’d still be flushing 7,665 litres of water down the drain every year.

This is where it gets controversial because those numbers are, in fact, tiny.

Miniscule. Infinitesimal. Minute.

According to a 2008 WWF report on the UK Water Footprint (PDF here), household water use including showers, but also including washing machines, toilets, kitchen sinks and hose pipes, makes up just 3% of our total water use.

Showers contribute perhaps 0.5% of my personal water footprint.

Most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ‘drinks up’ 1,500 litres. (WWF)

In their summary of actions that we can take to reduce water consumption, WWF conclude:

As a consumer you can ask businesses, including your local supermarkets, to tell you what they are doing to ensure good water management along their supply chains. Everyone can help by reducing food waste. As a citizen you can urge your government to make good water management a priority both in this country and overseas.

Note that they say, Everyone can help by reducing food waste – not water waste. Household water waste isn’t mentioned at all in their summary of the most important actions we can take because it is a relatively insignificant contributor to our personal water footprint.

So what are our alternatives to the daily shower?

  • Go vegan, or at least stop eating meat. A 200g beef steak saps about 3,000 litres of water; a nice lamb cutlet drinks 2,000 litres, a pork chop more like 1,200 litres, a goat curry would be about 1,100 litres and a chicken supreme around 850ml. (SOURCE)
  • Stop buying new cotton clothes and bedsheets. Cotton sucks up 9,114 litres for every kilogram of product. (SOURCE, as above)
  • Drink from the tap. It takes at least twice as much water to produce a plastic water bottle as the amount of water contained in the bottle. (SOURCE)
  • Recycle paper and plastic. Recycling the equivalent of a typical newspaper saves 16 litres of water. (SOURCE, as above)
  • Don’t buy cheap consumer goods, buy quality that will last. Chucking stuff away is chucking away water.
  • Don’t waste electricity. Power stations use up to 168 litres of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity they generate, depending on how they’re cooled. (SOURCE: Table 1)

In the course of writing this email, for example, my laptop has wasted as much as 16 litres of water. You can see now why showers are considered pretty small fry…

But if you’re still up for changing your shower routine – and I’d always support that sort of thing – then you could:

  • Time yourself in the shower and challenge yourself to keep it below 3 minutes.
  • Turn off the tap while you scrub.
  • Capture your used shower water and reuse it to water your plants (if you don’t use soap) or flush your toilet (if you do).
  • If you want a really long shower, run a bath instead. A bath takes about 100 litres, so the equivalent of a 16 minute shower.
  • Fill a litre measuring jug and use no more than that. I found I could do a good job with a flannel and about 500ml of water.

Check out Rob Greenfield, who lived for (at least) two years without taking a conventional shower. From his photos, it looks like he had a much better time than me, frolicking in rivers, lakes, waterfalls, torrential rain and leaky fire hydrants. Not a bucket in sight.

Rob reckons he managed to conserve about 23,000 litres of water in that time. This is clearly awesome, but even he says:

Rather than giving up showering for a year you could just pass on six hamburgers. That seems a lot easier to me.

I guess that’s why there’s this Veganuary thing going on right now.

Transcendental Meditation

Over the course of four days just before Christmas I learnt the Transcendental Meditation® technique.

Transcendental Meditation® is a simple form of meditation that involves sitting with eyes closed while mentally repeating a meaningless mantra for 20 minutes, twice a day.

I was given my mantra in a ceremony that involved incense, a photograph of a dead guru, a single white handkerchief, a Russet, a pineapple and a credit card.

As someone open to experiments with consciousness, I took up regular meditation in March 2018, practising for anything from 2 to 25 minutes a day, every day.

But meditation never quite found a regular habit-making slot in my day. I never even really knew what kind of meditation I would settle on until I’d sat down.

Vipassana? Body scan? Loving-kindness? Mindfulness?

It didn’t really seem to matter because most of the time I was fretting about work anyway. And then fretting about why I couldn’t meditate properly.

Although I didn’t miss a day between March and December, sometimes it was a close-run thing, and often I’d end up cramming in 5 minutes before bed.

All in all, I was left with the faintly unsatisfactory feeling that meditation had more to offer.

So when generous benefactors offered to pay for me to take a Transcendental Meditation® course, I was delighted.

This post is about what I learnt, starting with all the things about Transcendental Meditation® that make me want to throw up…

Those bloody ®s!

Transcendental Meditation® and its promulgators the Maharishi Foundation® seem irritatingly obsessed with protecting their intellectual property.

It’s not only the constant assertion of ®, but we were also made to sign an agreement that promised we wouldn’t tell anyone else about our personal experiences.

They say that this is to reduce expectations of other people coming to the practice, but their whole sales technique is about raising completely unrealistic expectations.

Browse through the Transcendental Meditation® website or brochures and you’ll find promises (scientifically proven!) that the unique Transcendental Meditation® practice will reduce crime, cure Irritable Bowel Syndrome and insomnia, and basically write that film script for you.

This is, essentially, nonsense. So I feel no shame whatsoever in breaking my agreement and telling as many people as will listen about my experience – exactly as I have done for other similar practices like Vipassana and Psychedelic Breathwork.

The science is overstated and crappy

On a more serious note, the scientific evidence for the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® is massively overstated by the Maharishi Foundation®.

This makes things very confusing for people without the inclination to go trawling through the hundreds of publications to see whether there is any merit at all in what the website claims.

Luckily, we don’t have to go trawling because there is a whole chapter on the science of Transcendental Meditation® in Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm’s excellent 2015 book The Buddha Pill.

Farias and Wikholm are academic psychologists used to picking apart research papers, and they found that a lot of the Transcendental Meditation® research suffers from:

  • sampling bias in the selection of participants
  • passive rather than active control groups
  • no placebo comparison
  • no double-blind experimental design, which can cause an expectation effect in both experimenters and participants
  • cherry-picked results that exclude negative or neutral outcomes

Unfortunately, this bad science casts doubt on everything the Maharishi Foundation® claims, and would rightly put off most people from spending their money.

Is it even worth practising Transcendental Meditation® at all?

