Gentle Reader,

I have a list on my phone of all the places I’ve ever lived. There are 20 addresses. 13 are in Ireland, 5 are in Australia, and 2 are in Italy. That means I moved house 19 times.

About 7 or 8 of those times were big moves, when I had to haul everything from one place to the next, unlike some of the easier moves, when you still leave half your stuff in your childhood bedroom, when you come home at weekends and your ma still does your washing and gives you food.

But every time I did a big move, I had the same thought: “How is it possible that I have accumulated so much rubbish in such a short space of time?”

Then a second, slightly guilty thought arises: “Imagine how much harder this would be if you had a wife and kids. Imagine moving them around. You actually have it quite easy.”

Such thoughts are in accord with the present writer’s tendency for self-flagellation.

The idea of ‘moving house’ actually has very little to do with moving a house, and a lot to do with hawking one’s belongings to a new abode, and I have come to realise it’s more of a process than an act. I ‘moved house’ again last year, although this time, I hope, semi-permanently, as I bought a place for the first time.

Before I moved out, I had to throw away all the rubbish.

Some of it was curious to apprehend: all the little loyalty cards, faded, which I thought I would use again, but used only once. There are secret wishes in such items. When I kept a loyalty card for a cafe, it told me that I harboured a silent desire to become the kind of person who goes for coffee there regularly; it did not eventuate.

After I fucked up my knee, I found it very hard to throw out sports equipment, to sell bikes, to throw away football boots, because doing so would throw away the last promise of reclaiming that version of the old me.

What about seven pens you find in a drawer? How many should I keep? Some are blue and some are black and some are other colours. Five seems reasonable.

What about the nice big desk that won’t fit where I’m going? If I sell it I won’t make half what it’s worth. My parents have space for it but then we have to talk about it: another resistance arises.

What about things that, conceivably, could come in useful again? How do I know whether I will, some fine day, need such and such an item?

I’ve been caught out more than once. Recently, I gave away a Google Nest, only to realise it was exactly what I needed, and they don’t make them anymore.

But you can get most things now, quickly. If you have a big house I guess you can keep everything, but it’s only worth it if its well organised and accessible. I’m in an apartment so I err towards throwing stuff out, unless it’s hard to replace.

What about single socks? Should they always get the bin? There’s a chance the other one of the pair could turn up under your bed. I discovered several sets of socks from the previous owner in the far reaches of the hot press (yes, Americans, we Irish have something call a hot press, and I love it). What about garden pots and hanging baskets? How many does one need? Will my green thumb re-emerge or fade away? Who knows.

And, being Irish, I was raised in a guilt-inducing kind of way. You can’t throw anything away because someone, somewhere in the world, conceivably could use it. It’s the correct intention but, dear reader, I took it to extremes:

Looking through my kitchen pantry, I realised I had brought the same jar of vegemite with me, from address 14 or 15 on the list , to every single new address, without opening it again since it’s glorious Australian days — and that was six years ago.

Had it expired? Yes. Did it taste fine? Yes (insofar as vegemite can ever taste ‘fine’). Did I throw it away? No.

This time, moving for the long haul, I threw all the bags on the floor and then spent a few months of elated fatigue designing and assembling and organising and so on. The amount of labour required was much higher than anticipated. And I realised that I hadn’t really thrown out all the stuff I should have thrown out: a renewed round of purging began.

Then there was much moving of furniture and, subsequently, not moving it because you would be waiting for something to arrive. And then the something arrives and must be sent back because things are never right and a hole is left gaping in the living room which you can’t temporarily fill as you’ll only have to move things again.

Then there is the stuff which, after the experience of living in the actual place for a while, you realise you have put in the wrong place. Like my resistance bands and yoga mats and the single dumbbell which I have.

But they can’t go in their rightful place yet because the shelves and drawers and cabinets for the right place haven’t arrived yet. And the stuff which should go where the gym stuff is can’t go there, and there’s nowhere else for it to go, since I live in an apartment, now it’s in the hall, impeding the entrance and periodically tripping me up.

And once it’s organised, you’ll realise it doesn’t look good, and when it doesn’t look good, you’ll have to make it look good, which will disorganise it. And so on.

But it’s glorious, and there is a bedding in and a bedding down: you begin to find yourself. You can show who you are, to the world but to yourself. You can say: these are the books that I like: this is the art that I like: this is what I think should go on a hall table (potted plant, key bowl, hooks, sunglasses, coins, wallets, airpods, books, notebooks, a blue cap, swimming goggles hanging down). You can put books on every table and nobody will move them. You can design a whole environment. You can set yourself up for success.

And better still, outside the door, the faces of people begin to become familiar. The neighbour, the nice man at the grocer’s, the familiar couple from the local run club, the woman you did one reiki session with who salutes you warmly every time, the chatty guy at the cafe who may or may not be the owner.

You feel different, because you bought in. It makes you want to put down roots and it makes you want to put out feelers. You behave differently. This is the real gold.

And on a sunny day you begin to think: I love living here.

And the back of your mind pipes up and says: “Well good, because I’m not f****** moving again!”

• The Golden Age of Solo Travel is Over

• Get Out of the Gym

• When Are You Going back to Work?

Gentle Reader,

Last year, I rang the Irish Revenue (Tax Department), seeking clarification on my financial affairs. The usual pre-recorded message came on, informing me about long wait times. I shook my head, knowing I might not get through at all.

But then, after listening a minute more, I heard a voice in Irish telling me to press #2 to conduct my business trí Gaeilge (in Irish). Feeling bold, I pressed #2 and the phone was picked up immediately by an Irish speaker on the other side. Stumbling and mumbling, I managed to get my point across and get my affairs sorted.

I put the phone down and felt both impressed at the clever trick I had pulled off as well as embarrassed at how bad my Irish had gotten – it was time to re-learn it!

As a lifelong linguistic dabbler, diving into a language once again is never a problem, often a joy, and sometimes a challenge. I speak 5 languages reasonably well: English, German, Irish, Italian, and French, and probably in that order of competence.

Speaking in each one has its own flavour and feeling, and brings with it certain memories and associations, as well as an overall feeling of sort of being a citizen of the world, or at least of soem worlds.

Let’s have a little look at each of these languages and how they have influenced me.

Gaeilge (Irish)

As an Irishman, I’m obliged to put this one first. In the Irish constitution, Irish is stated to be the first language of the country. English is begrudgingly accepted as a ‘second, alternative language’ – here’s the actual text:

Every time I read it, I chuckle internally at the reluctance here to afford English any kind of states. English is also referred to as ‘sacs-Bhéarla’ which literally means ‘Saxon mouth speech’.

(Of course, in practice, the vast majority inhabitants of this island chiefly speak English, and even yours truly communicates here in Saxon mouth speech.)

But Irish, which started off as scratchings on stones, called ogham, in ways, is alive and well. I speak it quite frequently with one particular friend – basically, whenever we are alone, we speak it exclusively. The desire to learn and re-learn it is reasonably strong amongst the population. Famously, it is poorly taught in schools, but the language itself is having a bit of a revival moment amongst adults.

My Irish was once very good. Now, when I speak it, I enjoy the advantage of a word coming to me, mid-sentence, out of thin air, that I had no idea I knew. The other side of the coin is that I will also often forget a very simple word, out of sheer rustiness.

What is the language itself like? Very beautiful and rich, it thrives on subtle shades of meaning. As Flann O’Brien once described it:

The Irish language also famously contains 32 words for field, such as: Geamhar – a field of corn-grass; Tuar – a field for cattle at night; Réidhleán – a field for games or dancing; Cathairín – a field with a fairy-dwelling in it.

(For the sake of brevity, the Irish words for ‘rain’ will not be listed here.)

Irish also contributed several words to English, for example whiskey (uisce beatha, literally meaning “water of life”), banshee (bean sídhe, meaning woman of the forest), galore (from go leor, meaning ‘to sufficiency’), and phony (I will not elaborate).

It has been lovely, personally, for me to reconnect with the language, and I hope to use it more and more in the future. I also feel a little better about myself now, having neglected it for a long time, at the expense of seemingly more exotic languages.

On a final note, I will leave you with 2 sad and lovely Irish terms:

• Diadhánach - the lonely bellowing of a cow who is missing her calf.

• Cuisle sléibhe - an overgrown mountain stream which you can hear but cannot see. The literal meaning is: “the heartbeat of the mountain.”

