Blog: The Motherlode

I’ve not been well for the past three weeks, with fluctuating symptoms of fatigue, sore throat, headaches, blocked sinuses and stomach upset.

It’s not Covid, it’s not long Covid, it’s not a cold, meningitis, Lyme disease or glandular fever. Blood count, folate, B12, liver function — all healthy.

The longer this little thing drags on, even after two courses of antibiotics, the more convinced I am that it’s a manifestation of stress.

Simple as that.

Simple Is Complex

I’ve never forgotten something my sister once noticed at a gig when we were at university:

The easier a musical instrument looks, the harder it is to play.

• Synthesiser: looks complicated, plays easy
• Trumpet: looks simple, plays hard

The metaphor extends to medicine.

For example, I have an underactive thyroid.

The thyroid is an endocrine gland that secretes three hormones that dictate the basal metabolic rate of almost all body tissues, manage our appetite and stimulate the breakdown of glucose and fatty acids, increase the rate of our heartbeat and mitochondrial activity, and play a key role in our sexual function, menstrual cycles, and sleep and thought patterns.

Looks pretty complex, no?

But when things go wrong, the thyroid plays pretty easy: one blood test to diagnose; one pill to restore normality.

Stress, on the other side, looks simple. But jumping jacks does it play hard.

We all clearly see the cause, but where is the cure?

Unpicking An Opinion

Stupid question: what is stress?

Let’s say it’s a troubling sense of anxiety that rides into town when external or internal demands on your performance exceed your capabilities.

But hold on.

Human beings are wonderful creatures. Our capabilities rise to the demands placed upon us.

This is why there is such a thing as eustress: motivational dollops of stress that actually improve our physical and mental performance.

Without the stress of a fierce opponent, neither of tomorrow’s Wimbledon finalists, Elena Rybakina and Ons Jabeur, could rise to the level demanded of tennis champions.

Even when demands on our performance do exceed our capabilities — why — that’s what we call learning! And there’s nothing bad about learning, is there?

So the negativity around anxiety must contain the seeds of something else.

We can see this physiologically, as well.

Anxiety is what’s known as an arousal state. It makes my heart race, shallowing my breath, making me sweat, butterflying my guts, tiring me out.

But these are the same symptoms as the arousal state of excitement. The only difference is the interpretation put on the two: one negative, coming from a place of fear, and one positive, coming from a place of joy.

If stress can be positive; if anxiety can be excitement; if falling short can be learning; then, anxiety as a response to stress is just, like, your opinion, man.

But it goes without saying that I not finding my current state of mind particularly joyful. I am not excited; I am fearful. I can’t even make space to see all the wonderful ways I am growing and learning.

Our radically varying responses to stress, then, must burrow deep, much deeper, into our core beliefs about ourselves as human beings.

Letting Go

The cure for stress, the one everyone will tell you, looks as simple as the diagnosis:

Relax, don’t worry, just let go

Thanks. Now what the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?

I can’t tell you how many hot baths, naps and slow walks I’ve had over the past three weeks. Sure: feels great. Now what?

Well, yesterday, my counsellor invited me to try the Sedona Method of letting go.

The Sedona Method, according to Rational Wiki, is a ‘roll-your-own New Age self-administered psychotherapy’. At this point, I’ll try anything.

If you can’t afford the $100 online course, here’s what I did with my counsellor:

1. Focus on an issue you would like to feel better about
2. Ask yourself: Is this feeling coming from a desire for control, a desire for approval, a desire for security or a desire for connection?
3. Ask yourself one of the following questions: Could I let this feeling go? Could I allow this feeling to be here? Could I welcome these feelings?
4. Ask yourself the question: Would I? Am I willing to let go?
5. Ask yourself this question: When? Hint: the answer is always ‘now’ because the past is gone and the future never comes.
6. Repeat half a dozen times, with slightly different inflections

During the session, I focused on my anxiety around the aforementioned and rapidly upcoming ride to Athens.

That’s where most of the stress in my life is right now and that’s how I suspect my sinus infection originally snuck in and, once, snucked, wouldn’t shift.

As I focused on that feeling, and as we made our way through the method, I realised three things.

1. My anxiety comes from a desire for control

I want to control every aspect of the ride — knowns and unknowns — to ensure that everything imaginable goes exactly as everyone involved could possibly dream.

That’s an awful lot to control. No wonder I get the sense that I’m operating a wee bit beyond my capabilities.

Looking back on those words, I realise too that my anxiety is coming from a good place: I desperately want people to have a good time and not die.

This is a good thing to want. Can I not be proud of my anxiety because it pushes me to do my best? Easier said than done.

2. But control is not an option

Unfortunately for my brain, control at this scale is simply not an option.

There are far too many moving parts to this operation:

• 5,000km of cycling
• 97 participants with all their own anxieties and excitements
• 66 days and nights
• 21 allergies or pre-existing medical conditions + Covid
• 10 countries with 9 border crossings
• 1 temperamental van 🙏

So, if control is not an option — what is its opposite?

3. The opposite to control is not chaos

The opposite of control is trust.

• Trust in myself to do my best and rise to meet any challenge
• Trust in the people around me to do the same
• Trust in nature and the underpinning logic of the cosmos

Okay, so that last one is a little out there, but hopefully you know what I mean.

In the context of a dying star, our pettifogging anxieties seem a little insignificant, don’t they?

Whatever will be, will be and, don’t you see, it’s all perfect?

Anxiety arrives, with bugle horn and crack of whip, only when we lose our trust.

Trust

Of course, trust could (and perhaps one day should) be a whole post in itself — what is trust and how can we make more of it?

One thing I know for sure is that this bike ride generates exactly the right conditions for trust to thrive.

A bunch of people, each with unique strengths, surrendering to a unquantifiable, indefinable challenge far bigger than any individual, succeeding only together.

We’re ready.

~

I hope that this exploration of my stress has been a little helpful for you too.

If you’re seeing the connection between this post and my post about responsibility the other week, then ten points to you. Responsibility is an energy: distribute it wisely and you’ll power a whole network.

It’s worth noting that there are plenty of other good ways to manage stress, like going outside for exercise and eating a diet rich in prebiotic and probiotic foods.

Finally: if you’re crazy stressed, then please ask someone you (yep) trust for support.

We imagine responsibility as a weight.

This imagined foe finds expression in the metaphorical language we all use.

Responsibility is something we hold, bear, carry or shoulder. Responsibility is a heavy, weighty thing that can be handed over, dodged or ducked.

Sometimes responsibility even falls on us.

No wonder that, in our most solemn moments of responsibility, we speak — quite literally — of the ‘gravity’ of the situation.

This Is A Terrible Metaphor

Responsibility doesn’t behave like a weight.

A weight on your shoulders will always slow you down, drag you down, bring you down.

But responsibility doesn’t always feel like that, does it? Hell — I don’t think it even often feels like that.

If responsibility were a force (metaphorically speaking), then it wouldn’t be gravity.

Most of the time, responsibility is empowering: it gives us the energy and motivation we need to achieve cool things.

I’m sure you can think of many times in the past when someone handed over responsibility to you — and it made you feel lighter, stronger, faster, energised, electrified and empowered.

The Thing Got Done. Right?

Far from being a gravitational, weight-like thing, responsibility is much more like a vitalising force that we absorb, store, conduct or distribute.

Yep: a better energetic metaphor for responsibility is electricity.

One idiomatic hint that responsibility truly is more electrical than gravitational: we say that the person responsible for a task is the person ‘in charge’. I found this amusing.

Where a cumbrous weight will always slow us down, electricity, when it’s hooked up right, can grant us superhuman speed — like one of those mad scooters you get nowadays.

Okay, cool. So we’re agreed that responsibility isn’t a weight, but an electricomagnetic energy. Where does that lead us?

The Party Balloon Of Expectation

We can imagine now that the responsibility for any given task is generated energetically from the expectations and obligations involved, like the build-up of static between a woolly jumper (obligations) and a party balloon (expectations).

The more friction between obligation and expectation, the bigger the metaphorical electrostatic charge and the bigger the energetic potential of responsibility.

Energy = exciting!

Yes, but a word of warning too.

Once generated, that high charge of responsibility can suddenly seem scarily high voltage.

Oh shit. A hundred people at the party and no balloons.

Even more worryingly: all the energy we’ve generated between obligations and expectations has a worrying propensity to be discharged through the nearest conductive surface.

Us.

This is exactly like — you see where I’m going — electricity.

Yesterday, for example, a 25,000 volt overhead cable fell onto a Birmingham railway line, causing ‘a spectacular fire with sparks, flames and smoke’.