Amazingly, Farias and Wikholm report one placebo-controlled, double-blind trial that tested the claims of TM.

The 1976 study by Jonathan Smith included an ingenious placebo for Transcendental Meditation® called PSI and compared the two for the treatment of anxiety in college students.

After 6 months of twice daily meditation, Smith concluded that:

the crucial therapeutic component of TM is not the TM exercise.

Psychotherapeutic effects of transcendental meditation with controls for expectation of relief and daily sitting. Smith, Jonathan C. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (1976)

In other words, when it comes to reducing anxiety in college students, Transcendental Meditation® works equally as well as sitting quietly in a chair for 20 minutes twice a day.

But, remarkably, it does work: both Transcendental Meditation® and Smith’s placebo PSI led to a significant reduction in anxiety and a more relaxed physiological functioning.

As far as I’m concerned, this paper is great news: a placebo-controlled, double-blind trial shows that Transcendental Meditation® works!

But you will be less than astonished to learn that this paper is not cited anywhere among the hundreds listed on the Transcendental Meditation® website.

Oh, and it’s appallingly authoritarian, exclusively expensive, and essentially amoral

The Maharishi Foundation® seems to promote a very authoritarian, paternalistic view of the world.

On the wall of the room in which I studied was an enormous schematic of the Transcendental Meditation® world view. It runs from the Unified Field of Pure Consciousness right up to the Head of State – who is, of course, a male.

Every head of state can fulfil his parental role of bringing maximum success and happiness to his people, and thereby create unified field based ideal civilization through the application of Maharishi’s Unifield Field Based Integrated Systems of Education, Health, Government, Rehabilitation, Economics, Defense, and Agriculture.

(c) International Association for the Advancement of the Science of Creative Intelligence (1983)

Scary.

Especially as, thanks to its £290 to £590 price tag, Transcendental Meditation® is also very exclusive. Hmm. Not sure I want to be a part of yet another boys club.

Side Bar: PSI

If you want a practice that gives you all the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® without the exorbitant price tag, then try periodic somatic inactivity – the meditation placebo created by Jonathan Smith for the paper cited above.

  1. Twice a day, sit comfortably on a chair, or upright in bed.
  2. Close your eyes for 20 minutes.
  3. Let your mind do whatever it wants. Whatever you do mentally will have little or no impact on the effectiveness of the technique. The important thing is to remain physically inactive. Do not talk, walk around, or change chairs. You may engage in an occasional action such as shifting your position or making yourself more comfortable. And you may scratch.
  4. At the end of the session, open your eyes, breathe deeply a few times, and continue with your everyday activities.

Adapted from The Buddha Pill by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm.

Finally, there is nothing in the initial Transcendental Meditation® training about ethics. Yeah, ethics! It’s all very well connecting to the unified field of pure consciousness for 20 minutes twice a day, but what about the other 23 hours and 20 minutes?

Transcendental Meditation® is Hindu meditation stripped clean of the supporting ethical framework – presumably so it would be more appealing to our godless Western minds – but in throwing out the bathwater, we have also lost the baby.

Nevertheless…

Despite these complaints, I enjoy doing the practice, by and large. It’s a good excuse to sit and becalm myself.

I enjoy doing it in the morning, I enjoy doing it in the middle of the day, I enjoy doing it on public transport, I enjoy doing it before I go to sleep.

As far as I can tell from my experience (and this is supported by the more rigorous studies) the benefits of Transcendental Meditation® are similar if not identical to any form of relaxation.

However, this should not be underestimated (or misunderestimated).

I have never consciously dedicated time to relaxation this regularly ever before in my entire life.

Any practice that can actually convince human beings to switch off for 20 minutes twice a day is doing a fine job.

It doesn’t really matter to me that the Maharishi Foundation® use bad science to mislead: practising Transcendental Meditation® will still make me less stressed, less anxious and lower my blood pressure. (Probably.)

The method of Transcendental Meditation® is simple and structured and, as a result, many people including myself are able to stick to the practice for 20 minutes twice a day.

That is a considerable achievement and for that reason alone I would say that Transcendental Meditation® – if you can afford it, if nothing else seems to stick, if you can look past the bad science, and if you can fill the ethical vacuum – is worth trying.

Just don’t expect miracles.

Tim Ferriss, podcaster and self-help celebrity, also took the Transcendental Meditation® course, and seems to have had a similar experience.

For me, [TM] is what kicked off more than 2 years of consistent meditation. I’m not a fan of everything the TM organization does, but their training is practical and tactical. … The social pressure of having a teacher for 4 consecutive days was exactly the incentive I needed to meditate consistently enough to establish the habit.

Tim Ferriss, Observer

And if you find that Transcendental Meditation® doesn’t work for you, then don’t worry: there are a multitude of ways to find whatever it is that people call transcendence.

Try self-hypnotism, progressive relaxation, roller-blading, walking in nature, breathwork, yoga, a different form of meditation, climbing a mountain or contemplating the ocean, psychedelic trips large and small.

Good luck!

Note: I only learned the technique a month ago and will update this page as I discover more. I might be wrong about the benefits in the long term; I might also be wrong in my criticisms. Who knows, I might even become a patriarchal despot. 🙂

Note 2: Experimental shortcomings are by no means unique to Transcendental Meditation® . A more recent study into the prosocial benefits of meditation co-authored by Miguel Farias concluded the following:

We further found that compassion levels only increased under two conditions: when the teacher in the meditation intervention was a co-author in the published study; and when the study employed a passive (waiting list) control group but not an active one.

The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2018)

Absolutely Gutted

Science is complex. The science of the gut is both complex and young. I’m not a scientist, let alone a gastroenterologist.

At best I am ‘sciencey’, with just enough reading to unwittingly mislead myself and other people on the internet.

And yet here we all are.

So, without further ado, here is what I think I know about the science of the gut, and how I have used it to completely change the food I enjoy and, most significantly, to wean myself off sugar.

Caveat emptor. Also: Caveat bullshitor.

The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis

First up, let’s define some terms.

Your microbiota are the various strains of different bacteria that help you digest your food. Yep, that’s right: there are trillions of microbial organisms living inside your gut right now.