English

The first language I fell in love with was my own native tongue: English. As a language, it is a mongrel of sorts, with a Germanic base laid under an early modern sprinkling of French, amidst countless other influences.

It was through English that I learned that words have an etymology — that they do not arise in a vacuum, but that they come packaged in a little envelope of their own history.

(Thus: ‘opportunity’ comes from the Latin phrase ob portum veniens "coming toward a port," in reference to the wind, from ob "in front of; toward"; ciao is actually an old Venetian word for ‘slave’; the word ‘nice’ actually originally meant ignorant, not-knowing, and came from ne- "not" + stem of scire "to know" and so on.)

I first fell in love with English through the Englishman Shakespeare, who remains highly ranked in my top 3 greatest literary giants. It is very hard to read Hamlet without being seized by a seismic awareness of how fundamental it was for many following texts, and it is very hard to read Shakespeare at all without seeing so many phrases, familiar to us all, which we probably did not know came from the man himself.

William was a great neologist — apparently Milton coined a great many more words, but his offerings don’t ring as richly to my ear as those of the Stratford poet.

Ironically, it was then the Irishman Joyce who compounded my love of English:

You see, the Irish have our own little variety of English — Hiberno English. It speaks to the richness of the language that countries the world over have put their own stamp on it. Even the Germans, with whom I have occasional work dealings, have a kind of Dinglish, often directly using English terms, albeit with a different angle and meaning all of their own. Sehr schön, oder?

Deutsch (German)

I learned German in school, which in hindsight was a great choice. It’s quite a difficult language, and it would be much harder to get to grips with as an adult, as a complete beginner, compared to the Romance languages which are generally a lighter lift.

They say that the language follows from the culture, and in my experience the German language is an exacting instrument, and the Germans, and the Austrians, (and the Swiss Germans??) are an exacting people. They love rules, punctuality, and something they call Stoßlüften, which means to open the windows to freeze everyone half to death every few hours – they even did this to me in my German exam.

Unlike in English, where we have one definite article (“the”), in German there are lots and lots, which I won’t list here, for fear of what Beckett called the comedy of exhaustive enumeration.

The problem then results that everytime you say ‘the’, you wonder whether it is the right ‘the’ (should it be der or die?). Happily, Germans even fight about this amongst themselves, and can’t agree whether it should be der Nutella, die Nutella, or das Nutella (I know where I weigh in here, but won’t reveal my preference, at the risk of alienating my readership).

My own German, although good, suffers a little from the fact that I never really lived or spent a prolonged period of time in Germany. So, I don’t know much slang, and tend to produce words which I read from Karl Marx or Kafka, and so when I speak German, it’s a little serious, like the language itself, but that’s okay.

(I also listen to a lot of German podcasts — something which I greatly appreciate about learning foreign languages is access to their media, their native arts. Two of my favourite films are in German. In terms of current affairs, as I live here in Ireland, important discussions about European matters are taking place every day, and not always in English, and the present writer appreciates having access to them. I watch the Rai in Italian and Arte in French and German.)

German is famous for its Mammutworter – you can basically join words together into one giant word. Apart from being funny, this is genuinely useful, and I find it’s much easier to understand or discuss a somewhat obscure concept when you can smush it up into one word. Such words abound in bureaucratic contexts, in which the Germans thrive. Examples:

• Wahrscheinlichkeitsvorhersagen — probability predictions or probability forecasting.

• Verschlimmbesserung — the act of making something worse by trying to make it better (we wouldn’t know anything about that, over here in Ireland).

• Immatrikulationsbescheinigung — certificate of enrolment

• Zwischenkriegszeit — the interwar period between WWI and WWII.

Italiano (Italian)

I only ever went on one family holiday as a kid, and it was to the fine city of Florence. There, as a (probably horny) 13 year old, I heard the Italian waitress speaking to her colleagues.

What was this beautiful, melodic language?

I wanted to know what she was saying. Thus began an obsession with the Italian language, my guilty pleasure. Italy was the first country I scurried off to, for the sole purpose of learning the language (I spent about 3 months lollygagging around Bologna).

It is true that Italian has a lovely rhythm. Very many words end in a vowel, which makes rhyming a slam dunk for the Italian poets. Dante took full advantage:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Rest assured, reader, it’s every bit as beautiful as it sounds. This Italian is actually 800 years or so old, and remains quite intelligible compared to modern Italian. If you read English from 800 years ago, from the time of Chaucer, you will see that it’s basically complete gobbledegook. But Dante’s Tuscan dialect, which eventually became standard Italian, has not changed all that much – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (as they say in American English).

My relationship to Italian is tied to the time I spent there – pasta, litres of wine for €1.50, couples fighting loudly in the streets, and a hand gesture for every occasion. Italia — ti amo!

Français (French)

French was the last language I learned (except for Spanish, which I can’t claim…yet). Again, I soldiered to the country of origin to learn it. I was looking for an excuse to run away again, and so I turned up in Paris, and took in the atmosphere of that splendid city of Haussmann’s devising.

It’s hard to beat Paris — I always feel that Paris and Rome are two cities which you can visit more or less indefinitely. I went the whole hog, too. There was barely an escgargot or a frog’s leg to be seen by the time I had left.

French has a lovely whispery, floaty feel to it. It’s full of those airy sounds, produced by creating little frictional currents of air. I was struggling once with ending a word, pronouncing it correctly, when I got the advice to just blow a little puff of air instead – it worked serviceably.

One of my great pleasures is reading a work of literature in the original, but even I, a sucker for punishment, resorted to reading In Search of Lost Time in English, rather than French. Nevertheless, I have now and then dipped in to check certain passages, to see what they looked like in their original form. As an example, the opening line reads:

For those who know French, does this read a little less clinically than the English translation below?

For the sake of eyeballing some more French, here’s an excerpt from Proust’s famous madeleine scene:

Et tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu. Ce goût, c’était celui du petit morceau de madeleine que le dimanche matin à Combray (parce que ce jour-là je ne sortais pas avant l’heure de la messe), quand j’allais lui dire bonjour dans sa chambre, ma tante Léonie m’offrait après l’avoir trempé dans son infusion de thé ou de tilleul. La vue de la petite madeleine ne m’avait rien rappelé avant que je n’y eusse goûté…

(As an aside, Proust gave me the confidence, as a writer, to be long-winded. A lot of (recent) ink has been spilled about getting to the point, about not boring the reader…how much of this advice would dissipate if we were all as potent penmen and women as the writers of yesteryear?)

The language itself can be a little tricky. The letters are not all pronounced, unlike its cousin across the border, and the construction of sentences can be a little unexpected. But once you get to grips, the worlds of Proust, Hugo, Maupassant and Candide await you, as well as this very sad but marvellous short film by Florence Miailhe:

Go raibh míle maith agaibh as ucht léamh mo chuid scríobh inniu. If you want to read more, click below to receive my writing directly to your inbox.

Gentle Reader,

A simulacrum (pl.: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin simulacrum, meaning "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing.

Wikipedia explains that photorealism in art offers an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. For example, instead of painting an apple, you paint a likeness of a photograph of an apple, because you might not have an apple or because you prefer the lighting in the photograph of the apple.

As a society, we have begun en masse to accept simulacra for being as good as the real thing, and we have applied this principle of cheap imitation, across the board, to somewhat dystopian effect.

Engagement

My attention was recently drawn to a video showing two men ( and ) studying physics together.

I thought two things were noteworthy about the video.

The first is that, unsurprisingly, two guys who are willing to make a video about studying physics together, are very smart.

Secondly, I noticed the level of engagement with the content; there was a lightly-held intensity in how they focused their attention on the material, an intensity which is very much at odds with the more passive manner in which, generally, we read educational information.

For example, as they read the text together, they clarified the precise meaning of each line, making suppositions all the while, iteratively checking and testing each other’s understanding and knowledge, and occasionally going off on related tangents which might involve a maths formula or trying to solve an equation to demonstrate newfound knowledge.

At one stage, Andy says:

“This process of explaining stuff to myself is of course also a very powerful way to learn…a lot of the difficult cognitive work that I’m doing is in compressing the textbook and running it through my own mind and running it through my own words and noticing what I’m not remembering.”

Or, stated otherwise: he learns not by solely consuming material. He at first acquaints himself with the newly-presented information, before assessing it, deconstructing it, re-assembling it in his words, and then re-checking to see if makes sense. He is actually studying, rather than simulating studying.