That’s a lot of electrons spurting very quickly out of a literal fire hose.

Anyway. Don’t be scared. This is the wont of electrical charges, the world over, from time immemorial. This is the natural order of things.

And such is responsibility.

If you find yourself as the only conductive surface for an enormous electrostatic fire hose of responsibility, then god help you.

In plainer English: if you try to conduct all that responsibility through yourself, all alone, then you’re going to fry.

Like a tree caught in a flash of lightning, you’re going to burn out.

Stretching The Metaphor

Watching that touch-it-and-you-die 25,000 volt cable thrash around Birmingham of a summer’s day, it can seem a bit wild to remember that humans willingly generate electricity.

Oodles and oodles of the stuff.

Just today, just in the UK, humans have generated 608.3 gigawatt-hours.

For scale, imagine the UK is a building site and imagine that everyone on that building site has been working hard for eight hours.

In order to get through 608.3 gigawatt-hours of energy, that building site would need as many builders as India has people.

I’m not sure that scale model helped, but the point is that we generate a huge amount of power in this country and yet, somehow, we share it around, more or less safely (Birmingham railway notwithstanding) and then use it to do loads of really cool stuff like typing emails to strangers on the Internet when really we should be stuffing our faces with birthday banana bread.

Given how destructive electricity can be, isn’t that marvellous?

Responsibility is the same.

We generate oodles and oodles of the stuff, every day of our lives, because it’s a powerful motivating force that helps us do loads of really cool stuff.

Yes, it can turn us into charred steak quicker than you could say ‘medium-rare’ — but only if we try to absorb it alone or conduct too much all at once.

If instead, like the national grid, we find a way to distribute that energy — share it with friends, colleagues, sauna buddies — then together we can power all manner of wondrous things.

End of metaphor.

Responsibility is a powerful force: share it around or you’ll get fried.

Or, to wilfully paraphrase Spider-Man:

With great responsibility comes great responsibility.

Thank you.

~

Etymological Side Note: What’s response got to do with responsibility?

According to the OED, a response was, originally, the answer given to a question asked of an oracle. A response is a reply: an answer.

If you are responsible, then you are the one answerable for that duty: you’re accountable.

~

Photos: Okai Vehicles, Felix Mittermeier and Johannes Plenio

Yesterday I finished reading The Men’s Group Manual by Clyde Henry. I’m not a member of a men’s group and I can’t really imagine joining, much less starting one right now, except perhaps in some kind of Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Nevertheless, I got a lot out of reading the book because it explains, as if to idiots, the principles of non-violent communication and gives clear instructions on how to build constructive conversations, designed to bond human beings as equals.

One of the suggested meeting topics in the book was for each man to draw the floor plan of a boyhood home. It’s a powerful exercise (for all genders, I’m sure) that can unearth long-buried memories.

I can get with that.

Sometimes, on the threshold of sleep, I imagine myself an invisible, weightless spirit-bird, flying over and around old homes, swooping between floors to explore each before rising starward again. Beats Netflix for me.

Anyway, at the end of the floor plan exercise instructions, Clyde Henry suggests a variation where everyone draws their ‘perfect dwelling’.

Henry doesn’t offer any interpretation of this idea, but it seems to me that, rather than throwing us back on our childhood, this variation could help us visualise, with pen and paper, a dreamy future.

As someone who dwells all too often in the abstract, the pen-and-paper practicality struck me as an important part of an important tool that might help me do something I’ve never done before…

Future Visualisation

How do you see your life in five years?

At first pass, this doesn’t seem like a tricky question. It’s the sort of question your careers advisor at school would ask and you’d roll your eyes and be like ‘Ugh, I’m gonna be dead by then. SO OLD.’

But when AW3T asked me this exact question a week ago, I realised that, aside from the increasingly teenagery ‘dead by then’ answer, I hadn’t a clue. Not a Scooby.

It turns out that, while some people can’t keep their mind’s eye off their Five/Ten/Fifty Year Plan, some people can scarcely imagine breakfast tomorrow, let alone the second middle name of their third grandchild-to-be.

(Side note: Is this a symptom of Man Sloth Mode? I suspect it may be.)

If you’ve got It All Planned Out, you can probably skip today’s story.

But if you’re stuck with me in the Breakfast Club — and, to be fair, that’s probably at least a quarter of you — then let’s crack on and find our futures.

(Crumpets are a good shout tomorrow, btw.)

In A Minute: Clyde Henry’s Floor Plan Task

But first, let’s be clear: humans are bad at imagining the future.

When we’re asked to imagine the future, we usually look around at what life we’re currently living, tweak it so it’s not raining quite so heavily, and that’s us.

And we’re particularly bad at imagining our own futures.

Jane McGonigal, lead author on the afore-pictured American Future Gap survey, explained it thusly in a 2017 article for Slate:

Typically, when you think about yourself, a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, powers up. When you think about other people, it powers down. And if you feel like you don’t have anything in common with the people you’re thinking about? The MPFC activates even less.

The further out in time you try to imagine your own life, the less activation you show in the MPFC. In other words, your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.

Furthermore, and as if that wasn’t enough, as we imagine increasingly distant futures, our imaginings become commensurately vague.

(This is called Construal Theory. There’s no need for you to know that, but I spent ages reading about it for this story so now it’s your problem.)

This explains why, sure, I can plan complex things like cycling from Glasgow to Athens with 100 other humans, but my time horizon is six months tops.

So, while I have a very clear idea of what I’ll be doing between now and October, I couldn’t begin to describe what my life might look like in a year, much less five or ten years.

Imagining May 2023 is, for me, like trying to cloud-watch on a foggy day. Through steamed-up glasses.

Finally: Clyde Henry’s Floor Plan Task

And here is where we come back around to Clyde Henry’s floor plan task because marks made in ink on paper are both imaginative and practical.

That’s exactly why architects use both pen and paper to make detailed plans that bring into being actual houses with plumbing and cavity insulation. They don’t just vaguely tell builders to sort of, you know, build, like, a house with, er, walls and stuff, I guess?

And we in the Breakfast Club can use the same physical properties of pen and paper to force ourselves out of a purely hypothetical fantasy realm and into the realm of reality.

So I took half an hour and sketched.

Looking down at my floor plan sketch, I can see the light breaking over the woods and falling onto my lap as I lie drowsy in the bay window.

Standing up and pushing open the French windows, I can smell the resin of the wood and hear the far-off songs of swallow and stream.

I can feel the cool grass against my bare feet, and the heat of split logs, as I mooch over to the fire pit, just in time to take a s’more, flame grilled à point, from the outstretched hand of a friend.

There.

I have succeeded. I have visualised a future for myself that goes far beyond the here and now, beyond the six-month horizon. For this dream dwelling is surely situated, at bare minimum, five years from today.

But, dear Breakfast Clubbers, visualisation is only the start because now it’s time for the easy part…

Ice Cream Execution

Why do I call this the easy part? Because we’re Breakfast Clubbers.

We don’t have any problem with executing a plan in the here and now. We just never had a plan — until now.

Now we have our floor plan.

Okay, okay. There’s probably a bit more to it than that.

We might have to practise our floor planning over and over again before our futures take on the kind of single-minded clarity that we need to feel confidence in our vision.

But let’s give ourselves a pat on the back today. Until this morning, we’d never even had the confidence to picture our futures, let alone create them. Now at least we know how it’s done.

It takes courage to first imagine and then bring into being a life significantly different to the one you’re currently heavily invested in.

Courage, that is, or — favourite word claxon — audacity.

If audacity is a muscle you need to build, see also: The Best Things In Life Are Audacious and Audacity Is Our Only Option. I think I’m due a re-read as well.

More Ideas For Future Visualisation

• Write down your task-by-task schedule from a dream day in 2027, complete with meal plans (don’t forget to brush your teeth).
• Flip through a prospectus from a university, adult education college or anywhere else that sells future selves. Stop when something jumps out at you. Read the description carefully. What makes you connect to this future?
• Make a scissors-and-glue collage of stuff that whispers big dreams to you. Whatever you do, don’t use a computer — print if you find something online.
• Take a psychedelic and make notes.
• Finally: use FutureMe to send your visualisations to yourself in a year’s time.

~

Thanks to A3WT for the gentle prod that resulted in the foregoing and, perhaps, the going forth.

No, I’m not wading into The Pronoun Wars. (Scrap ‘em all. More than half of the world’s langauges don’t have gender markers anyway.) This is something else…

Next time you’re having a conversation, notice what pronouns you’re using and think about what that might mean about your state of mind.