Your gut actually behaves like a second brain of over 100 million nerve cells called the enteric nervous system, which can communicate with your head-brain through the vagus nerve, and also by releasing bacterial metabolites into the bloodstream.

(But remember that I did say that the science is young and, to be honest, no one is 100% sure how this all works, okay?)

This is called the microbiota-gut-brain axis and, quite frankly, I find the whole thing completely mind-blowing. (Or should that be gut-blowing? No, no it shouldn’t.)

For example, there is evidence that the bacteria in your stomach can influence your mood, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and even stuff like autism, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

However, for this dollop of sciencey writing, I’m going to limit myself to (what I now think is) the obvious.

The food you put into your mouth also feeds the bacteria that grow in your stomach, who use the microbiota-gut-brain axis to influence the food you crave and thus put into your mouth.

That sounds (fairly) straight-forward, but think of the consequences.

What I’m saying is that you might be able to stop your cravings for chocolate, pasta or steak not in a dieting willpower kind of way, but in a permanent I-simply-don’t-really-like-that-any-more kind of way.

No one can currently say this from a place of scientific confidence because it’s still only a ‘could’ in the couched language of gastroenterology.

But I say this from a place of anecdotal confidence because a couple of years ago I stopped craving sugary snacks and puddings (I think) by killing the bacteria in my stomach that loves those sort of treats.

Without that variety of bacteria (or as many of them) sending pestering requests to my brain, I simply don’t fancy eating cake any more.

I’m not saying that you can definitely do this as well – all bodies and guts are different, and the science is still somewhat alchemical – but you can certainly give it a try.

How it works (maybe)

This is the mechanism, so far as I think I know:

  1. Everyone has a different make up of bacteria in their gut. Some of this biome we’re born with and co-exist with us our whole lives; some we can change by changing our diet and our living environment.
  2. These different strains of bacteria get their energy from different food sources. Some particularly like sugar, some prefer fats. The more sugar or fats these bacteria get, the more they reproduce, and the larger their population grows.
  3. These bacteria influence the communication between your gut-brain and your head-brain, and can (could) influence the cravings that you have for different foods.
  4. The greater the population of a certain type of bacteria in your gut, the ‘louder’ the clamouring for their favourite food becomes in your head-brain.
  5. This is (could be) the source of what feels like unconscious cravings. Why do you reach for the cake tin, even when you know you shouldn’t? Bacteria done it (maybe).
  6. The more you ‘listen’ to these cravings, the more you feed that particular strain of bacteria, the larger their population grows, and the more dominant their ‘voice’ becomes. Congratulations, your gut is out of whack and you can’t stay off the Skittles.

How to kill the bad guys

In 2017 I spent about 3 months not eating anything sweet, including fruit.

Starved of their usual food source, I think I managed to kill off most of my unhealthy sugar-loving bacteria.

I had a few days of headaches, which I like to imagine was the starving bacteria sending increasingly desperate signals for food. Like a cruel despot, I ignored them.

Since then, I haven’t had a problem with sugar. I don’t use willpower to avoid chocolate or biscuits, I just don’t fancy eating them.

I can eat sweet things in moderation. Nothing bad happens when I eat a bit of Christmas pudding. But, in general, I simply find sweet things ‘a bit much’.

This isn’t about me and my personal preferences. This is my gut bacteria dictating to me the foods they need to stay alive. It just happens that I’ve killed all the ones that loved me scoffing six bowls of Christmas pudding and twenty-seven mince pies.

And I don’t think I’m special. I think this approach is available to other people.

Yay optimism

I find gut science to be very optimistic. Every time you put something into your mouth is an opportunity for change.

Your gut biome can respond to changes in diet within hours, not weeks or months. So whatever you eat today directly affects what you will want to eat tomorrow (maybe).

Yes, it might take willpower to make the initial change: the bacteria in your stomach don’t want to be starved to death and will put up a fight, but I think we are mistaken to believe that maintaining our new healthy diet will always need willpower.

After the headaches (which only reassured me that I was doing the right thing), I don’t think I needed willpower to keep to my sugar-free diet for more than a week.

What I think is needed instead is an understanding of how our microbiota, gut and brain work together and how we can use this nascent science to give ourselves the best possible chance of eating the healthy diet we want.

Your mileage will vary.

Perhaps my 3-month sugar fast was excessive or maybe I was lucky and my gut responded better than most would. Who knows? You’ll have to see what works for you.

The Fast and the Curious

A few sugar-fasting rules that worked for me:

  1. No exceptions. Even one biscuit could keep those bad bacteria clinging on for dear life. For me, this included fruit and artificial sweeteners. I wanted that craving gone gone gone.
  2. Trust the science. Vegetables are freakin’ delicious and the more you eat, the more you’ll love them. This works because it’s not ‘you’ who loves them, it’s the bacteria that you’re cultivating. Imagine you’re growing a beautiful garden: you’ve just got to get the soil right, pull up the weeds and keep watering the flowers.
  3. Fast for longer than you feel is necessary. I can’t remember exactly how long I felt that I needed to use willpower, perhaps a week. After that, the rest of the 3-month fast wasn’t difficult at all: I was happily eating the more healthy foods that I and my microbiota now loved.
  4. Replace your sugar intake with the type of food that nourishes the bacteria that you want. Eat at least 30 different types of vegetables every week. Don’t worry about 5-a-day or 7-a-day rules, just make sure your weekly shop involves something from every basket in the greengrocer.
  5. Change your environment. Remove every last piece of sugary-food from your house. Stop going to places where you have a sugar-eating habit. That might mean changing where you shop, the cafes you visit or even the friends you hang out with (for the fasting period, at least!).

Finally: good luck, and let me know how you get on!

Further Reading

  • The Diet Myth by Tim Spector (2015) Tim is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College London.
  • Gut by Giulia Enders (2015) Giulia is a resident doctor for Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology.
  • The Clever Guts Diet by Michael Mosley (2017) Michael is a broadcaster who trained as a doctor in the 80s, but apparently never practised.
  • Or anything else by an actual scientist…

Prefer listening? Try this All Hail Kale podcast from the BBC, featuring Tim Spector among others.