This is a high level of engagement, a cognitively demanding technique. But it’s interesting to note that he seems energised, rather than depleted, by the process.

What happened to engagement?

Taking a step back, why is this kind of approach so rare? We all know that TikTok has scrambled our brains and that we pick up our phones hundreds of times a day, but I believe that kind of dopamine-seeking is a little different, and the problem of inattention, or of surface-level attention only, is a little older than the short-form video variety of brainrot.

What I see is a more pervasive and general passivity which has been facilitated by the online environment, a tendency to replace the real deal with a simulacrum of the thing itself.

It started with entertainment. Long past reading, which is seen as too much of a heavy lift, we unwind by watching long and short form video, the chief means by which people ‘numb out’ in the evening when they don’t feel capable of doing anything else. Yet, even in the realm of video material, the lightest forms are still winning out, with the most popular television shows being those which, ironically, most closely resemble simulacra of the real world, i.e., reality TV shows.

But beyond entertainment, the approach to how we learn is now also quite voyeuristic, almost spectator-like, and I say this because I noticed how guilty I am of it myself. The infotainment industry has tricked us into thinking we can better ourselves in extremely passive ways: namely through the ingestion of educational material extremely passively. This simulates, but does not meaningfully replace, meaningful engagement, by suggesting we can ‘learn’ about any topic just by watching a few videos or podcasts, or doing an online Coursera course.

Such an outlook is very consumption-orientated, without emphasis on engagement, iteration, or experimentation as a means of verifying or expanding knowledge.

We hate thinking

On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this passive exposure, per se. The issue lies in the fact that low-friction media are too easily digested, and just like juicing your vegetables instead of eating them whole, we miss out on the fibrous goodness within.

Believing you can become advanced or make noteworthy progress in any field in your life, without deep iterative engagement, is incorrect. As a society, we have been juicing our vegetables for far too long now.

And, by doing so, what we are really doing here, by not engaging deeply, is avoiding thinking.

Thinking is actually quite difficult — no wonder nobody wants to do it. Powering up the most energetically-demanding organ in the body, the brain, to carry out its specialised task of executive function is draining and, if you don’t do it very often, it’s even more exhausting. But that’s what it is meant to do: that is the brain’s job.

The distaste for thinking is precisely why ChatGPT is so popular — it carries out this task which we so utterly despise: thinking. Previously, we could listen to a four-hour long podcast about gunboat diplomacy and, since we didn’t think about it or cross-examine ourselves on the topic, or read further, our opinion was basically what the podcast told us. We never self-interrogated.

Now, we can be “infotained” for several hours on the way to work or in the gym and, directly afterwards, go straight to ChatGPT for its takes on the topic. Then we wonder why we feel like we don’t know very much at all. Receiving information simply simulates thinking, stroking the surface of the brain and fooling it into believing it has had a workout.

I learned this again recently when I signed up to sit the B2 German exam and, in the course of studying, I realised that this kind of passive engagement left black holes and blindspots in my language skills.

I signed up to two video lessons pretty soon after signing up to the exam. The first lesson was pretty good – it was an unstructured chat about myself, where I’m from, what I do, how and why I learned German etc. I spoke very fluently and I felt really confident about the exam afterwards.

The next lesson changed all that. I told the teacher I wanted to practice specifically for the exam, and what ensued was a series of questions and scenarios which involved me speaking German in a context and way which I had quite simply never spoken it before. It was both terrible and great: I felt like an almost-beginner again, but also I could see a pathway forward to improving my German meaningfully now.

I would have to sit down, choose a topic, and write up my opinion on it, the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach, potential pitfalls, etc. Then my brain would slowly learn this manner of speaking and could apply it to many different topics.

The interesting thing is that no amount of general reading or podcast listening (at least at any reasonable and achievable scale) could have prepared me for this. And if I had not studied in this very specific and directed way, I probably would have felt short-changed or frustrated by my lack of progress.

Just like the multitudes of others, I would have been dissatisfied. But did I have any right to complain when, like many’s a comrade, I never stopped to think, to pause, to examine the trajectory of my failure, and to set fresh eyes upon it?

What I needed to do was what Dwarkesh and Adam were doing: identify a simple problem and engage with it at a focused and detailed level. As a heuristic, if you’re not taking notes, or annotating, or conducting thought experiments on the side, then you probably aren’t engaging deeply, meaningfully, or successfully with the topic.

This approach, finally, verifies another foundational tenet of learning: that the best way to learn is always self-directed. It doesn’t mean you don’t receive instruction; rather that you must receive instruction and then, in the wake of receiving it, you must reconstruct, rearrange and re-form the material in a shape which makes sense in your own mind. Even better, you must act on it, write it out, test it, experiment with it in thought and real-life experiments.

Only then can you say that you have learned, and this applies as much to educational topics as it does to topics of everyday wisdom and to matters of everyday concern which go beyond entertainment and education, where a passivity of approach is the default, and where the simulacrum, rather than the object itself, has been brought into focus.

Take dating as an example. People don’t really date any more, rather they larp at dating. What they refer to as ‘dating’ is actually only swiping.

Similarly, we larp and simulate reading by scrolling on text-based social media, we simulate having a healthy diet by drinking protein shakes, and we simulate improving our mental health by ‘doing therapy.’

Beyond entertainment and education

The access, via AI, to a free and immediate summary of any topic, at any time we want, is irresistible, but what do you think it does to your brain? If you said it turns it to formless mush, then you are of course correct.

The reckless usage of such cheap and abundant thought machines will ensure that we continue to pay a price: that we are no longer serious as a society, that we are all feckless automatons.

As an experiment and closing thought, take an area of your life with which you are dissatisfied and consider it:

Have you been taking meaningful action in this area of your life, or have you been cosplaying and simulating taking meaningful action in this area of your life?

If you have blindly followed a school of thought or a prescribed and generalised course of action without self-enquiry, then it is mostly like that the latter is true.

If you have incorporated suggestions, ideas and intuitions and iterated on them, if you have not only sat down, pen in hand, but also entered the fray and battle-tested your theories, then it is likely that the former is true.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe to receive my writing straight to your inbox.

Here is some of my work on similar themes:

The Golden Age of Solo Travel is Over

The Self-Help Paradox

Roads to Nowhere

• The Lost Souls Society

• Oxen of the Sun

• When Are You Going Back to Work?

• Work is Fundamental: A Personal Odyssey

Gentle Reader,

You may be wondering how my little sabbatical / mini-retirement is going.

Well, first I should begin by setting out what my intentions were.

As my note above suggests, I wanted to reclaim my attention and intention, and my current job was leaving me wasted at the end of the day, with little room to do the things which I believe are important for a fulfilling and healthy life, which include but are not limited to:

• Time to exercise (if you’re going for 5 stars here, you probably should be exercising about 15 hours a week)

• Time to engage in creative pursuits and side projects (for me, mainly writing related)

• Time to read books again

• Time to start out windows and at tempestuous seascapes (“Suave, mari magno…”)

• The simple ability to live intentionally and to spend the best hours of my day in a manner which in enjoyable and fruitful for me (note I did not say “productive” here – maybe fruitfulness is the new productivity and @ you could have called your book “Feel-Good Fruitfulness”

Above all, I noticed that I am most feeling myself, and feeling playful, funny and energised, when I am not deep in the doldrums, recovering from a job which bastardises my soul and corrupts my single state of man.

Are you following so far?

If you are, you might have noticed that there are two problems with my approach: the requirement to obtain money, and the absence of structured, purposeful work.

If you know me, you might know that I consider writing (particularly my beloved fiction), to be purposeful work, but it’s not very structured, and I benefit from a bit of a routine in order to keep on track.

Luckily, these two problems, those of money and of structure, can be solved by…getting a job.

…

*crickets chirp

….

Does that mean I’m back at square one? Had I greatly erred?

Not at all, gentle reader, because, for once, I’ve thought this one through.

I didn’t quit my job to quit work forever; I quit it because I want to work more on my own terms. The present writer would happily submit to gainful employment or contract work, but only in an arrangement more suited to my snowflake temperament, artistic proclivities, and general lack of reliableness.