Here are some suggestions:

Saying ‘I’ a lot

Is this really all about you? Are you self-obsessed or self-reflective? Maybe stop in a second and ask the other person, ‘How about you? What do you think?’

Saying ‘You’ a lot

Are you arguing or accusing? Can you flip this around? ‘I feel such-and-such when whatever-happens.’

Saying ‘He/She/They’ a lot

Are you bitching about someone? Would you say this to their face? How would they respond if you did? Speak for them and add their defence to the conversation.

Saying ‘They’ a lot

Are you blaming an ill-defined other? ‘Experts’, ‘Tories’, ‘Gardeners With Fucking Leafblowers’. Can you be more specific? Can you take responsibility instead?

Using personal names a lot

Are you using personal names to respect or censure? Does it feel intimate or impersonal?

I hold strong opinions. Dangerously strong opinions.

The way that the human brain works, strong opinions like mine can lead to political breakdown, financial collapse and even death 💀

Most human beings hold at least a few strong opinions thanks to something called the confirmation bias. Duh, duh, DUH.

Because of, I dunno, evolution or something, our mystical skull goo (or ‘brain’) automagically seeks and celebrates evidence that supports our entrenched beliefs and rubbishes and discards evidence that contradicts them.

For example:

• Confirmation bias in politics leads to polarisation of opinion and, ultimately, to political breakdown and events like the storming of the Capitol in the United States on January 6 2021.
• In finance, confirmation bias leads to overconfidence and lower investment returns as traders overestimate their market knowledge and overlook contrary information about their portfolio.
• The Covid-19 pandemic is a huge (and inadvertent, I should hastily add) social experiment in the effects of confirmation bias on our health, as misinformation and misperceptions of the safety and efficacy of vaccines become self-reinforcing and lead to many more of us dying avoidable deaths.

(PSA: In the first half of 2021, Covid-19 was the cause of death in 37.4 percent of all unvaccinated people in the UK. Among those who chose to get two shots of a vaccine, the Covid-19 death rate was 0.8 percent. But, then again, this data is from the government-funded Office of National Statistics so you can magically confirmation bias that away too!)

Just Plain Dumb

But even worse than political breakdown, financial collapse and death is succumbing to the Dunning-Kruger effect:

Dumb people think they’re smart.

Or, as David Dunning and Justin Kruger wrote in their original 1999 paper:

Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Smackdown. You do not want to get on the wrong side of Messrs Dunning and Kruger.

Follow up research on the Dunning-Kruger effect has since expanded the phenomenon to take in its flipside too:

Smart people think they’re dumb.

The more one learns, the more one realises how much more one has to learn, which leads high achievers to underestimate their level in comparison to the rest of us dumb-asses.

You see this a lot. Smart or skilful people tend to come with a healthy dose of humility. As ancient philosophy MVP Socrates apparently said:

What I do not know, I do not think I know either.

Or, as twenty-first century tennis MVP Rafael Nadal put it:

Humility is the recognition of your limitations. I always work with a goal, and the goal is to improve as a player and as a person.

This is the same Rafael Nadal who has won an all-time high 21 Grand Slam tournaments, the crowning achievement in tennis. What improvement? What limitations?

So whenever you notice yourself holding the sharp end of a strong opinion, take a minute.

Is the strength of your opinion really justified? Like, really justified.

Or are you just plain dumb?

Now: Be Like The Tree

But strong opinions don’t have to mean inflexible opinions.

If I can use a shitty metaphor that’ll break down in five minutes: imagine a hurricane ripping through your town. Sorry.

A skyscraper has a strong, inflexible opinion. It’s going dowwwwn. But a tree has a strong, but flexible opinion. It’s going to survive the storm by bending with the wind.

So be like the tree.

Strong opinions are fine — good, even — I will strenuously defend my strong opinion about the right of all beings to free movement across the planet. Go on: I dare you!

But strong opinions shouldn’t be like a badly constructed skyscraper in a hurricane. They should be re-examined in the light of new information, contrary viewpoints and changing circumstances. Like a tree.

(Told you it’d break down in five minutes.)

Always Right In An Infinite Universe

One of the wisest books I’ve read recently is Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey.

(Tl;dr: Poverty Safari is an attempt to describe how brains, humans, families and communities operate under conditions of financial scarcity.

It’s the anthropological-autobiographical partner to the more academic Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by psychologist Eldar Shafir and economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and you can read an updated summary of the research here.)

In the latter pages of Poverty Safari, McGarvey addresses the apparent inability for political parties to work together to solve really important systemic problems like poverty.

McGarvey points the finger squarely at the confirmation bias and our desperate need to be right, no matter what the dire social consequences:

In a global civilisation dogged by political and religious tribalism, occasionally asking ourselves where we may be mistaken becomes a radical political act.

Isn’t it a bit convenient that we, the ‘good guys’, always find ourselves not only on the right side of history but also on the right side of every argument on the right side of history?

In an infinite universe, on a planet that has existed for billions of years, the chances of us being right about everything are slim, surely?

[…] There’s arguably more virtue in admitting you’re mistaken and correcting your course, than there is in stubbornly believing you haven’t been wrong since you were a teenager.

Amen.

So (finally) here’s a list of:

• 9 things I once strongly believed and now completely don’t.
• 9 things I strongly believe today, but suspect I might not in the future.
• 9 things I strongly believe today, but am actively canvassing for contradiction — help me out, won’t you?

I suspect that sharing these beliefs should come with some sort of a trigger warning so please don’t take them too much to heart.

My point here is more to recognise where I now strongly disagree with my past self. And you can ask yourself the same question.

9 Things I Once Strongly Believed And Now Completely DON’T

1. Drugs are bad and will lead to addiction, destitution, imprisonment and an early grave. Drug users are, therefore, Bad People to be greatly feared. (Remember: these are opinions that I now strongly disagree with!)
2. Nation states are a sensible way of organising the different human communities of the world and borders must be protected against illegal intrusion.
3. The police service is unimpeachable. Police officers know the law and will always enforce it fairly. (Also applies to law courts and politicians.)
4. Morally and ethically, there is such a thing as Right and Wrong.
5. There is only one type of intelligence — the one that I’m good at.
6. When people let me down, turn me down or do me down, it’s probably because I’m in some way an awful person.
7. Being well-travelled is about how many countries you’ve visited.
8. Meat and dairy are an essential part of a healthy diet, or at least of a healthy diet for me.
9. I sleep badly 99.9 percent of the time. (It’s actually 100 percent — nah, only kidding. Compared to some horror stories I hear, I sleep really well. Sorry.)

9 Things I Strongly Believe Today, But Suspect I Might Not In The Future

1. Robots and A.I. — ughhhh. Let me talk to a human! While we’re here: I strongly believe that we’re not living in a computer simulation. I’m probably wrong.
2. Everything is relative. Morality, ethics, opinions, abilities, knowledge, whatever — it’s all relative. So back off.
3. I’m a handsome clever clogs.
4. I’m in great health and will probably live forever.
5. I’m crap at music.
6. I despise potato crisps or any crisp-like appetiser, such as poppadoms or Chinese crackers.
7. ‘Everything is amazing and no one is happy.’ I hope I always believe the first half of that quote and I really hope that, magically, everyone in the whole wide world contradicts me on the second half.
8. For most people, looking at the weather forecast is a total waste of time. We’re in the UK, you’re going to need a raincoat.
9. I don’t deserve enduring happiness in my relationships. Because that would be too easy.

9 Things I Strongly Believe Today, But Am Actively Canvassing For Contradiction

1. Please can everyone stop voting Tory for a second? Thanks.
2. Authentic connection is the single most important thing we can do for each other and for the planet that we live on. That could mean going for a muddy walk in nature or sharing a ribald laugh with a stranger.
3. Every second I spend in front of a screen instead of outside in nature is killing me a little bit.
4. Reading a physical book, however, is probably the best way of building our empathy muscles to help us with #2. Also: books we can read outside.
5. Fuck borders.
6. Going on adventures is a wonderful thing to do and another way to build authentic connection with people and place.
7. The mind is a body and needs stimulation, touch and movement.
8. All property should be cooperatively owned. End landlords.
9. Saunas.

Now, over to you — how wrong am I? And how wrong have you been?!

~

Thanks to AT for the motivation to turn this nagging thought into a story.

Today I’m going to build on everything that I wrote last week, encorporating as many of your wonderful contributions as I can.