More than a crime thriller

How was 2018 for you? Do you look back and remember a year full of bad news, bad news about Brexit, Trump and Russia?

In which case, here’s something to make you feel better:

“[The news] doesn’t relate to the ordinary person’s existence, any more than a crime thriller… But we are competing for people’s time and their attention, and the reality is that bad news does sell.”

Tony Gallagher, Daily Mail Editor (2015) [LINK]

As grown-ups, we’re made to feel like it is part of our duty as citizens to ‘stay on top of the news’. But who among us truly believes that what we’re sold as ‘the news’ is actually giving us the tools we need to fulfil our duties?

Academic Jodie Jackson has found that regular news reporting is disempowering, making us feel that our social problems are ‘inevitable and endless, rather than solvable and temporary’.

Cathrine Gyldensted, a masters candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, found that people’s positive affect (something like happiness) fell after reading ‘classical’ news reporting.

If you’re not convinced, then by all means do an audit of your favourite news sources. Does their agenda empower you, inspire you, or make you want to go out and change the world?

Does ‘the news’ give you the tools you need as a citizen who hopes to live a more fulfilled existence in a flourishing world?

If your answer is yes, then fine: keep them.

But if you feel ready to chuck in your usual news sources, I’ve got a few suggestions for replacements:

  • Books and libraries. Set your own long-form agenda. Learn something new and change the future. [Why Everyone Should Watch Less News And Read More Books Instead by Ryan Holiday]
  • Friends – yes, friends! Whether it’s their new baby, a job vacancy at their company, or an invite to a barbecue next weekend, it’s rare that our friends don’t offer news of real, immediate value to our lives.
  • Strangers. Or, as they are sometimes known: fellow citizens. We could all do with hanging out together more often.
  • Community politics. Politics isn’t something that happens out in make-believe world of ‘the news’. It something that happens right now, on the street. Go and say hi. (Okay, so I’m still buzzing that the council recently fixed a faulty street light outside my house, but I do think this is true.)
  • Go for a long walk outside in nature. What’s the news with the starlings, with the streams, or with the sunset?
  • An afternoon nap. Sometimes the best thing you can do is nap.
  • The Future Crunch newsletter. Try their roundup of 2018 for size – tagline: The world didn’t fall apart this year. You were just getting your news from the wrong places.
  • Positive News magazine and/or blog. If you are looking for more positive sources of ‘news’, then this list by Jodie Jackson will help. But honestly: do you need them?

As someone who hasn’t read the news for two years, I promise that you really don’t have to stay on top of everything. Trust that the important stuff will come to you because it’s important.

In the meantime, read a book, phone a friend, talk to a stranger, go for a walk. You’re free now. Relax.

And I wish you a happy news year!

7 things I’m grateful I did in 2018

I can’t quite believe 2018 is already nearly over. More than 31.5 million seconds have tick-tocked, transferring their unfulfilled potential into the secure achievement of the past.

It hasn’t all been easy, but here are seven of the more mind-blowing things that have happened for me in 2018, some of which I’ve written about before:

  • Finding Frisbee, and all the friends I’ve made through Ultimate in London, Bristol and Athens.
  • Travelling overland through Europe to Greece, then volunteering with refugees, eating falafel, and gazing at the stars.
  • Thighs of Steel, both cycling Ljubljana to Sofia in the summer and joining the organising team for 2019.
  • Writing an application for a postgraduate degree course, and another for an adventure internship. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise, but writing applications is a wonderful way of clarifying what I want with skin in the game.
  • Spending time with family and friends: family reunions in Oxon and the Isle of Wight, living with close friends in Bristol, meeting new friends – and new family!
  • Walking in the wilds of Scotland, Wales and Dartmoor, taking my first steps into a new professional sideline.
  • Reading and writing. As you know, I’ve read some spectacular books this year. Writing the second series of Foiled was a blast, and my Happy Friday newsletter has been a constant spring of inspiration.

So what’s next? Here are seven things I’d like to be grateful for in 2019:

  • Starting to earn some of my corn in the G.O.D. (Great Out Doors). Professionally, I’d like to spend less time typing at a computers, in a city, on my own.
  • Growing an audience for whatever it is that I write about, particularly through public speaking and events.
  • More transcendence: more meditation, more psychedelics, more awe in nature.
  • Going on another awesome trip like this summer’s Greece and Thighs of Steel combo.
  • Spending more time with family and friends. You can never get enough of this. It’s important, so I’ve got a spreadsheet.
  • Doing my damnedest to make Thighs of Steel 2019 a success, while growing our network of adventurous and compassionate souls.
  • I’ll leave this last one blank for something unexpected. Maybe series three of Foiled going to TV, maybe finding a more scholarly outlet for my psychology interests, maybe something else totally unforeseen.

2018 has been a year of waking up. Stand by for 2019!

I believe in Psychedelics

1. Psychedelics on the NHS?

Last Friday I was at the Cube cinema in Bristol to watch a documentary about the first clinical trials involving classical psychedelics in decades.

In case you missed it, in 2016 Robin Carhart-Harris led a team at Imperial College London that trialled the psychedelic treatment of 20 depressed patients, 18 of whom had ‘severe, unipolar, treatment-resistant major depression’.

The trial gave promising results, with all 19 patients who completed the follow-up showing significantly reduced symptoms of depression for at least 5 weeks after the two psilocybin sessions.

18 of these patients did not seek any further treatment (medication or psychotherapy) for their depression until after the 5-week mark.

This is remarkable for a cohort that had, on average, a history of 4 previous failed medications.

Subtitled ‘Can Magic Mushrooms Cure Depression?’, it is to the credit of director Monty Wates that his film Magic Medicine is more about the illness than it is about the controversial compound that could hold the key to its treatment.

Indeed, I would argue that the only controversy is that it took Robin Carhart-Harris and his team more than 3 years just to secure government and ethics approval to use the psilocybin.

The Class A / Schedule 1 classification of psychedelics means that scientific research, and future medical treatment, is bureaucratically arduous and expensive.