So, I am indeed on the hunt for work again, ideally looking to build up a bit of a portfolio of bits and pieces so that I can make a little bit of employment money and a little bit of self-employed, limited business type money, which is taxed at a lesser rate and which keeps the pension topped up. All of these bits will hopefully pay the mortgage and also keep a bit of pocket money sloshing around.

Things are getting weird – AI interviews

And so, in the process of looking for work and odd-jobs, it has come to my attention that the work environment has greatly changed, and that the noose has tightened on us, The Workers, very severely of late.

Case in point, a friend suggested I apply for a job involving teaching medicine to an AI. One dark and cold evening, with nary a curtain in my partially-furnished apartment, I sat at the dining table and clicked apply, uploading my CV. Then, a message flashed up on the screen, telling me that my interview was about to begin, and that I should allow access to my camera.

Oh.

The Irishman within me, fearful of public opinion and seeking always to demonstrate respectability, scurried into my bedroom and returned with a shirt on, buttoning it up as I rushed back to my berth at the table. I was then interviewed by an AI, which asked me good and admittedly insightful questions, before being told the interview had concluded.

A few weeks later, despite “passing” the interview, I was told that the client determined that they were no longer able to follow-through on this project.

*those crickets again*

A part of me wondered whether they just used the interview to steal my data, but who knows. I came across quite a few other AI-related hires, mostly for gig work, many of them relatively low-paying. It gives me the chills, a little bit, to imagine my CV and achievements and age and previous employment being scanned by an entity which is basically organised self-reinforcing lines of code.

Enshittification strikes again

But of course there is more to work than these new-fangled roles. In terms of more ‘regular’ jobs, I had and still do have options of working in medical clinics etc, but I’ve noticed that there has been a vast privatisation of healthcare, as well as a general takeover by big companies who have started to squeeze healthcare staff into largely larping healthcare rather than providing it, sort of performing the act itself and offering spadeloads of garbage and unnecessary tests to satisfy the bottom line.

A friend of mine recently attended one of these huge clinics, hobbling in on his crutches. They immediately took his crutches away and replaced them with a branded pair, with their own logo, which were of much lesser quality.

And this isn’t a private-only problem – the way public healthcare is delivered in many countries is deeply dysfunctional also but that’s a story for another day.

So, what am I saying?

I’m seeing that regular employment is, in some ways, still a safe bet, but it depends on what you mean by “safe.” Modern work, just like modern travel, is a kind of watered down experience, where we perform work rather than actually working, because the global economy is now a performance economy.

Those sweaters you bought on Black Friday? All low-quality garbage that is half the price but 10% the quality of what your father used to wear. Every t-shirt I get loses the shape of its collar after two low-heat washes. I once bought a long sleeve t-shirt in Italy for €2 which was beautiful and survived about 300 washes without the slightest change. What happened to that kind of clothing?

What happened to films like Barry Lyndon, Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes, and The Talented Mr Ripley?

In terms of books, I used to have a rule that I wouldn’t read anything less than 50 years old, because it hadn’t stood the test of time. Now I don’t read anything less than 20 years old because they largely suck.

But, to tie it in, what i want to say is that this enshittification of society also includes the enshittification of work, which will prove to be another “secular trend,” as they say in Economics, meaning that you can’t put the genie back int he bottle.

And to survive in a modern work environment, you have to be able to tolerate a relatively new and fresh kind of suffering (who new that they were still inventing new ways to suffer – you have to hand it to them, how do they keep coming up with this stuff?).

A fresh way to suffer

This suffering consists mainly of the trade-off that to get your paycheck, you will be asked to further and further water yourself down into a work version of yourself which is an anaemic and bloodless automaton. You will be forced to take the part of some kind of cog in an endlessly-abstracted system which, in the end, probably produces some digital product or public relations impression which is a million light years away from the poking and prodding you do at your laptop, guided by Jira tickets and regular ‘check-ins’ with managers and the ‘People’ department (here is your unscheduled reminder that human resources work for your boss and not for you and their jobs is to get the most out of you, to squeeze you until the pips squeak).

I’m being facetious here, but many forms of modern work do carry that dystopian element, and I say that as somebody who does not expect to be paid to do nothing, and I say that without the slightest shred of judgement of those who work a job which they may not feel is fulfilling because, despite my tone, I have a mortgage to pay over here and I also happen to inhabit the real world and I know what happens when the financial well runs dry. I lived through what people call the Great Financial Crisis but what people here in Ireland simply called “The Recession” and I remember people patrolling the river to stop suicides, the empty streets with shuttered shops and the mass emigration and so, to be clear, I am not some privileged never-worker who expects to be handed a living.

But what I am saying is that social contract was broken long ago, and what is emerging now is strange and dystopian, but not without opportunities either.

How can we thrive?

Remember that they told us that technology, and AI, would leave the most meaningful work for humans? Actually, the opposite has happened. AI, in concert with Big Tech and Big Everything Else, has made work less meaningful, has reduced us all to laptop jockeys and keyboard punchers, in the employment realm.

But curiously also, even as the worldwide employment sector has taken a qualitative nosedive, those like myself who turn their nose up at many roles can see that the jobs which we rejected, even though they were secure, are no longer really secure. And they are no longer secure in the sense that you won’t be laid off, but they are also not secure in terms of tolerability. I consider these soul-crushing labours to be rather insecure, by that definition.

There is a certain freedom in knowing that something which you spurned, and which you felt that you were taking a chance and being selfish by opting out of, is no longer really a sure thing. Sure things are few and far between, these days, reader.

In the realm of the entrepreneur, the solopreneuer, the internet writer or online creative, things are also very tight. People don’t want to pay for creative work all that much anymore, and not just due to artificial intelligence. One of the headwinds which has always faced the online influencer, gig worker, writer etc is that the online space tends to be a winner-takes-all market, with the biggest names in each niche taking the spoils, and the rest of us left to live on rice and beans.

But the upside is that in an expanding internet and an expanding gig-economy, there are more niches, more opportunities for intersection, for carving out a space for your tribe, for finding a following who likes your work, be it in video, in words, in imagery, or anything else.

The thing is that we have to fight harder, maybe impossibly hard for some. But even if the gig economy is a tough sell, there are still ways to make it online or, my preferred method, through a sort of hybrid living.

How I envision it for myself, currently:

The Soul-Preserving Portfolio

• Some kind of part-time bricks & mortar job which gets me out of the house and gives me a financial foundation without corroding my soul incorrigibly

• Make money through the gig economy, online roles etc, very industry specific

• and donate the rest of my time to following a craft, to having a healthy lifestyle, to building a relationship with people who read my work or who work similarly and share the same ideas.

The above won’t get me rich, at least not in my bank account, but it’s a good hedge against the current turmoil and against the fact that I don’t have the confidence or ideas to go fully independent, while I don’t have the stomach to sacrifice myself at the alter of whatever company wants to own me for forty hours a week.

In the meantime, I’m not averse to a full-time job, but it has to be right for me, and it has to respect my wholeness as a person, and it cannot be a role which compartmentalises me into exhaustion.

On that cheerful note, readers, I hope that you can take heart – I won’t stop thinking about this and experimenting until I can live and work on my own terms, and if you’ve read this far, you’re probably passionate about your independence too, and so it looks like we, all of us, are in this together – let’s keep fighting.

Affiliates:

Wizardlike solopreneur Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible. Paul is also selling a hardcover version of his first book, The Pathless Path, so check it out!

I once took a sabbatical and spent a few months lollygagging around the fine Italian town of Bologna, which was known for its food culture. When it came to restaurants, I was spoiled for choice – there were lots to choose from and there was always chatter and disagreement about where you could find the best tortellini or the best ragù.

Similarly, with gelato, there were a few gelaterias which claimed to be the best in the city, but after sampling a few, I decided that the Cremeria Cavour was the best. It didn’t hurt that it was situated in a cute little piazza and that the building itself in which the shop was housed was very grand and spacious.

Leaving the Italian school every hot September weekday, I would often make a bee line for the gelateria, wondering which flavour I would get, and occasionally becoming confused such as when I realised stracciatella was a flavour of ice cream, a type of soup, and a type of cheese, all at once.

I’m the kind of guy that goes to the ice cream shop and wants to try every flavour, and that’s what I did. In the end, I decided that pistachio was the best flavour, and I’ve stuck to my guns ever since.

Explore vs Exploit

At the time, I didn’t see a downside to trying out all the options, but if I zoomed out, I might have seen a pattern in my life. I travelled quite a lot in my twenties, which was great, but I think I was always subconsciously looking for something, something which probably didn’t exist, just as I was looking for the next best flavour of gelato.