In fact, last Saturday, I got so excited by your responses that I had to make a load of changes to the original article, so please go and read that if you haven’t already.

Then come back for more diaries.

What’s In A Name: Man Sloth Mode? Secondary Carer Sloth Mode? Drive Care / Take Care?

One of the things that surprised me about the comments on last week’s email was how many women said that they had noticed themselves slipping into man sloth mode — to the point where a friend asked if they could drop the ‘man’ bit altogether.

Of course you can — it’s yours!

Before delving into the terminology, it’s worth saying that I don’t necessarily believe these women when they say they go into what I called man sloth mode.

I’m well aware that women habitually underestimate their performance compared to men.

So, while I accept that women (being human) can and do go into some sort of sloth mode, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as common and nowhere near as acute as the male strand that I discussed last week.

Aaaaanyway, that aside, what was particularly interesting was under what circumstances people told me they go into sloth mode.

Just as men tend to sloth mode when a woman is there to take care of all the life admin, so it seems that adults of all genders can easily slip into sloth mode when they go back to their parents’ for the weekend.

Sound familiar?

Having just spent a week with family, I can relate. But I’m getting better at noticing man sloth mode and acting before it impacts too badly on other people. (And I still think you’re overpraising when I fill the dishwasher, mum 😂)

Fascinatingly, I also got an email from a friend who is part of a two-mum family. They described how one person, who they call the primary carer, often carries the ‘emotional and functional weight’ for everyone in the family unit.

‘Traditionally,’ my friend wrote, ‘it’s the Dad that slips into Man Sloth Mode, but take out those genders and you’re left with secondary carer sloth mode.’

My friend also made a brilliant distinction between what she called ‘drive care’ and ‘take care’ modes — and how she and her partner have bounced back and forth between the two as they’ve matured.

If I’ve understood correctly:

• Drive care = someone who sees and actively straightens out the chaos of life: a person who cares
• Take care = someone who would rather passively adapt themselves to the chaos of life: a person who receives or benefits from care

I love how this distinction acknowledges that we can find ourselves more or less in one or the other mode at different times and in different contexts in our lives.

As children, naturally, we are take carers. As parents, naturally, we are drive carers.

Within the parental bubble, it is common for one or other of the partners to take the more active primary care role. And I think the same is true for relationships without children: a primary carer emerges. Which sucks.

So: what do you think about dropping the man from man sloth mode? What about my friend’s secondary carer sloth mode and the drive and take care distinction?

Oooh — talking of inspired new terminology. How about this, from the irrepressible M.C.:

Man sloth dodging (noun, verb): Man sloth dodging is when the female partner of one man makes direct contact with the female partner of another man in order to guarantee the successful and timely arrangement of social plans. 🤣

So good. More please!

Utimately, the point here is to develop language that facilitates conversations. Have we done that? Maybe. Can we go further? Definitely.

Psychological Fragility And The Male Response

The response to last week’s newsletter was genuinely wonderful. I loved getting screenshots of when you shared it with friends. 😍

But I couldn’t help noticing that the strongest responses were from women. Largely in the form of: YES, THANK YOU FOR NOTICING.

I feel a bit of fraud, given that ninety percent of the ideas behind man sloth mode were smuggled away from conversations I’ve had with women.

Nonetheless, it’s gratifying to hear that I nailed one of the purposes of the article: to really hear and validate what other people are saying.

Ultimately, however, I wrote this whole thing for men — to help myself and other males take responsibility for the direction of our lives and our relationships — so it’s their reaction and response that I’m most worried about.

The tricky thing here is that men tend to be, in the words of one friend I spoke to last week, ‘psychologically fragile’. After all, that’s why primary carers feel they have to overpraise their male partners and colleagues for the slightest cooperative behaviour.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like we men don’t tend to deal well with our flaws being pointed out, nor with other people providing us with a solution that we haven’t come up with by ourselves (and subsequently been overpraised for our cleverness).

I have essentially dodged this problem by coming up with a solution (man sloth mode) for which I have been acknowledged and praised (again: thank you). This assuages my ego and paves the way for me to be a bit better.

But I want to find an accessible way for everyone to talk about these problems.

A female friend of mine told me that she’d love to send my article to a bunch of the men in her life, but was a little nervous about how it might be received, as a ‘personal slight’ or even ‘man-hating’.

So how do we reach men?

Do you know, I think the answer might be…

The Sweaty Stranger In The Sweaty Sauna

Bear with me.

Last weekend, I shared a sauna with a lovely chap called Ren.

We chatted about this and that: how awkward a sweaty silence can be in a sauna, how nice it is to chat to strangers, even if they’re sweaty, stories of past sweaty sauna escapades, and so on.

Then, because we were two sweaty men sitting on a sweaty bench in eighty degree heat, I decided to broach the topic of last week’s newsletter.

This was the first time I’d chatted to a total stranger about these ideas and I was unsure what to expect from a half-naked sweaty man in his mid-fifties.

Reader, Ren practically slipped off his bench with enthusiasm.

Ren’s father had died when he was very young, so was brought up by his mother. His mother, as it happened, was a feminist and determined to make sure that her son did his share of the housework.

Ren cleaned the toilets, did the dishes and the mopping, as well as the cooking. By the time he was an adult, Ren could actually function as, well, as an adult.

He only realised this was weird when he went to university and all his peers were, to put it bluntly, slobs.

Now happily married with two kids, Ren boasts that he does seventy percent of the housework at home, simply because, having started at such a young age, he’s better at it than his wife.

Ren is living, breathing, sweating proof that boys can learn this stuff, if only we teach them.

‘Kids,’ Ren tells me, ‘pick up on your actions, not your words.’

‘You think you’re doing your kid a favour by not making them do the washing up, but you’re not,’ Ren says, mopping his brow. ‘You’re only saving up problems for them later in life.’

YES.

Boys need adult householding skills not only for the bloody obvious reasons like hygeine and diet, but also for the sake of their adult relationships.

Ren was taken aback when he got to university and realised that all the other young men were slobs, but he was delighted to find that his domestic talents were valuable, attractive — sexy even.

Man Sloth Mode ≠ Sexy

Guys: science tells us that men who do the dishes have more sex.

Actually, there’s nuance here and the nuance starts badly.

‘Traditional’ gender conventions have actually been found to increase the amount of sex had by heterosexual couples.

Booooo.

The explanation for this is that traditional ‘sexual scripts’ of ‘male sexual control’ privilege male sexual desire and men, basically, want to have loads of sex. So that’s what happens.

But, as the adults among you have probably noticed by now, there’s a lot more to our ‘sexual scripts’ than this.

The interlinked variables that go into good sex were unpicked in a 2019 study by Daniel L. Carlson of the University of Utah and Brian Soller at the University of New Mexico.

Here’s a fun picture of what they found:

So, yes: more egalitarian attitudes to domestic and paid labour leads to a reduction in sexual frequency, through the mechanism of male sexual control.

As I said: boooooo.

But, if you study the model closely, you can see that male sexual control comes at a cost in communication. Weird. The more the male is in command of the sexual situation, the less likely they are to communicate with their partner.

Communication was measured, quite simply, using the following question:

When you have had a particularly difficult or bad day at work or in your daily activities, what is the percent chance that you will tell [PARTNER] about what is going on?

The more egalitarian each partner’s attitude towards work, the more likely they were to report a high percentage and actually discuss their problems, together. Honey, how was your day?

That sounds like a nice thing to have in a relationship. But it’s got nothing to do with sex — or has it? Yes.

Carlson and Soller found that, with higher scores for communication, came higher scores of ‘sexual self-efficacy’ — for both male and female. The more men and women talk to each other, the more sexually self-efficacious they become.

Sexual self-efficacy is sexual empowerment. You can play along at home by (strongly) agreeing or (strongly) disagreeing with these statements:

If my sexual activity is not satisfying, there is little I can do to improve the situation.

I feel that it is difficult to get my [PARTNER] to do what makes me feel good during sex.

If our birth control choice is not satisfactory, there is little I can do to improve the situation.

Gross, huh?

Now here’s the clever part: as female sexual self-efficacy rises, so does sexual frequency for everyone.

Et voilá!

➡️ Egalitarian attitudes towards domestic and paid labour
➡️ Better partner communication between male and female
➡️ Higher women’s sexual self-efficacy
➡️ Higher sexual frequency 🔛

But wait — there’s more!