Now that this therapy has been shown to be safe, it is time we reclassified psilocybin and let the scientific community spend their time and money where it belongs: on the treatment of disease.

The focus of Magic Medicine is quite rightly not on the profound psychedelic experiences of its participants, but on the shocking symptoms and consequences of living with depression.

Psilocybin offers hope to these people and we owe it to them to do what we can to realign the law with the science.

Four separate trials have reported improvements in depressive symptoms after psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (Griffiths et al. 2016; Ross et al. 2016; Grob et al. 2011; Carhart-Harris et al. 2016), including one in which ‘treatment-resistant depression’ was the primary criterion for inclusion (Carhart-Harris et al. 2016).

Psilocybin has shown promise in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (Moreno et al. 2006), alcohol (Bogenschutz et al. 2015) and tobacco addiction (Johnson et al. 2014) and anxiety related to terminal diagnoses (Griffiths et al. 2016; Ross et al. 2016; Grob et al. 2011).
[CITATION]

Unfortunately, of course, the treatment is currently illegal in the UK.

One thing we can all do is sign this government petition to reschedule psychedelics so that researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris can redouble their efforts to find treatments for the greatest mental health diseases of our age.

2. Psychedelics and Society

Along with most humans, I am captivated by experiences of awe, moments in which my self seems to dissolve into nature, where time and space have little relevance, and which seem to unveil to me the meaning of my puny existence.

Psychedelics are by no means the only route to such experiences – look out from a mountain top, have sex, ride a roller-coaster – but, once experienced, it would be foolish to argue that they are not one of the most direct.

Such a direct experience of awe is, I believe, the birth-right of all humans. Psychedelics change lives for the good, and not just those of people who have a diagnosable mental disease.

Psychedelic experiences are associated with measurable changes of personality in the direction of greater openness.

What does that mean?

In a pilot study, Taylor Lyons and Robin Carhart-Harris found that after two doses of psilocybin the participants’ measures of nature-relatedness were significantly increased, and that their political authoritarianism was significantly decreased. [CITATION]

Not only that, but these personality changes persisted 7-12 months after the psychedelic session.

For someone who would really rather like to live in a society that is more connected to nature and less politically authoritarian, this is a good news story.

3. Psychedelics and Mundane Wonder

Psychedelics can be used as a remarkable treatment for some of the most stubborn illnesses of the 21st century.

They can be used to explore the outer limits of consciousness, experience awe and transcendence, and perhaps change society for the better.

But they can also be used in the mundane, as an extraordinary part of ordinary daily life.

Microdosing is the way that I am very glad I was introduced to LSD. I am by nature cautious and was brought up in a drug-negative society that taught me to fear altered states of consciousness.

It doesn’t help that almost everything we think we know about psychedelics is wrong.

I can scarcely believe that I would have ever had the courage to take a large dose of a psychedelic had I not learnt the small way that these compounds would not – as I had been led to understand – send me insane.

But taking miniscule amounts of a psychedelic like LSD can have a surprisingly profound effect on your day.

In my experience, I find myself more open to social interaction with strangers, more appreciative of the beauty of the world, more able to focus on creative work, and more content with life.

In the words of pioneering researcher Jim Fadiman, more often than not microdosing helps people have ‘a really good day’.

Psychedelics for a Better Future?

In our hyper-rationalist culture, psychedelics are reminding us that there is another way of seeing the world.

Perhaps it’s just the re-emergence of a tradition that has been squashed in this country ever since the Romans banished the druids to Anglesey.

With the work of scientists like Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London, psychedelics are showing us that transcendence can have a measurable and positive impact on our lives.

We have to be careful not to screw this up, but the time has come to support scientific psychedelic research, to support the right of individuals to explore their own consciousness through altered states, and to believe in the potential of psychedelics to change our future for the better.

Further Reading

  1. The Science of Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience (11 minute read) Start here for an introduction to everything I have learned about psychedelics over the last 2 years.
  2. A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman (16 minute read) My review of Ayelet Waldman’s book on microdosing LSD is, on the one hand, nothing more than a non-fiction book review. On the other, it is a fully-featured 3,000 word guide to psychedelic microdosing.

I believe in Minimum Viable Technology

How many devices have you looked at this morning?

I’m on seven.

  • I checked the time on my bedside travel clock
  • I listened to a comedy on my DAB radio
  • I used a stopwatch to time my press ups
  • I wrote my diary using a typewriter
  • I sent a text message on my feature phone
  • I took a photograph with my smartphone
  • I typed these words into my computer

You’ll note that all of these tasks could have been accomplished using only one tool: my smartphone. So why have seven devices when I could have only one?

After all, the smartphone does many things excellently.

Most people in the world will never have owned a camera as good as the one on the back of their smartphone (myself included).

Smartphones have normalised the miracle of GPS navigation, made mobile internet access a pocketable habit, and serve us as powerful micro-computers whose potential is limited only (it seems) by the imaginations of app developers.

I have used my smartphone to practice yoga, answer emails, chat with work colleagues, catch up on the cricket, check train times, monitor my sleep, write blog posts and, of course, track my smartphone usage.

Incredibly, this is quite normal.

But whereas the smartphone is a complex technology, basically indistinguishable from magic to most people (myself very much included), single-purpose tools like my travel clock or DAB radio are what I call Minimum Viable Technology.

Rather than starting out with what the tool can accomplish (Ooh! Look, it’s a clock and a radio and a stopwatch and a phone and a camera AND a yoga teacher!), the principles of Minimum Viable Technology first define what you want from life (Bleeurgh, what’s the time?), and then find the simplest tool to match (a bedside travel clock).

Principles of Minimum Viable Technology

  1. Clearly define the single task at hand
  2. Use the least complex tool that still accomplishes that single task
  3. Stop. Adding. Features. Goddamit.

I believe that such Minimum Viable Technologies offer significant advantages over complex multi-purpose technologies.

1. Focus
It is too easy to switch task when using a multi-purpose tool.

We’ve all been there with smartphones and computers, but it’s equally true of other complex technologies – a house, for example.