The problem with spending a long time exploring is that you miss the opportunity to exploit, to go deeper, and sometimes a small habit in your life can illustrate something bigger about your tendencies, in microcosm.

When you are jet-setting around the world, maybe it’s true that you are running away from something more than you're running towards from something.

If that’s the case, what are we missing out on? What is the benefit of digging in and digging deep? And is it true that we should not try new things in life, rather we should pick one thing and go all in on that topic?

I can’t remember where I heard it, but I like the idea of “explore vs exploit” – in your own life, there’s a time when you will feel called by exploration, and there will be a time when you feel more called to exploit what you have decided interests you the most.

We see a natural arc in many people’s lives when they begin, maybe in their early thirties, to be more settled in where they live, in their job, in their relationships, and it’s fair to say that exploring particularly as a young person, is a formative process in many people’s lives, and many look back on backpacking trips as the best days of their lives.

Everyone has to make their own choices, but what I see in modern life is that many people are sold what is effectively a lie: they get the wrong idea through social media and through our predominant cultural narratives that they always need to be exploring, to be moving to New York, to ticking off a bucket list, to be have done the “ten things everyone should do in their twenties”, and so on.

The reality is that we are all being lied to. It’s not a big conspiracy, or a tinfoil hat theory, but it’s just the natural consequence of being a member of a society which operates under the microscope of social media. Open up Instagram right now and you will see that you probably have a friend who is on an amazing holiday or getting a promotion at work or pretending to have a flawless relationship with their partner.

It’s all bullshit, and it’s all a poisonous brain worm, and I’m not the first or the last to say it: social media is not reality and, even if we all know it, it still pervades our subconscious mind and drives our decision making.

Committing and connecting

Fast forward many years from my gelato days, but I do still like to try new things. Even in a world without social media, I still think that our biology and tastes change as we move a little through the gear changes of life.

What I didn’t realise, was that when you are too busy trying all the flavours, you sometimes forget to enjoy the one that’s in front of you.

Nowadays, my vice is the Sunday farmer’s market, rather than the gelateria. Fortunately, I’m spoiled for choice, and when I moved here I made a mental note of all the different stalls, and decided to systematically try out all the different food offerings, week over week.

After about three weeks, however, I found a very good Thai food stall and, on week four, I couldn’t walk past the friendly chap who gave me a delicious Thai basil dish the week before, and so I got it again, and it came with a friendly nod of recognition this time.

One week, I cheated on my Thai food man, and went to another Thai stall – the food was just as good, and the guy behind the counter every bit as friendly…but it wasn’t just the same.

Seeing the error of my ways, I now go every week to the same stall – the food is excellent, but more than anything, it’s the familiarity of the same face and the nod of recognition that keeps me coming back, every Sunday.

Maybe that’s what I was missing, all along, the little moments of connection which anchor the human. Every new destination and flavour thrilled and delighted me, but those feelings of pleasure soon waned.

Nowadays, I like that slow-burn enjoyment which comes from a connection – I value having a friendly, albeit unstated, connection with the man at the market, above the novelty of trying a new dish every week.

If I could go back in time, I might say to the younger Edward – what are you really looking for?

But maybe it was just a time in my life which had to be, a necessary period of search and exploration, a fundamental part of coming of age – and there’s a certain beauty in that, too.

The formidable Simon Sarris has written a piece called Viscerality: some notes on pleasure, detailing the enjoyment we can all derive from indulging our senses.

In light of having recently bought an apartment, I’ve been thinking about how the ideals of comfort, pleasure and beauty contribute to the appearance and experience of a home being enjoyable to live in.

Notes on comfort vs pleasure

In this article, I don’t seek to use the terms “comfort” and “pleasure” in accordance with their dictionary definitions, but rather to discuss them as concepts which will help me to delineate my arguments.

“Comfort” here refers to not experiencing sensations which are commonly referred to us as being uncomfortable, such as cold, excess heat, or the hardness of a wooden chair-back without a cushion. “Pleasure” describes a method of experiencing visceral sensations which employ and engage the senses. In this respect, standing by the sea on a day of high wind and high rain, as I did yesterday, may not be comfortable but is pleasurable in a visceral way.

If you optimise for comfort, you might find yourself with the thermostat set at 19 degrees all year round, walking around in your fluffy slippers, tracksuit bottoms and t-shirt, regardless of the weather.

If you live in a well-insulated property without air leaks and which effectively retains heat, you can set the thermostat and live independently of the seasons, wearing the same indoor clothes, all year round.

There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it is arguably a little out of tune with the human appetite for viscerality. Having spent time in places like that, usually newly-built apartments, the airlessness and insulation contribute to a feeling of being tightly vacuum-packed within your own lodgings, without the tickle of a breeze or a draught under the door to tease the senses, like being in a sensory-deprivation chamber, yet without the benefits.

I, myself, fell victim to a sort of comfort trap. For reasons unbeknownst to myself, I obsessed a little over always being “comfortable.” Maybe it was some kind of emotional cope or a band-aid which was concealing something else which I didn’t want to process, but it didn’t serve me well.

You see, prioritisation of comfort puts on you on the hedonistic treadmill. Your 19 degree apartment becomes a baseline which you will tolerate as a standard, rather than actively enjoy, and any deviation from that becomes something actively unpleasant, or hard to bear.

Your body is actually equipped to maintain a level of comfort all by itself through the mechanism of homeostasis. Ironically, it gets better at doing this when you expose it to a broader range of temperatures, textures and environments, as anyone who swims in the Irish Sea can tell you.

There is a pleasure in living in tune with the seasons – if we expect winter to be like summer, we will always be disappointed. But if we appreciate winter for what it is, and find beauty in frost and snowflakes and a cold pinch in the cheeks, then we will see a new delight.

There is a great letting-go in this idea of being able to take something for what it is, something which I think is well-described, as is often the case, by a great German word: Gelassenheit.

Beauty

If you manage to arrange your living quarters in a manner which is comfortable, you will achieve a small but worthy win.

If you can add viscerality to the space, through varied textures, art which draws the eye, rooms which bring different sensations: a view of the sea, a balcony over a busy street, a kitchen optimised for natural light, a dark-wood study designed to evoke sensations of intellectual rigour, then you will have come very far indeed.

The final component in this little holy trinity will be beauty, that counterpart and bedfellow of pleasure, albeit one which occupies more of the visual than visceral realm.

Beauty in the home will follow from the narrative which your home tells about its occupant. An armchair, which is in and of itself visually interesting, will not be beautiful if it is placed in an odd corner of a room, nor will it be pleasurable to sit in, even if it is “comfortable.”

In designing a beautiful space, you should compose vignettes: think of a chair which sits in a reading nook which is illuminated by a lamp. Our eye enjoys it because it tells a story of a life which is cozy, or intellectual, or relaxed.

Each space must also be designed in harmony: just as a very nice wool jacket looks weird with a silk pair of trousers, even if both are independently beautiful, we see that components of design must be compatible with one another in order to actualise their potential.

They must either be in the same register (same level of formality), must be in complementary colours, or tell the same story, or all of the above. This is because we intuitively seek out environments which appear organic, and in a sense we are, by imposing a colour scheme, mimicking the patterns which occur in nature.

And nature is the most beautiful of all. When I dug my own little wildlife pond a few years ago, it looked a little odd for a time, a hole in the ground which was out of keeping with its immediate envrions. But once the plants around it had grown in, and once an interface between the water and edges developed, and once the hand of nature had blended the water and the surrounding edges together, then it looked much more appealing to the eye.

You want your home to look like this, radiating an organic beauty. The best spaces take years to arrange themselves, just like my pond, because they must be layered and textured and knitted together with a common purpose which takes shape through time and through the benefit of lived-in experience.

Many thanks for reading. Subscribe below to receive my writing straight to your inbox.

Gentle Reader,

The modern work environment is often a cause of burnout or general anxiety, and the work itself is often regarded as less satisfactory compared to how workers from previous generations used to feel about their jobs.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that the work which we do is often one part of a very large and complex machine which operates, via the internet and in the real world, at great scale.

We are actually used to being a cog in a machine, but in a way which is legible. Now, operating as a cell within a cell within a cell, we often don’t see the fruits of our labour, and the human is built to see the fruits of his labour.