In a 2015 study of first-time parents (a role that is heavy on household labour), researchers found that more equal division of labour (presumably excluding the actual birth labour) led to greater sexual satisfaction for mothers and greater sense of romance for fathers. Aww…

Frankly, nothing I’ve said here should come as a surprise. Tired, overworked, annoyed women are unlikely to find a sloth man sexually attractive or, for that matter, have the energy or even the free time (which is, incidentally, gendered) for sex.

And yet, at the risk of slapping you in the face with stating-the-bleeding-obvious research one too many times…

In 2017 Swedish researchers found evidence that relationships where there is an unequal division of domestic labour, combined with a general sense of entitlement among men, are — BREAKING NEWS — liable to end in a breakup.

Right. That’s enough now.

Are you a man? Do you enforce and enact traditional sexual scripts of male sexual control to get your rocks off? Okaaay… And how’s that working out for you?

End On A Positive

So what now?

Well, besides a little idea I have for setting up a sweaty sauna men’s group, now I go for a quick walk and then I go to bed.

But before I disappear, one of the most thoughtful responses I got to last week’s email included a ‘not yet fully-formed thought’ about the role of positive self talk in man sloth mode.

My email last week might have made it sound like there was a lot of work to do. And there is. But it’s important to focus on the positive and acknowledge when we are doing our best.

The good news is that every moment we live between now and our death is another moment to do our best. So let’s not beat ourselves up when we slip-slide; let’s just keep on noticing when we do.

I will finish now by repeating my four point, work-in-progress strategy to draw ourselves out of whatever we call this sloth mode of being:

1. Notice yourself slipping into man sloth mode. If you’re not sure when this happens, look closely at the symptoms listed at the top of my original article — and remember that there are two strains of the disease (social and work)
2. Call yourself out publicly and explain what’s going on (without being boring or attention seeking). At first, acknowledging man sloth mode out loud will really help, but the ultimate goal is to effortlessly skip from stage one directly to stage three. (Who knows: stage one might one day miraculously vanish altogether…)
3. Seize the initiative. Take positive action to drive yourself out of man sloth mode. If you genuinely can’t think of anything to do, simply ask how you can help and listen to the answer. WARNING: If you find the other person instinctively micro-managing your contribution, don’t get annoyed. Remember that they might well be used to dealing with man sloths as if they were children. Politely request that they step back: you’ve got this.
4. If you discovered in stage three a pretty basic life skill that you couldn’t do without a lot of help, go onto the internet and learn how it’s done properly. Do not waste other people’s time: they are not your personal life trainer. If you regularly find yourself unable to think of helpful things to do, then spend more time observing the things that other people do to be helpful. Copy them.

~

Huge, huge thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s article and all the conversations that have contributed to this one. Please share your experiences and let’s keep thinking and acting on this!

Science might say that laughter releases endorphins that support your immune system, can provide a palliative to long term illness, moderate sensations of intense pain and reduce your risk heart disease by relaxing your arteries.

Journalists around the world have celebrated this vindication of the pernicious claim that ‘laughter is the best medicine’.

It’s all lies.

When you have an intercostal muscle injury, laughter is manifestly not the best medicine.

In this case, laughter is, almost literally, side-splitting.

If humans have personalities, so do muscles. Some are extroverts, showing off their range and power, like the hamstrings or the biceps, making their presence felt with almost every movement of your body.

But some are introverts, happiest when unnoticed and, like the muscles of the eyeball or the omohyoid, scarcely ever consciously felt — until something goes wrong. Then: beware the quiet ones.

The intercostal muscles of the rib cage are introverts.

Their job is to help you breathe by expanding and contracting the rib cage so that the lungs beneath can fill and empty of air.

In the same way that a hamstring injury doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop walking, so too an intercostal injury means that you don’t necessarily have to stop breathing.

What it does mean (in both cases) is that you should avoid explosive exercise.

In the case of a hamstring injury, now is not the right time to go sprinting.

In the case of an intercostal injury, now is not the right time for the six bodily functions that make life worth living:

1. Yawning before sleep
2. Hiccups after drinking
3. Burps after eating
4. Laughter with joy
5. Sighing in peace and contentment
6. Sneezing

Is there a more important muscle group than the one that helps suck in the air, not only of survival, but of life?

It started with a hiccup

It all started with a hiccup. Not a particularly large or loud one, just a normal hiccup on a hilltop near (appropriately enough) Rudenoise in France.

I felt a twinge in my side, but nothing more. The next day the twinge grew a little worse, but nothing insurmountable. I’d also pulled a muscle in my calf on the same walk. No big deal. I can walk it off.

The problems really started on Friday night, when Tim and I started trawling through our back catalogue of Abandoned Rugs songs.

There are many types of laughter. Some laughter is a social lubricant, either totally or partially under conscious control. This kind of laughter is fine.

But there is a laughter that is orders of magnitude more violent, more explosive and almost completely involuntary. More like a sneeze, in other words. This is what the songs we made with Abandoned Rugs do to me.

Now, these songs won’t necessarily make you laugh quite as much as they make me laugh. But imagine being six years old again. Go back to your most childish, playful self.

Now give your inner child unfettered access to an array of musical instruments, recording equipment and one very talented musician.

If I were to die and the only artefact to survive the centuries, from all my decades of creative work, was ‘Walking In The Area’ by Abandoned Rugs, I would die contented.

The magic of Christmas reduced to the banality of boredom and the sheer absurdity of trusting me (of all people) with the parody of a famous choral soprano leaves me helpless.

I’m standing on the grass,
I’m standing near the garden shed…

Professionally, I’m sure I’ve done better work, but nothing so reliably reduces me, personally, to paroxysms of laughter.

Unfortunately, such laughter rips into my intercostal muscles with uncontrollable and terrible force.

Laughing myself to death

The next day I catch the train down to Basque country. On Saturday night, I sleep fitfully and wake up almost in tears, unable to even roll over to get out of bed.

Luckily, I’m staying with a GP and, with the help of some serious Spanish painkillers, bought to ease my friend through the Camino, I feel much better on Monday and Tuesday — as long as I don’t go much further than a polite chuckle.

On Wednesday, however, I arrive in Lisbon. For some reason I decide not to take any painkillers. Despite the fact that I am here to spend a week with my comedy writing partner Beth Granville and our friends, writing funny jokes that make people laugh uncontrollably.

It’s a disaster. I manage to hold it together enough to survive the first course at dinner. Then I share a story about an ex, a bath and a game of chess…

Doubled over in the restaurant, struggling to breathe, not because I’m overcome by laughter, but because my lungs are unable to expand enough to draw oxygen into my blood cells through the pain.

It’s at this point that I wonder whether laughing oneself to death is a thing.

The Internet isn’t reassuring on this point. Aside from kuru, a devastatingly sad ‘laughing sickness’ caused by the consumption of diseased human brains, there are multiple cases of cardiac arrest caused by excessive fits of laughing:

Asphyxiation caused by laughter leads the body to shut down from the lack of oxygen.

I must remember to keep taking painkillers.

Personality is physicality

I sincerely hope that you never have to spend time with an injured intercostal muscle, but there is a broader lesson here, one that I hope everyone can sit with today.

The lesson is: personality is physicality.

I know this only too well from my experiences with my thyroid. An underactive thyroid makes you cold, tired and unable to focus. Not the best conversationalist. Physicality is personality.

In the same way, with an injured intercostal, I can feel myself consciously measuring my responses to other people. It’s simply too painful to let go and laugh with my friends. I can do a half-hearted chuckle — but who wants that?

I notice that I’m holding back from saying things that I know the other people will find funny because I can’t risk the laughter tripping my muscles. It’s a whole new way of being in the world (and a bit of a shit one). Personality is physicality.

In the same way that mountains, valleys and the ocean play a decisive role in our experience of clouds or sunshine, so too does the morphology of our bodies influence our own psychological weather.

There’s no point ignoring the basic principles of our existence, our facticity.

If you’re feeling irritable, maybe you need to be kinder to yourself. Stop pushing so hard. Ease off for a minute. Your body needs a break and your mind is responding with antisocial behaviour, in the hope that you’ll isolate and rest.

And vice-versa. You might, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, meet today with ‘inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men’. Maybe they’re suffering from a twisted omohyoid. Try empathy before anger.

Eager readers among you will remember that, in 2021, I vowed to accomplish and then did indeed accomplish 100 ‘Days of Adventure’.

The experiment, then, was a success: the stated objective, to have ‘a lot more’ adventures, was achieved.

But getting outside more isn’t what made the experiment a success. What made the experiment a success was the success of the experimental method.

(Last week, a friend and reader said that he was never quite sure whether he understood my emails: with sentences like the preceding, I concede his point.)

Let me explain.