Would I be more comfortable in the lounge or the kitchen? Should I lie on the bed or rest in a deck chair in the garden? Does the bedroom need another lick of paint, and when am I going to put up those shelves? Is the heating on too high?

It sounds ridiculous, but the plurality of options and the ease of task switching is detrimental to our ability to focus. And losing focus quite possibly makes us more miserable humans.

2. Quality
Does the blade on my Swiss Army knife have a sharper cutting edge than the cook’s knife in my kitchen? No.

Similarly, does the camera on my smartphone take better photographs than a dedicated SLR? Clearly not.

The best multi-purpose tool will never be superior to the best single-purpose tool, and that has consequences for the way we work (and play).

Are we willing to accept good enough for the best?

In many arenas, the answer will be emphatically yes, but for the most important things in life, the answer simply must be no. Otherwise, what the hell are we doing here?

3. Waste
There is an argument that using one device to rule them all is less wasteful, and I wouldn’t like to argue with that.

I have now seven devices where one would do and at some point all those devices will end up in landfill and their useless lumps of plastic will out-live me. I feel pretty shitty about that.

But the principles of Minimum Viable Technology tend towards less wasteful behaviour, not more.

For example, the absolute Minimum Viable Technology for cleaning my hair is, quite simply, water. Having grown up in a certain society with certain expectations, however, I have settled on using diluted lemon juice.

No more need to buy expensive (or indeed cheap) shampoos and conditioners. No more need to wonder what all those ingredients are doing to my hair (let alone what happens when I wash them down the sink).

In the final analysis, do I really need my own travel clock? Do I really need my own phone? The wide span of human history argues in the negative. I just don’t have the guts to go without.

4. Skill
If we all use multi-tools, what will become of the artisan and the artist?

The more basic the technology, generally speaking, the greater the skill you must learn and deploy.

For example, motorists who grew up in the 40s, 50s and 60s had to become semi-skilled mechanics in order to keep their cars on the road.

Modern motorists have no such need. In fact, car manufacturers deliberately make their technology unhackable, so that you have to go back to the approved dealer for repairs.

Technology, as it becomes more complex, leaves in its wake a certain kind of ignorance.

Of course, this ignorance is not always or necessarily a limitation. Drivers who don’t know the first thing about car maintenance (myself included) can instead spend their time on other pursuits – but it doesn’t make them better drivers.

Side Bar: It’s not all about ‘devices’

Technology is everything humans have ever invented to try and make our lives easier, from agriculture and money, to shampoo and footwear.

Here are some other ways that Minimum Viable Technology influences my life choices:

  • I prefer to walk than cycle, if I have the time. This often surprises people who think that I’m a devoted capital-C Cyclist. I am, but also: MVT, baby.
  • I wear ‘barefoot’ shoes that don’t over-complicate the business of keeping my feet warm, dry and protected from sharp stones.
  • I don’t have a gym membership because I can use press up bars and a yoga mat in my own bedroom.
  • I eat a primarily plant-based diet: a more simplistic diet than meat-eating in almost every way, from food production to preparation and digestion.
  • I don’t use supermarkets when there is a low tech greengrocer in town.

If in doubt don’t spend money, say no to ‘upgrades’, and always check the ingredients.

With all this in mind, I believe that my original question should be flipped: Why have only one device when I could have seven?

Rather than depending on complex multi-purpose tools for everything, I believe that we should use them as ‘catch-all’ technologies to mop up the functions that are either unimportant to us, or we simply haven’t had the courage, the time, the money or the wherewithal to replace yet.

My smartphone does only one thing better than any other device I have found: GPS mapping when I’m on my bike.

Does that make it worth having? Frankly, no. I cycled around Britain without GPS: it’s not a big deal.

But my smartphone sweeps up a few other useful functions that are nice to have, but aren’t sufficiently important to me to find a dedicated replacement.

A yoga teacher would be vastly superior to the app on my phone, but I’m just not dedicated enough to make the switch. Likewise, I don’t care enough about photography to buy an actual camera.

And so we come to the 50ft-chameleon of the personal computer.

I wrote a line to myself recently: A computer is not a crutch. And yet that is exactly how I treat it.

My computer is my workstation and playstation combined. It is my portal into the world, and the screen through which I peer. It is the medium of my creativity.

I know that my life could benefit from applying the principles of Minimum Viable Technology to those moments when I turn to my computer screen.

What do I want from life right now? It’s probably not to stand here typing, reading on a screen, or replying to emails.

This computer is so far from being a Minimum Viable Technology that it’s actively keeping me from being the person I want to be.

Woah.

I’ll see you outside!

Further Technologies

  1. Minimum Viable Technology (6 minute read). The tool is not the task. In our search for the most efficient technology, we forget that 99% of a task is not about the tools we use. Cleaning yourself is not about power showers, hot water tanks or expensive shampoos; it’s about water and scrubbing. Jumping into a lake would do it.
  2. Productivity Positive Constraints (5 minute read). The Neo is a full size keyboard with a four line screen and a memory for hundreds of thousands of words. That’s all. There’s no internet connection to distract me. There’s no hunching over an eye-straining glowing screen. There’s no clunky weight to carry around or rest on my knees. There’s no power cable because there’s hardly any technology to power so the batteries (3xAA) last for years.
  3. No Money Mondays (6 minute read). I can’t just buy a nice packet of biscuits when I feel like it; I’ve got to finish up those lentils that have been sitting in my cupboard since January. I can’t pay for the bus; I have to cycle or walk.

I believe in Running

This Sunday I’ll be running the Gosport Half Marathon for the third consecutive year.

I’m not quite sure why. I have no particular connection or affection for Gosport, aside from this one annual occasion.

It is, however, the largest town in Britain without an operational railway station, but that’s not reeeally a good reason to run there.

No. Running the Gosport Half is just one of those young rituals without which November is now unthinkable.

Actually, emend that last sentence: the calendrical absence of the Gosport Half would make the entire russet spread of Autumn barren indeed.

Running is not the kind of master that rewards the ill-prepared, so the Gosport Half must begin with a spike in training by September at the latest.