Tasks which give us immediate results are satisfying, like cutting the grass. Tasks which do not yield a result for some time are also enjoyable, in a sort of slow-burning way, like growing vegetables.

The common element here is tangibility – the work we have carried out is followed by an outcome which we can clearly understand and appreciate, or maybe even hold in our hands, in the case of home-grown vegetables.

It is not necessarily a problem of abstraction – even the mathematician who works carefully in the highfalutin’ world of numbers and theorems can sense and appreciate and calculate to check his work, but the middle manager of the sales team of the regional arm of the software department has only a vague and gnawing sense that the skills he teaches his team are somehow, somewhere, contributing to shareholder value.

Intangibility is one thing, but the sheer strangeness of what modern work is composed of is another aspect. Most knowledge work is carried out online, which means through a laptop or computer, which means it is effected by dint of keystrokes and mouse clicks. This is not so bad if you are using technology to carry out a “lindy” activity, such as writing or designing or producing video, but when you are involved in roles like project management or keeping tabs on various tasks and spending half the day in meetings, it is somewhat punishing.

On the outside looking in, this kind of modern work sounds fine and easy, and in a way it is. You can do it in your pyjamas and you don’t even need to clean your living room because Google Meet has background filters for your video calls. The downside, however, is that, as always, you must pay the piper.

After some time working like this, you will begin to feel a vague dissatisfaction and a sense of gnawing listlessness. This may expand to a sensation of impending doom or to a feeling of neurotic urgency associated with a never-ending to-do list, since the demands of all knowledge work are essentially insatiable and limitless. And, even though AI can now do some of it, you must simply work harder and faster with AI.

This results in a habit of checking Slack and not being able to relax and wanting to drown your phone in moments of clarity. I used to have a work laptop and every time I saw it, it just used to make me feel unwell.

You may not feel like me. I am a special kind of irritable snowflake, but the workers in their droves have voiced at least some of these concerns, so I know that I am not truly alone.

And of course, many jobs out there just aren’t quite this soulless, but the soulless job is surely on the rise and it has left us with a sense of unease and a desire for antidotes.

People are out there fantasising about moving to the country and living in homesteads, about quitting and travelling the world, or they are looking for activities to offset the icky feeling which work has left them with. They want old hobbies again, they want to work with their hands and garden and knit and move their bodies.

All of these impulses are natural responses to having a dead-behind-thee-eyes job. Even better than following these impulses is not having such a job in the first place, but in a corporate world which seems to be eternally hurtling towards shareholder value and abstracted, siloed work environments, this is easier said than done. And it’s not just corporate work which is rotten to the core…

Reader, I don’t have good answers here, and sometimes that’s alright. Not all jobs have to be passion projects, and are sometimes very much a means to an end. If you’re in the latter camp, and it’s hard to change your situation, then the best option is to change how you feel about your situation.

After all, there’s a reason this publication is called Chop Wood & Carry Water, a saying which suggests that we can experience the profound within the mundane, and that all endeavours, in and of themselves, can be imbued with meaning and even joy, but boy, on a Monday evening after a soulsucking day tethered to the laptop, that’s sometimes easy to forget. ❤️‍🩹

Eagle-eyed reader Jerry recently drew my attention the fact that I couldn’t be bothered forgot to write the third and final instalment of A Winter Fugitive, one of those random fictional outbursts which I like to impose upon a readership which, admittedly, seems to prefer factual essays.

Thanks Jerry for the compliment, and I hope you enjoy the final instalment! Readers can find links here to parts I and II.

A Winter Fugitive, Part III

Ireland: October

“October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.”

The story continues: we are not far from the end. But it never really finishes. I am in dear Ireland: grey skies, grand soft weather, cups of tea. The fire I fantasised about, lulling me to sleep, wakening to half-remember the fugitive words that haunted my feverdreams.

The nosebleed I almost welcomed: vivid red spots blotching on the metal of the sink, dehiscing, bloodred, vivid lifeblood, sapping from me. Have you ever seen a colour as vibrant, as tangibly alive? Blood under a tap, washed in the blood. How could one work?

Outside, there is the familiar field with its ragwort (we call them buachaláns). I had been looking at those f’ing things since anno domini. They are a bastard to pull up but when you get them it’s satisfying, the clod of soil that comes up with the roots, a fresh earthy smell. They poison cattle. Dirt in your fingernails. Good honest work. That word again.

They seem faroff, through the window, beyond the warmth of indoors, intangible. There is the odd rattle of the cattlegrid - that means there’s a visitor. Then you’ll hear a car groaning up the driveway between the tall trees, two beams in the night. Inside, the kettle is always boiling on the Aga cooker, whistling plaintively.

That night, it finally arrived. A gale raged – it was here, the storm that they said would chasten the island, would fell trees and rip roofs from the shoulders of houses, would totter moored ships and cut the power, obliging us to move carefully, guided by the lambent flicker of atavistic candlelight, ghosts in our homes.

I had the fire for solace. Someone came in, ushering the cold in with them. I do not know who; I did not look up.

I moved closer to the fire and I wondered where could I go, anywhere, wherever? And there I would be.

And I was sinking into slumber again, and all I could hear was the howling wind outside. I pictured the black Shannon river, moiling in the dark, lashing its confining walls, lashing to escape; then occult imaginings flitted through my mind, where the forms shifted, divaricated and contracted, vacillating between humane and phantasmal; I was transported into fugue states and across foreign lands; someone spoke, I awakened.

“Did you hear me?” My mother said.

I did not hear; I could not answer. And the chill had come in again, through the door which was now shored up. But it left me cold. And the wind rushed, the rain spattered incessantly, streaming down the windows, and a howling gust blew swirling down the chimney. The creeper tapped against the window, tapped its ghastly greeting; I shivered, I thrashed, I pined to break free; I couldn’t; I was in the thrall of the squalling elements, in the thrall of the winter from which I had tried, all year, to escape.

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Wizardlike solopreneur Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible. Paul is also selling a hardcover version of his first book, The Pathless Path, so check it out!

It was not a bright or sunny day, but he was wearing an extraordinary pair of sunglasses. To the best of my recollection, they were completely flat and horizontal on the top, but the bottom of the lenses were like the lower half of a hexagon shape.

Gold-rimmed, and possibly tinted a dark green in the lenses, they were more of a statement piece than a true item of practical usage.

Looking at the man entire, the rest of his outfit followed the same register. He had an overlarge suede jacket and some kind of navy or black denim on inside it. He flicked at a cigarette and I saw that there were rising around his head the various vapours of smoke which hinted at a recent drag.

He took it up again, the cigarette, and savoured a long pull.

I was gone. Walking by, I only really had a second or two to take him in – here was a man who followed the beat of his own drum. He looked like he never had a ‘proper’ job somehow, like somebody who just did his own thing, somebody who probably burned the candle at both ends

I loved his whole outfit, but the sunglasses were the true pièce de résistance, and they seemed so well-suited to his leisurely activity.

I knew I had to find a similar pair.

I’ve never really been a sunglasses guy. I live on quite a dim and overcast little island, and anytime I wore them, they felt like a kind of inconvenience, and I was forever lifting them up and down over the eyes or forgetting them or losing them.

Besides, I think I must have a small and narrow head or some kind of odd proportions because regular men’s sunglasses look a bit big on me. Ironically, when I tried on a pair of my ex’s, they looked oddly good, as did some of her t-shirts on me (is there something about feminine clothes seems to suit the present writer’s delicate build?).

Alas, there was always a sense that the sunglasses were wearing me. Or, sometimes, that I was a guy who wanted to wear the sunglasses, who was trying to wear sunglasses, rather than a guy who was, simply, wearing the sunglasses.

None of the styles seemed right. The aviators were too much of a larp; the small round ones too full of aspiration; the wraparounds not necessary for a leisurely stroll.

The slim rectangular ones were the closest to a good match, but even they never quite fit the bill. The product-market fit just wasn’t there. Nothing felt very me.

But now I had new data – that old bastard outside the pub could do it and so could I.

The online search began, a humbling experience. How do you describe something which you only saw in half a moment? I stopped short of typing “French pervert furniture maker antique sunglasses” even though that was how I felt about them, in the best possible way.

In the end, I found a pair that I liked, cheap and new, and not quite the ideal shape, but when I started wearing them, they just felt…right.