In 1747, the ship’s doctor of HMS Salisbury, James Lind, decided to compare six different treatments of scurvy, the bloody scourge of sailors long at sea. Some were given cider, some were given sulfuric acid. Some were given oranges and lemons.

In the process, Lind learned how to cure scurvy (it wasn’t the cider, sad face). That was useful, sure, but not nearly as useful as simultaneously proving the efficacy of a well-conducted clinical trial.

I’m not saying that 100 Days of Adventure was a well-conducted clinical trial, but it was a trial with a positive outcome and, like James Lind’s scientific successors, I can work backwards to isolate the elements of the trial that supported its happy ending.

Based on my reading of immortal business management truisms, two contenders for contributing elements of success spring to mind:

1. Public accountability thanks to this newsletter
2. Working with a well-defined and measurable goal

On closer reading, I’ve learned that both might well have done more harm than good.

1. Go public — but not too public

I’d assumed that, by talking about my goal in this newsletter, I was being held to account by nearly 300 discerning humans. And I thought that this was a good thing that would help me reach my goal.

Turns out that I was probably wrong.

A 1998 management study found that, while conditions of ‘low accountability’ improve goal performance, conditions of ‘high accountability’ merely encourage people to massage their public image, with no improvement in performance.

In other words: with the eyes of the world upon you, you’re more likely to hide the failures and emphasise the positives.

But is this newsletter helpful low accountability or damaging high accountability? Well, it’s hard to say for sure because I don’t have access to the paywalled academic papers…

But perhaps what this newsletter was helping me with was not accountability at all, but commitment.

Thanks to this newsletter, every week last year, I sat down with my calendar and counted up how many Days of Adventure I’d had in the past seven days. On the equinox and solstices, with the changing of every season, I also delved a little deeper and wrote a little more, reflecting on my progress towards my goal through the year.

Perhaps it was this regular commitment to the process that was helping me, rather than the sense that you lot were standing over me, tapping your rulers on the desk, waiting to punish or reward me.

This is certainly what I’ve found in the opening months of 2022. There was no fanfare at the end of 2021: there were no fireworks to celebrate my achievement. All that happened was that I moved onto a new page on my spreadsheet and started again from zero (now on nine).

Goals come and go, but the process endures.

2. Not so SMART

Some of you business types will immediately jump up and tell me why my process was successful: it was because I created a SMART goal.

The 100 Days of Adventure project was:

• Specific. 100. Days. Adventure.
• Measurable. A day either is or is not adventurous and when I hit 100, I’d hit my target.
• Achievable. Before starting, I counted that I’d done 67 the year before, so 100 didn’t seem like too much of a stretch (as long as Covid played along).
• Relevant. 100 Days of Adventure was totally aligned with my personal and professional values and priorities.
• Time-bound. I knew exactly when to begin (1 January 2021) and when to end (31 December 2021).

But what if 100 Days of Adventure succeeded despite the smartness of the SMART acronym? After all, how specific was my definition of a Day of Adventure?

Not very, as it turns out.

My original definition is that a Day of Adventure is a day when I could answer the following question in the affirmative: ‘Did I spend a significant chunk of the day outside on an adventure?’

I immediately followed up this definition with a weasly confession:

‘Outside’ is deliberately wide open because I’m a firm believer that adventure can be found anywhere. ‘Significant chunk’ and ‘an adventure’ are both deliberately relative because DOA is a simple binary measure that should work for everyone.

This definition did mature over the course of the year. At some point, I decided that three hours was unequivocally significant, but I still maintained that great adventures could be had in less and several, particularly as the end-of-year deadline drew closer, were more like two hours.

Compare this to the stringent requirements of the forty practice hikes that I have to log before I can take my professional Hill and Moorland Leader assessment. These require me to do at least four hours of walking time. No ambiguity there — particularly not when all my hikes are timed and logged automatically by GPS.

The lack of wiggle room in this qualification metric means that I missed the deadline for taking my assessment next week. I’ve been out on far more than forty hikes in the hills and moorlands of England, but, analysing the data, I fall six days short.

Although I’ve enjoyed every single practice hike that I’ve done, the reality is that, by the SMART goal measure, I have failed. And that failure makes me feel a bit crap.

But my deliberately, ostentatiously vague definition of a Day of Adventure meant that there was plenty of flexibility in my 2021 goal and — surprise, surprise — I completed the challenge and that made me feel bloody marvellous. What an accomplished human being I am, pat on the back for me!

Two outdoor challenges: one I can put down as a triump, the other I’m forced to consider a failure.

But here’s the thing: the two challenges were identical. By definition, any day that qualified as one of forty practice days for my Hill and Moorland Leader assessment was also one of my 100 Days of Adventure.

They were identical in every detail bar one: one of the goals wasn’t so SMART. And, confusingly, sometimes smart goals aren’t SMART goals.

Suppose I’d only managed 99 Days of Adventure in 2021. What would I have gained from that year of abject failure? Yes, that’s right — a whole heck of a lot!

Similarly, what have I gained so far from only completing 34 of 40 logged hikes for my Hill and Moorland assessment? Yes, that’s also right — a whole heck of a lot!

The flexibility of my definition of Days of Adventure encourages me to go outside and try something new.

The inflexibility of the professional definition of a Hill and Moorland qualifying hike means that I won’t go outside until I can guarantee at least four hours walking.

Last time I was on Dartmoor, I arrived extremely tired. I’d meant to do a four-hour hike that afternoon, but only managed a couple of hours before I quit.

The pressure of an inflexible goal kept me going longer than I should have and, when I got back to the bunkhouse, knowing that the deadline loomed, I went back over the past few years of hiking, desperately massaging the numbers, trying to convince myself that I was ready for assessment.

I was doing exactly what the literature told me I would do. Instead of improving my performance, this condition of high accountability was making me manipulate my public image — I was being lured into lying!

So I stopped scrolling through my hike logbook and went to bed instead.

A couple of quality hikes later, walking off Dartmoor, through the woods on the edge of Fernworthy reservoir, the sun jumping from leaf to leaf through the trees, the chill air plucking at the hair on my bare arms, I realised that I didn’t want this to end; I didn’t want to qualify; I didn’t want to finish my training.

SMART goals are time-bound. SMART goals end.

What more would I accomplish by rushing to accomplish this goal? Nothing. Nothing, no assessment, no qualification could top what the process consistently delivers: these moments of serenity in the woods and on the moors.

There will be no fanfare, no fireworks. All that must happen is to move onto a new page and start again from zero.

Goals come and go, but the process endures.

So, sitting in the car, the chewy scent of mud in my nostrils, I opened up my email and wrote to my assessor, telling him of my gleeful decision to cancel…

Watch this and wonder at the astonishing things we do to find love.

Perhaps you hope that, after the cameras stopped rolling, Mrs Right swam past, eyes popping with hearts, and found her Mr Japanese Puffer Fish.

Or perhaps you wish Mr Fish a lewd and lascivious future, swarmed by budding mates, destined for a stud’s death on his lustful seabed.

But what if Mr Fish goes hungry? What if no female swims past? What if symmetrical sand art is out of fashion with Japanese Puffer Fish?

Down be downhearted.

Wonder at the astonishing things we do to find love and wonder still further at the astonishing artworks that are inspired by love, independent of the sexual success of their creator.

Wonder too at the remarkable capability for intra-species aesthetic appreciation that has brought a loving dose of oxytocin to 475,253 humans — 475,254 including you.

It’s not every artist who can touch such an audience so deeply.

We see you, Japanese Puffer Fish.

Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is a novel famous for its paradoxes. It’s so iconic that the book’s title has become the technical term for a specific type of paradoxical situation in which we’re trapped by the circular logic of rules and regulations.

Catch-22 was inspired by the inexorable bureaucratic logic of war, where war itself is a paradox.

We don’t need long memories to remember preemptive or, even more absurdly, preventive war: wars fought to prevent wars. The US and UK justification of their invasion of Iraq in 2003 springs to mind.

But how can war prevent war?

The paradox deepens, of course. Less than three months into World War One, HG Wells published a book describing that conflict as The War That Will End War:

[It] is a grim satisfaction in our discomforts that we can at last look across the roar and torment of battlefields to the possibility of an organised peace. For this is now a war for peace.

Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war!

But how can a war end war? How can nations wage war for peace?

History tells that the peace won by Wells’ paradoxical war lasted barely twenty years. Among the ruins of the World War Two, another author stretched the paradox.

After George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four, wars are no longer fought for peace. Now, according to the doublethink doctrine, ‘war is peace’. Perpetual conflict abroad is the easiest way for a government disinterested in social progress to foster a distracted sense that all is well at home.