This year training began in October; this year I expect a slower time.

As a confirmed relativist, I believe that physical exercise is as close as we come to an absolute moral good.

Unlike the sessile (to show off a new word) plants, we humans were made to move. That’s why we have Achilles heels, thermoregulation and well-developed bottoms.

Apes are rubbish at running; dogs tank out at 7 miles; and a decent marathon runner is not much slower over that distance than a racehorse, a beast whose genetic inheritance is to run.

As such, there is an honesty in exercise that is disturbingly hard to find, at least in my other work.

My annual pilgrimage to the south coast gives me an opportunity to measure myself against myself. Can I break last year’s personal best?

Certainly not without being honest to the process, and by training hard throughout the year. Nothing holds you to account like a stopwatch.

Running gets me out of bed in the morning. Running is therapy with sweatbands. Physical training is mental training. Sweat is its own gold.

Running gives us a inarguable measure of our mortality.

On the optimistic side, I am 36 years old and I can run faster and further today than I could ten years ago. It’s always good to feel like we’re making progress in life.

There are, too, plenty of older runners quicker than me: next year I could be running faster still than I do today. At my local Parkrun last week 7 runners older than me ran a quicker 5km than my personal best time.

Eventually, though, I know that my times will begin to drift, like the tide receding both imperceptibly and indubitably away from the shore.

No one can resist the tidal pull of time; but we can prepare ourselves.

And so back to Gosport.

Further Running/Reading

  1. Haruki Murakami: What I Think About When I Think About Running | The novelist explains the correspondence between putting strides down on the pavement and putting words down on the page. Link is to my review.
  2. Christopher McDougall: Born To Run | Why humans love endurance running, and how the Tarahumara can run 100 miles at speed without injury.
  3. Scott Jurek: Eat & Run | A record-breaking vegan ultramarathon runner tries to explain.

UPDATE: I finished the 2018 Gosport Half in a course personal best time of 1 hour 29 minutes and 59 seconds, in a dead heat with my ‘race manager’.

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 28 'Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.'

Today’s pages (p149-154) commence with the second aspect of Viktor Frankl’s ‘tragic triad’: guilt.

How can we find meaning in our lives in spite of the presence of guilt?

For Frankl, no crime is fully explicable. No crime can be ‘fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors’, he writes.

Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired.

Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 28 ‘Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.’

Gifts Part 1: Life Let's go into the weekend with the oh-crap-now-I've-got-to-get-them-something mindset of someone who's just been given a wonderful gift.

I’ll kick off with that last resort of hapless students everywhere: looking up words in the Oxford English Dictionary. (OED.com, accessible by subscription: your library almost certainly has a subscription that you can use from anywhere. It’s incredible.)

I choose to ignore the etymology – from the Old English gift meaning payment for a wife – and instead zero in on the common definition:

A gift is something, the possession of which is transferred to another without the expectation or receipt of an equivalent.

Point A: I don’t know about you, but my first reaction when I read the bit about without the expectation or receipt of an equivalent was ‘Yeah, nice, but…’ Continue reading Gifts Part 1: Life Let’s go into the weekend with the oh-crap-now-I’ve-got-to-get-them-something mindset of someone who’s just been given a wonderful gift.

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 27 'Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change ... may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.'

Today’s pages (p145-149) address the question of the meaning of life itself. Finally – the promised land!

But rather than The Meaning Of Life As A Whole, Viktor Frankl has a smaller target in mind, at least at first:

[T]he logotherapist is concerned with the potential meaning inherent and dormant in all the single situations one has to face throughout his or her life.

Frankl doesn’t deny that The Meaning Of Life As A Whole does exist, but that we can only fully understand it after having understood the meaning of each of the smaller moments leading up to the final moment of our death. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 27 ‘Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change … may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.’

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 26 'Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy". Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.'

Today’s pages (p139-144) open the final part of Man’s Search for Meaning, written as a postscript to the book in 1984: ‘The Case for Tragic Optimism’.

An attitude of ‘tragic optimism’ means to remain optimistic in spite of life’s ‘tragic triad’ of pain, guilt and death. Or, alternatively:

How … can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects?

Frankl’s answer is hidden in the etymology of the word ‘optimism’, which is derived from the Latin ‘optimum’ meaning ‘the best’.

To be optimistic, therefore, is not to be deliriously blind to one’s circumstances, but rather to make ‘the best’ one can of any given situation. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 26 ‘Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy”. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.’

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 25 'Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.'

Today’s pages (p131-136) conclude the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning, ‘Logotherapy in a Nutshell’.

Viktor Frankl writes that ‘[e]very age has its own collective neurosis’ and believes that the mass neurosis of the present time is ‘a private and personal form of nihilism’.

Frankl warns against the danger of teaching that man is ‘nothing but’ the result of his biological and social conditions.

As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions.

But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps … and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 25 ‘Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.’

To Do List Bankruptcy Last night something snapped. I woke up at 3 a.m. silently screaming into my duvet.

The problem with a successful summer is that it can cause an overenthusiasm of doings.

A month living and working in Greece was exactly what I needed to get a fresh perspective on my life and work in the UK. Ideas for new ventures spilled easily from my split skull and they all, fatefully, found a spot on my Doings list.

None of this summer shower of ideas were bad, what is bad is that I can only work on three things at a time. Only three tasks on a given day, only three jobs in a given week, only three projects in a given month. And I already had three things that I was working on.

So what happened to this summer’s Trojan horse of ideas and ventures? It swelled and, bloated, filled my brain with to do list rot: a constant reminder that I wasn’t able to back up my ideas with action.

Last night something snapped. I woke up at 3 a.m. silently screaming into my duvet.
Continue reading To Do List Bankruptcy Last night something snapped. I woke up at 3 a.m. silently screaming into my duvet.

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 24 'The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.'

Today’s pages (p125-131) address the logotherapeutic treatment of anticipatory anxiety, the excessive anxiety we all sometimes feel in anticipation of a particular event or circumstance.

Viktor Frankl observes that ‘anticipatory anxiety … produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid’.