Something very small can transform you by bringing you into alignment.

Imagine you are swimming, and you just can’t get into a rhythm, and you suddenly realise that your head is too far out of the water – you lower it and everything feels smoother and more streamlined.

As I began to step into the world with my new stylish accessory, I felt more aligned. The glasses somehow revealed to the public something about my worldview, my essence, my modus vivendi. Either that, or they believed I was a perverted French furniture maker.

Whatever they believed, I was in rhythm. I was swimming fluidly in the stream of life, and every little walk I took was about 30% more enjoyable. I felt connected, in-sync, and I developed a sort of adoring fondness for the little green-tinted glasses, just like what Tom Pendergast felt for his Green Buddy.

Remember those hang-ups I had? That sunglasses are annoying, that you have to lift them up and down? Well, it turns out that adjusting them and removing them is actually an act of theatre, a demonstration of panache, a further flourish.

After all, if all the world’s a stage, the dramatis personae should make it their business to be interesting.

Something else I noticed: despite the cloudy nature of the sky here, there is quite a lot of background glare. I had been squinching up my eyes for most of my life, to attenuate this glare. Now, with my frames in situ, that is no longer needed. Going outside now without them actually feels like a bit of an annoyance.

The added benefit is that the glasses protect my eyes from the sun, thus preventing cataracts and the humorously named pinguecula.

The essence of this article is that I quite literally changed my perspective.

Out there in the world, there is something that will bring you more into alignment.

It doesn’t have to be a material object, but it sure can be. We live in a world which has recently become almost anti-material, and very focused on experiences rather than items. But a beautiful way to live is to appreciate materials and, as strange as it sounds, to develop relationships with material objects and their contexts.

Think of your first car that you saved up so much to buy, or a bockety coffee table that you made yourself, and of the special feeling you had for these things. But it also doesn’t have to be a crafted item or something with an emotional story, you can just love something, even if it’s mass-produced, for the simple joy it brings.

Beyond physical items, it can be a daily practice, a change of location, or a form of dance, which will click with you. It could be swimming in the sea, sitting under a beautiful lamp, writing in a gratitude journal, or starting a blog Substack. I have done all of these lovely things.

And yesterday, walking along by the sea, having donned my faux-vintage geometric sunglasses, I saw a woman jogging towards me.

Dressed in all black, she had the typical running gear, the split shorts and the technical t-shirt and the propulsive-looking shoes. But over her eyes she had wraparound sunglasses, in a vibrant tint of green, as she ran along the promenade.

It had happened again.

The sunglasses fit her; they fit the moment. Just like the man outside the pub, they were a perfect demonstration of a certain item in a certain setting.

The man outside the pub’s shades said to the world:

The woman’s wraparound sunnies said:

I knew I wanted a pair just like hers, for my ever-expanding collection.

After all, my furniture-dealing sunglasses would be no good moving at speed, and so I began to envisage the glory of the first outing of my new wraparound running sunnies.

But how many situations require a different set of shades? I suspect there may be many. Maybe I am a sunglasses kind of guy after all.

Or maybe I’m just viewing the world through rose-tinted lenses?

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Pathless Path maverick and internet encourager-in-chief Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible. I’ll see you in the Whatsapp group!

I have long held that the best life is a simple one.

One must always seek to reduce, to boil down, and to ruthlessly prune activities and procedures which get in the way of the essential and unadorned pleasures of life.

One of these pleasures is meeting with friends.

As recently reported, I’ve moved to a new place, a pleasant seaside village where it’s easy to take nice walks, to swim and to cycle, and to lollygag in the environs of the village itself, stealing furtive glances at the sea which shimmers between the avenues, and observing the little old ladies at the greengrocer’s as they examine items of fruit in forensic detail.

But one can only skirt the issue for so long, before actually diving in and meeting friends and participating in the life of the place itself, thereby combating the ever-growing societal plague of loneliness and disenfranchisement. Happily, I have a couple of friends who live very close, less than 10 minutes walk away, which has always been a dream of mine, and a couple of new village friends too, who already almost feel like old amigos.

The nice thing about this is that we often bump into one another, impromptu, and when I’m carrying out the little monotonous chores of daily life, or running errands as the North Americans like to say, then the tedium is somewhat assuaged and flavoured by the prospect of bumping into a pal, which is very pleasant.

Scheduled meet-ups, however, have proven surprisingly challenging. I work 4 days a week, and so do a couple of my friends, but our free day doesn’t usually align and when it does, we won’t necessarily know about it…and of course no grown man would or should engage in the suffocating and heavy-with-expectation practice of sharing calendars.

Weekends, in my experience, especially for those with partners or families, are usually already tightly scheduled with trips or activities etc, and if there’s free time on a weekend it’s usually brief and doesn’t lend itself to any kind of substantial hangout. In any case, yours truly usually likes to write his ‘weekly’ article on weekends.

That leaves us with midweek opportunities to meet up, which involves a lot of groping in the dark to find a suitable slot, resulting in a periodic series of scheduling messages which usually look like this:

Friend: I’m around Tuesday if you want a coffee?

Me: Can’t do Tuesday but I’m free Friday.

Friend: I’m out of town Friday, but how about Monday?

…and so on, endlessly.

I don’t know about you, but to me there is something very high friction about this, something which almost ruins the charm of the meetup, and makes it feel like a chore which should be carried out as expediently as possible.

Surely, with all of us living so close together, there must be a better way? Enter the idea of The Standing Arrangement.

But first, a little more context.

Picture a remote and beautiful island, diverse in landscape, at the end of the world. In its midst, picture an Irishman, full of piss and vinegar, wanting to trip the light fantastic and to see out his twenties in a last blaze of glory.

That was me, living far from home in a place where, initially, I didn’t know anyone at all. In the end, I was lucky because it turned out that due to a quirk of human nature, it is easier to make friends, ironically, on sparsely populated islands than it is in big cities where you rub shoulders with hundreds of thousands of people every day.

In the town where I lived, however, I noticed something. There were only really 3-4 bars and coffee shops in the whole place, and there was maybe 1-2 of each where we usually hung out.

This meant that if I went to the pub with one friend, we would generally almost always bump into somebody else we knew, and two would become three, four or five.

It was really nice. And the great thing about it was that you didn’t actually even have to plan anything. You could just turn up in the pub and meet someone and if there was nobody there, you can just read your book or whatever.

And so, I realised, hey, I could just turn up here and see who I bump into. Granted, some people might think it’s a little weird, especially since I had probably examined half the people in the pub’s prostates, and in reality people are a little suspicious of anyone who hangs around in the night on their own, even if it’s in a pub where you are likely to know half the people inside.

There is something very lovely about a weekly non-negotiable activity. Before half my knee fell off, I used to look forward to my Wednesday five-a-side soccer with an almost religious fervour, to the point that I was loath to take a holiday if it encroached upon a sacred Wednesday.

I want to recreate that space, albeit with the more flexible approach of the Standing Arrangement.

The idea of this is that you inform your friends that every week, on the same day and that the same time, you will be in location X. If they want to see me, they can go there.

If nobody comes, then I will be found carrying out a gentlemanly pursuit, such as reading or writing, something befitting my station as an artisan, a public intellectual, and all-round man of letters, aesthete and bon vivant.

Either that or onlookers will say: “Who is that poor bastard sitting on his own?”

Of course, there may be weeks when I am away or doing something else, but that’s the luck of the draw, and since my friends only have to walk down the road for five minutes, it’s not exactly a great burden for them to trek home again.

But what features should the Standing Arrangement exhibit?

1. You must be in the same place at the same time every week.

2. You must commit to being happy to be at this place, even if nobody comes, and willing to read or do some genuinely enjoyable activity, which means you won’t be furtively looking to the door.

3. The atmosphere and environs must be suitable. It probably makes more sense to have a daytime schedule, rather than evening, as you probably won’t want to hang around in a pub in the evenings, since cafes are probably closed. An evening schedule may make sense if you make the location your own home, which probably comes with an expectation that you will provide food as well (I read somewhere about a couple who had a rolling pizza night every Sunday at their home).

4. The location must also suit your activity, eg reading or whatever you plan to do, if left alone.

Once you have decided on a time and a place, all that remains is to inform the little tribe of friends, and soon you will have a happy little coterie, chatting away to your heart’s content every week, as regular as clockwork.