The paradoxical logic of the military-industrial complex

It’s no coincidence that both ‘catch-22’ and ‘doublethink’ have entered the modern lexicon.

We are, all of us, too familiar with the inexorable bureaucratic logic of the military-industrial complex that has become an invisible motor running in the background of our societies.

That motor may be invisible to many of us today, but in 1961 — the year Catch-22 was published — it was evident as a growing threat to liberty and democratic process.

Those are not my words, but the words of President Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War Two and one of the prime architects of D-Day:

[We] must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

War is peace. Security is liberty. Paradox is logic.

Living inside the paradox

For anyone who doubts the modern relevance of these military-industrial paradoxes, ponder for a moment which side of the paradox you’re living through.

The war or the peace? The security or the liberty? The paradox or the logic?

Are you the crazy Orr, blythly flying deadly missions when you could be grounded? Or are you the sane Yossarian, flying deadly missions in terror that ‘they’re trying to kill you’.

Maybe you can’t feel the edges of the paradox because your reality persists entirely on the side of the happy-go-lucky.

It’s probably easiest to illustrate with an example. You’ll have your favourites, but here’s one that’s often on my mind.

Consider the paradox of the asylum seeker.

Paradox I

On one side of the paradox, refugees arriving in the UK after fleeing conflict or persecution will, in the grandiose name of Great British justice, be granted asylum.

On the other side of the paradox, the new Nationality and Borders Bill will ensure no legal ways for would-be refugees to arrive in the UK. And those arriving under the new ‘illegal’ definition will be deported.

It’ll be the most efficient asylum system in the world: a perfectly empty paradoxical asylum system, where the whole category of ‘refugee’ is frozen out by the inexorable logic of Catch-22.

War is peace. Security is liberty. Paradox is logic.

Of course, no system can be perfectly perfect. But our paradoxical asylum system solves that problem with a second paradox.

Paradox II

On one side of this paradox, the UK extends a ‘warm welcome’ to refugees, especially highly qualified refugees from countries where our military action has created a national crisis.

Yet, on the other side of the paradox, any unemployed adult is a drain on our national resources and unemployed foreign nationals should be expelled. In the UK, asylum seekers are not allowed to work.

Asylum seekers should be welcomed and immediately expelled.

War is peace. Security is liberty. Paradox is logic.

We are the catch

Of course, the kicker is that, in Heller’s novel, Yossarian comes to realise that the regulatory trap of Catch-22 is a trap of our own imagination:

Yossarian strode away, cursing Catch-22 vehemently even though he knew there was no such thing. Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon, or burn up.

The paradoxes of seeking asylum are not entirely traps of imagination. Unlike Yossarian, we do have a text we must ridicule, refute, accuse, criticise, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon and / or burn up.

The Nationality and Borders Bill is still being debated by the Lords. If you are a Lord, please choose at least three of Yossarian’s verbs and apply them most vigorously to the infamous text before you.

But, even if you are not a Lord, we are all responsible for the collective imagery of the multiple Catch-22s that appear in stories like ‘some humans are illegal’, ‘the unemployed are a drain on our national resources’ and in any number of doublethink bureaucratic snares whose teeth are invisible to those of us lucky enough to exist entirely in the land of the happy-go-lucky.

I don’t have any big and clever ways out of the paradox. Except to remember that human affairs are perhaps best described by Shakespeare’s Romeo, using, of course, paradox:

Here’s much to do with hate but more with love.

Where you go from here is up to you. Are you crazy enough to be grounded? Are you sane enough to keep flying? Is the answer to this question ‘no’?

And welcome to the final hours of 2021. Behind us lie 8,744 of those tidy little parcels, sixty minutes each. Sixteen more rush toward you on the railway tracks of time.

You’ll probably want to spend those sixteen hours in revelry or reflection, but if you find yourself with a few spare minutes, then here’s a fly-by of a year’s worth of creativity and curiosity.

AKA what I’ve learned thanks to this newsletter.

1. I can do a thing, consistently, for a whole year. Yes: 100 Days Of Adventure is complete. Bring on DOA 2022.
2. It takes about 55 hours to write my half of one episode of a radio sitcom. Creative writing is impossible to judge objectively. But knowing roughly how long a sitcom episode takes to write tells me that there is a reliable process behind the evanescent, ineffable clouds of creativity.
3. How to make bread. Easily.
4. My beloved Marin bike lasted about 18,000 miles and cost me about 18 pence per mile.
5. We are an indoor species, spending 90-95 percent of our living hours in boxes, either static or mobile. There’s a statistic worth raging against!
6. Drawing leaves is a lovely way to spend an hour. And might make my brain healthier too.
7. Veganism hasn’t killed me. Or given me diabetes, gout or low testosterone.
8. How to skateboard. Possibly the most rewarding thing I’ve learned this year. Never too old!
9. You get paid more for doing ethically dubious jobs.
10. Sending thank you emails to my favourite authors is surprisingly rewarding.
11. Since I bought The Corollavirus back in March, I’ve driven 4883 miles. This has cost me about £777 in petrol, racking up a carbon debt of about 968kg CO2e compared to similar journeys on public transport. It’d take 44 mature trees a year to absorb these new emissions. That’s a whole copse worth.

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    In monetary terms, I’ve worked out that the unembedded carbon cost of my 4883 driving miles is £480. More to come on this calculation in a future email — along with where I’m going to invest that money for maximal positive environmental impact.

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12. Right from the very beginning, the people who invented email knew that it was highly unproductive. Mind blown. Credit to Cal Newport’s A World Without Email.
13. Bitcoin currently uses more electricity than the entire countries of Austria and Greece combined. Since the most recent surge in market price, which began in November 2020, the energy demands of the Bitcoin network have doubled…
14. But cryptocurrencies could still be a force for good, by helping to change wealth distribution, reverse inequalities and counter ecological degradation.
15. 92 percent of our countryside is ‘private property’. We need the law to change. Until then, we need to trespass.
16. 90 percent of women have been victims of sexual harassment while travelling on public transport. That was according to a French survey, but nothing I’ve heard suggests the number is any lower in the UK. Credit Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.
17. How to light a campfire using a flint and steel. Also: how to click ‘buy’ on a stormproof gas-powered lighter. There’s no prizes for going hungry.
18. Heifers are terrifying in the springtime and tearooms are always unexpected.
19. ‘Inoculating’ degraded soil with the ‘soil microbiome’ of a healthy landscape can accelerate recovery and increase carbon sequestration.
20. Even a massive ‘wartime’ level of investment in carbon-removing technologies will not stop global heating at 2 degrees.

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    Even if negative emission technologies are a huge success, we must still make far-reaching changes to our societies and our economies. And, of course, there is no guarantee that negative emissions technologies will be a huge success.

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21. There was a man called Buys Ballot. He taught me something or other about atmospheric pressure. Turns out that interpreting synoptic charts is hard to internalise.
22. Every spring, thousands of ermine moths swaddle the poor bird cherry tree in a terrifying web of silk.
23. George Orwell’s 1984 opens with a graphic description of a helicopter gunning down a raft of refugees floating somewhere out in the Mediterranean. The passage chimes loudly today.
24. 108 ancient woods are being damaged or felled to make way for the HS2 railway line. There is no way to replace or replant a 400-year old oak.
25. Over the past three decades, Bob Dylan has played 3,064 shows — about 100 per year. For comparison, between 2014 and 2019, modern chart-toppers Arctic Monkeys played about 50 shows a year. About half the work rate of an eighty-year-old.
26. Aero bars are a PHENOMENAL bit of kit for the touring cyclist. I don’t know how I survived without them for so long. If you intend on cycling a long way next year, I can highly recommend getting a proper bike fitting.
27. In practice, there are no legal routes for claiming asylum the UK.

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    If it passes without amendment, our government’s new Nationality and Borders Bill will put UK law in direct opposition to the 1951 Geneva Convention by criminalising people who arrive on these shores without a visa — even when they have a legitimate claim for asylum under international law.