When one is particularly anxious about blushing when faced with a large crowd, one is more prone to blushing in that situation. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 24 ‘The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.’

Lessons from 10 Years of Hashimoto’s Hypothroidism I couldn't find happiness by following a FODMAP diet, testing myself for diabetes, or taking Magnesium and Vitamin E for adrenal support. It was both harder and easier than that.

It’s been 10 years since I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism. 10 years of taking two little white pills every single day in an effort to regulate what my body can no longer.

Those 10 years have been filled with a full 10 years of life: finishing a masters degree, cycling around a country or two (or half a dozen), self-publishing a smattering of books, teaching English to refugees, writing and producing an hour-long play, turning that into a radio series or two.

But every day, throughout it all, I’ve been taking those two little white pills. There is nothing I’ve done more consistently, so I think it’s fair to say I have some experience in this field.

So wherever you find yourself on your hypothyroid adventure, I hope these words give you some encouragement, and perhaps you’ll share your experiences with me, either by email or in the comments below! Continue reading Lessons from 10 Years of Hashimoto’s Hypothroidism I couldn’t find happiness by following a FODMAP diet, testing myself for diabetes, or taking Magnesium and Vitamin E for adrenal support. It was both harder and easier than that.

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 23 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered.'

Today’s pages (p119-125) begin, strangely enough, with something of a lament for the loss of clergymen as a professional resource for treating a loss of meaning in life.

Today, instead, people turn to psychiatrists (and are frequently mistreated for neurosis, is Viktor Frankl’s implication).

After making the point that life’s duration has no bearing on its relative meaning, Viktor Frankl turns to the troublesome (for a scientific mind) metaphysics of what he calls ‘super-meaning’. He begins by posing a reasonable question:

Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos?

Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?

Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 23 ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered.’

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 22 'The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.'

Today’s pages (113-119) begin boldly, with the sub-heading The Meaning of Life. But of course, Frankl has no catechistic answer.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.

He likens it to a chess move: ‘There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game’.

Indeed, the very search for an abstract meaning of life is futile: ‘everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it’.

Instead, Frankl flips the question on its head:

[M]an should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognise that it is he who is asked. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 22 ‘The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.’

Gandhi was wrong: you already ARE the change

We’ve all heard the famous injuction to be the change you want to see in the world. But these words (often and mistakenly attributed to Gandhi) skip over one far more salient point: each of us already ARE the change in the world.

Every little action (or inaction) we take in every moment of every day has consequences for the world we live in. That is an unassailable fact. We may not feel like we have a vast influence on the future, but we are all an intrinsic part of its creation.

This is something that perhaps we don’t think of an awful lot. We look up to inspirational leaders to make giant leaps forward, forgetting that we are part of the marching crowd.

Continue reading Gandhi was wrong: you already ARE the change

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 21 'What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.'

Today’s pages are some of my favourite in the whole of Man’s Search for Meaning. I say that not lightly.

First, a (re-)definition of Frankl’s logotherapy:

[Logotherapy] considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.

This search for meaning, however, creates an inner tension on which good mental health is based.

This goes against what Frankl calls the ‘dangerous misconception’ of many psychologists that a state of mental equilibrium is desirable. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 21 ‘What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.’

Overwhelming Kindness

Everyone knows that it’s nice to be kind, but the Prof taught me something interesting: it’s even nicer to be overwhelmingly kind, to be so intensively kind on one single day that it blows your little mind.

That makes sense: if you spread your kindness thinly over the course of a week, you might forget the flavour – like the scraping of butter that’s senselessly lost in the riot of a bacon and egg bap.

In the same way, your moments of kindness will be diluted during the week by all the other occasions when you were a douche, or just being ‘normal’.

But if you save your week’s worth of buttery kindness for one huge dollop on, say, a Friday, then all of a sudden you become – albeit briefly – hot butter spread thickly on a crumpet. An unforgettably kind kind of god.

Of course, different people have different baseline kindness. We’re talking about kindnesses that you wouldn’t ordinarily perform.

For example, on Wednesday I let a woman go in front of me in the queue because she had… fewer items in her basket than I did. That’s a kindness I never would have normally performed, so that counts.

But that same evening, I volunteered with a gaggle of other GoodGym runners at a community garden in Bournemouth. That’s no doubt a kind deed, but it doesn’t count because I would’ve done that anyway – it didn’t require any effortful kindness on my part. Baseline.

I can easily tell these two varieties of kindness apart: the first gives me a buzz of almost electrifying, almost illicit pleasure. As I turned to the woman behind me, I thought to myself: Oh my god, I’m such a queue rebel! Is this even legal? This is going to blow her MIND!

As it happened, she just said thanks and walked in ahead of me with her Dairylea Lunchables. But I can’t control that. You are what you repeatedly do: I became in that moment a little more of a kindly person. And, like the bleeding heart liberal that I am, I think that is a goal worth pursuing.

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 20 'A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress, but by no means a mental disease.'

Today’s pages (p103-108) mark the beginning of the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning: Logotherapy in a nutshell.

After some apologies for the inevitable failures for compressing into a few pages that which ‘required twenty volumes in German’, Viktor Frankl sets about explaining his therapy.

Logotherapy (as its etymology indicates) attempts to confront the patient with and reorient him towards the meaning of his life.

Frankl is very insistent that this ‘will to meaning’ is the overriding motivation for human beings: we live and die for our meanings and values, he points out.

Furthermore:

This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 20 ‘A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress, but by no means a mental disease.’

The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 19

Today’s excerpt is a little shorter (p96-100), as we reach the end of Part 1 of Man’s Search for Meaning.

These are the final pages of Frankl’s description of the psychology of the concentration camp inmate.

Even after liberation, the former-prisoner is not out of psychological danger. For Frankl, progress from inmate to human being seems to have been slow and steady.

But for others, liberation was not so easy. Frankl describes the sudden release of mental pressure that occurred at the end of their imprisonment as similar to the bends.

Just as the physical health of the caisson worker would be endangered if he left his diver’s chamber suddenly […], so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health.

Continue reading The Viktor Frankl 5-a-Day Book Cult: Day 19