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28. Cycle touring is a storyful way to see the world, making sense of the scenes briefly illuminated in our lamplight as we pass.
29. Liverpool is the world’s eleventh least stressful city.
30. Breaking a world record is a LOT of admin.
31. The Mayor of Glastonbury is an absolute baller.
32. Wiltshire is the most generous county in southern England. FACT. (Probably…)
33. Tiramisú is perhaps the least appropriate cycling snack for a vegan who likes to avoid sugar and doesn’t drink coffee. Works a charm, though.
34. After a month talking politics with strangers, I learned that The Daily Mail and the Conservative Party do NOT represent the views of the people of Britain. Far from it.
35. There are six ‘solidarity archetypes’: The Capitalist, The Idealist, The Gregarious, The Paranoid, The Wealthy, The Compassionate — which are you?
36. Feeling your support van’s clutch snap is not a great start to a day on a world record breaking cycle tour. But sometimes Turkish Delight falls from the sky and sometimes miracles do happen.
37. In Barcelona, you can swap your car for a free annual public transport pass. Tempting.
38. Once you’ve got your eye in, psilocybe mushrooms are almost impossible to miss in the autumnal damp of the Welsh Valleys.
39. An acute scarcity of time, money or love can mean a ten point penalty to your IQ. It’s not that you’re stupid, it’s that you’re stressed.
40. Lamb from New Zealand has a quarter of the carbon footprint of Welsh lamb, despite travelling 17,840km around the world to our shop shelves. But you’re still better off eating coconuts.
41. How to identify and presever the heather among the gorse.
42. The proportion of citizens who say that having people from many different ethnic and religious backgrounds makes the UK a better place to live has increased since Brexit from 75 to 85 percent. Thank fuck.
43. Sternutation is science-speak for a sneeze, a bodily reflex that I performed 127 times on a chilly day in November. That’s more than most people will ever do in a whole month. Proud.
44. Blood On The Tracks is 88 percent perfect and my appreciation for the music of Bob Dylan can be quantified.

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    Dylan’s finest albums by decade: Bringing It All Back Home (1965, 84% perfect), Blood On The Tracks (1975, 88%), Oh Mercy (1989, 63%), Time Out of Mind (1997, 56%), Modern Times (2006, 50%), Tempest (2012, 40%), Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020, 30%).

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45. Homemade vegan chocolate hobnobs are divine.
46. Our right to wild camp on Dartmoor is being constrained: no hammocks, no family tents, no groups of more than six, plus an 8 percent reduction in the permitted camping area, including some of the most accessible land.
47. Winter is the best time to go adventuring in Britain, for the wonders of solitude, star-gazing and silence.
48. Twenty-four hours in the day is merely a convenient average; the actual time between solar noons fluctuates throughout the year. This is why the latest sunset of the year arrives ten days before the shortest day.
49. Using nothing but the eyes that evolution gave you, you might see anywhere up to 4,548 stars in the night sky — although that number will depend greatly on the amount of light pollution in your vicinity.
50. I’ve now read 46 books this year. Here are seven of the best.
51. Writing a diary keeps me sane. I’ve written in excess of 223,000 words in my journal this year.

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    I use the wonderful novel-writing software yWriter to store my diaries and, since 2010, I’ve amassed more than 2.7 million words for future historians to sift through in bewilderment.

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52. Above all, I’ve learned (again and again) that the discipline, creativity and curiosity of sharing this newsletter with you is not only good for my heart and soul, but that so many of you generous humans love it too!

THANK YOU

Thank you for sharing some of those 8,744 hours with me. Thank you for hitting reply or posting a comment and telling me what moves you. Thank you for sharing these words with your friends and for helping this newsletter grow.

Most of all, thank you for helping everyone through a year of resilience and adventure.

I look forward to seeing what becomes of 2022 and I hope you’ll join me there.

Hungry for more?

• 52 Things I Learned In 2020 and 2019.

Over the past few years, I’ve become a much more qualified arsonist.

Back in 2009, I remember footling around with a grate and some matches for about three hours, before a consummate fire-starter dragged a toothpick along an emery board for an instant conflagration.

Here are a few of the cheats I use today:

• Cotton wool balls rubbed in Vaseline make for excellent lightweight, multi-purpose and fragrance-free starter fuel.
• Stop using cigarette lighters and matches. Start using a torch. Not those kind of torches. These kind of torches, the ones with a steady, focussed blue flame that you might use to cremate a crème brulée. I’ve started fires with wet tinder using this. Definitely cheating.
• Use an axe, penknife or saw to cut your fuel down to the right size for whatever stage of fire building you’re at. From bundles of finger-width twigs to hefts of wood block.
• Make sure there is enough draft under your fuel. Oxygen is the forgotten force in the fire trinity of fuel, heat and air.
• Don’t waste your breath on breathing life into your baby fire. Fan the flickers by using a piece of card, a scrap of bark, a book or even a t-shirt. You’ll get a much steadier draft and won’t pass out from smoke inhalation.

Hobnobs are vegan. Chocolate Hobnobs are not, thanks to the inclusion of something called ‘butter oil’ or ‘anhydrous milk fat’ in the chocolate coating.

This recipe began as your humble author melting a load of proper dark chocolate (naturally vegan) over a load of ordinary Hobnobs.

Delicious. Especially when sneezing one’s head off on Dartmoor.

However: as soon as one starts perusing lists of ingredients, one can’t help wondering whether one couldn’t do better one’s self.

Do those ordinary Hobnobs really need palm oil, sugar and partially inverted sugar syrup? I suspect not. Hence: this recipe.

Hob, nob, is his word; give’t or take’t
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Ingredients

Makes a baker’s dozen of large-ish vegan dark chocolate hobnobs.

• 150g oats (small grade, not jumbo)
• 75g flour (plain or wholemeal)
• 80g rice syrup (about 4 tablespoons)
• 75g vegan block
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 100g proper dark chocolate — I used 85%
• Optional: pinch of ginger
• Optional: tablespoon of coconut oil

The Biscuit Phase

Adapted from BBC Good Food

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (fan). Next time I’ll experiment with baking them for longer at a lower temperature — maybe even as low as 150°C.
2. Line a large baking sheet with that brown parchment baking paper stuff.
3. Beat the vegan block until it starts to behave. Add the rice syrup and mix well.
4. Combine the flour, oats and bicarbonate of soda in a separate bowl.
5. Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture a bit at a time, ensuring you mix well to incorporate all the ingredients together.
6. Next time, I’ll wrap this dough in cling film and put it into the fridge for as long as I can bear — this recipe promises crumblier results.
7. Roll the mixture into 13 little balls.
8. Smoosh each ball into round biscuit shapes onto the baking sheet. Repeat until mixture is all used up.
9. Bake in the oven (middle shelf) for 13 minutes or until golden brown. They’ll still be a bit soft, so don’t be fooled — they’re done.
10. Allow to cool completely. 40 minutes is more than enough (I forgot about them).

The Chocolate Phase

The key here is to avoid un-tempering the chocolate — tempering is how it stays solid at room temperature. It’s not a complete disaster if you mess this phase up, you’ll just have sticky fingers during the eating phase.

The following, rather delicate, method was adapted from eHow, of all places. You might prefer to melt your chocolate with a tablespoon of coconut oil in 30 second blasts in the microwave, as per this recipe — but be careful not to overheat the concoction.

1. Put only two-thirds of the chocolate into a glass vessal (I use a measuring jug).
2. Put that vessal into a saucepan of water and gently heat the whole kit and kaboodle.
3. Allow the chocolate to melt gently, without stirring, until it is nearly melted.
4. After a gentle stir, allow the chocolate to continue melting.
5. When the chocolate is fully melted, carefully remove the glass vessal from the saucepan and slowly stir in the remaining chocolate a few pieces at a time, stirring with each addition, until it’s all completely melted.
6. When all of the chocolate has been incorporated, dab a small amount of the chocolate onto the inside of your wrist. If the chocolate is slightly cooler than your body temperature, it is ready to use.
7. Add a pinch of ginger if you’re feeling that way inclined
8. Pour the chocolate over the top of the biscuits or dip the biscuits into the chocolate — whichever makes more sense to you.
9. Leave the biscuits to cool. In theory, if you’ve tempered the chocolate correctly, the coating will become solid at room temperature. I whacked mine in the fridge because I was desperate.
10. Whatever you do, make sure that you either leave the biscuits on the parchment paper or you wipe the melted chocolate away from the base of the biscuits, otherwise they’ll stick to the tray and break when you attempt to scoff them into your mouth.

The Eating Phase

Compared to normal Hobnobs, these taste quite savoury, but quite delicious.

In reality, I’m not sure how ‘savoury’ these biscuits really are.

They might have nearly 30% less sugar content than a McVities, but there’s still 3.2g of sugar per biscuit from the rice syrup and another 1g or so from the dark chocolate coating.

We’re down to slightly shy of one teaspoon of sugar per biscuit!

Actually, that’s still loads, isn’t it? Enjoy!