Or, you can be sneaky and just start turning up at the same time and in the same place every week, without saying anything and see if they notice. If it doesn’t work out, that means that either your friends didn’t notice or that they don’t like you, in which latter case nobody can help you, and your fate is likely to be even more awful than those consigned to the nethermost circle of Dante’s hell.

Hopefully I will avoid such an innings – stay tuned for updates.

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Pathless Path maverick and internet encourager-in-chief Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible. Think about joining — I’ll see you in the Whatsapp group!

Gentle Reader,

As the summer cast its glowing spell and as that shining orb in the sky bathed you in her glorious rays, did you nonetheless feel the absence, these past months, of a certain je ne sais quoi?

Now, in the whispery autumnal hush of September, just as the blackberries are beginning to ripen on the bushes, you have become aware that something was not quite right all along: a skipped beat, a ghost in the throat, a gnawing sense of generalised malaise…

Could it be that you sorely missed the weekly Substack article from your friendly Irish correspondent? That regular missive, laden down with verbal treasures, heavy with humid souldeep wisdom, glittering with that literary brio which is the sole preserve of the Hibernian man, or woman, of letters.

Or perhaps, you philistine, you did not notice anything at all, and you allowed each summer evening to fold you in its charming and caressing embrace, without a care in the world?

In either case, I’m back after an unintentional hiatus during which I was distracted by the travails of buying and moving into an apartment, combined with the process of job quitting and jobseeking, all while recovering from fairly major knee surgery.

This perfect storm proved potent enough to stymie even the most seasoned penman, and so I had to put the writing on the backburner.

As things begin to settle (mind you, I am still surrounded by cardboard boxes), I thought I would write about a few of my observations which came about in the course of moving house, and living in an apartment.

The mind is a dark room

During my property search, I had set up alerts so that properties in certain areas, in a price range, and with the right number of bedrooms and so on, would come into my inbox.

Above all else, I wanted to live in a house, and I wanted a garden. Not only that, but the garden would have to be south or southwest facing, an aspect which is all the more important on this sun-drained isle. In this garden I would dig a little pond, surrounded by little clumps of wildflowers to keep the bees and butterflies happy.

This was a ‘deal-breaker’ mentality. I was a firm believer in having strict criteria, and all that would satisfy me was my fancy house with a garden.

One day, while browsing online, I just looked at the map view of properties and saw what was to become my apartment, in a coastal village on the outskirts of the city, and with a balcony terrace which, surely, could never supplant a garden? The first thing I thought of was a pint I had had with a visiting Tasmanian friend in a nearby pub after a swim in the sea – I absolutely loved the area, but would I enjoy apartment living?

One month later, I can say that I really love it. The brain plays tricks on us – mine told me I would never be happy except in a house with a garden. I have come to understand that the mind is like a dark room – to know our own minds we must stumble in the dark, groping unseeingly, and by erring, by falling and landing where we had not intended, only do we learn the contours of our own preferences. No amount of theory can prepare you for this.

It made me wonder – where else was I falsely following a misguided ‘deal-breaker’ mindset in my life?

Apartment living is…different

A note for the uninitiated: apartment living is, in ways, unforgiving. I’m probably not the most tidy or house proud person. but even my laid back approach to domestic order has been challenged by the smaller dimensions of my environs.

Stated otherwise, if you leave anything out of place in a small apartment, the whole atmosphere suddenly feels very cramped or untidy. If I put out the clothes horse after doing the washing, then I suddenly lose the last couple of square metres of real estate which made the living room navigable; one dinner plate left on a countertop ruins the whole kitchen; or a dining chair not pushed in under the table suddenly restricts the throughway to the couch. Similarly, the storage of cumbersome items, such as hoovers, ironing boards, bike trainers, becomes tricky, if one is resolved not to ruin the vibes.

The positive side of owning, however, is that I get to finally put all my stuff exactly where I want it. My air fryer, juicer, sodastream, all the best of my books, all take (carefuly orchestrated) pride of place. And, within reason, I can accumulate new niceties, and express myself through flowerpots, furniture, paintings, and of course, a barrel pond.

Care must be taken so as not to bering anything in which could cramp my style. These circumstances have given me a newfound appreciation for structure, organisation, and everything having its own place. What next? Will I begin folding t-shirts neatly? Will I cease using my bedroom floor as a wardrobe? Will I start pre-heating ovens? Anything is possible, in this degraded age.

Location, location, location

Living in a walkable neighbourhood was a goal of mine which was somewhat at odds with my desire to have a house with a garden, due mainly to house prices.

The fundamental dilemma with which I was presented was city or country living, an abode at a far remove from the sights and sounds of the beating heart of civilisation, albeit which would prove to be its own sanctuary, versus the more urbane existence of the city-dweller who can walk to each and every amenity.

As I have gotten older, I have started to enjoy city living less and less. The bright lights no longer dazzle me, even if I do appreciate the accessibility and sheer access to services associated with living in the city proper.

In this case, that desire for walkability won out. I’m not really in the city proper, but I am in a village within the city’s belt, which means there is a good deal of life around me, and which means I can amble down to the shops at my leisure. And I actually prefer being in a smaller hub, with the benefits of a sense of community and knowing the local barber, fishmonger, and friendly publican.

And, at the risk of sounding like a gobshite, and knowing full-well that it is a joy not available to many, living by the sea has been a real godsend.

The ink is barely dry on the untidy signature which tied me into a hefty mortgage, and yet I have already started waxing lyrical about bracing maritime walks and ‘brisk’ sea swims.

Weekday mornings are punctuated by a constitutional which takes me through the village, out to the sea, down along the coast, and around in a loop back to the abode.

Right now as I type, I can see a tranche of shimmering blue, twinkling, on this bright morning, a scene which does the body and mind a power of good. Yet I am even more partial to a stormy sea, to tossing waves, and that sense of impending doom and general foreboding which I hope an autumn storm will soon bring us.

Gentle Readers of this column, if visiting Dublin town or surrounds, are of course most cordially invited — especially those who appreciate apartments which smell of rich mahogany.

In the meantime, I will leave you with a nice little poem by Irish writer Austin Clarke, which celebrates those two great tempestuous beauties: the sea, and womankind.

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I also have been dragging my heels on another fortnightly newsletter called “The Leg Up” which discusses longevity and vitality from a doctor’s perspective. This week’s chapter covers the three pillars which I consider to be the foundations of movement health – the musculoskeletal, metabolic, and motor systems of the body. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it!

The Leg Up

Affiliates:

Pathless Path maverick and internet encourager-in-chief Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible. Think about joining — I’ll see you in the Whatsapp group!

I have a strong dislike of my smartphone, but when somebody asked me recently why I had changed it for a greyscale e-ink device, I couldn’t provide a succinct answer.

The influence of my phone on my mood and my nervous system is insidious and yet all-pervasive. A simple two sentence answer would never have captured my feelings about it, so I said that I found it overstimulating, and let the conversation move on.

We all know our phones lure us in to their aura, paralysing our agency and sucking us into a doomscrolling vortex, but that’s not their only effect. They also have quite a paralysing effect when we aren’t using them, because our brain starts to seek dopamine, and it knows that easy, low-hanging stimulation is available from the device in our pocket or on the coffee table.

I hate it. I hate the gravitational pull it has upon me. I hate that I don’t read much at all anymore, as my attention span has been consistently worn down. I don’t like how I reach for my phone while walking, queuing, or standing at bus stops and I don’t like how scrolling has become my default activity if I’m tired or bored.

Socially, I also hate when somebody takes their phone out during a conversation. It breaks the flow of the interaction and, to be honest, I find it rude. Obviously, sometimes you have to check a message but, most of the time, whatever you are looking at can wait until after the conversation. Otherwise, you have prioritised a screen over a human.

How can we escape the vortex?

The brick

There is no one-size fits all solution. This is because the vortex is embroidered within the fabric of our lives, and not just in our phones. It’s easy to throw your phone in the bin and take a vow of technological chastity, until all the two-factor authentification requests come rolling in.

In my first attempt to escape, I bought an old dumbphone, a folding brick made by Caterpillar, a company which also makes construction equipment. It was a big, heavy unit which was clearly designed for building sites.

It had its merits. I liked that it was a flip-phone. After a call, I would flip it closed with a satisfying click. It attracted attention in a way which was funny but also started a debate. But, it also seemed a bit too much like a statement, as if I had strayed too far into the wilds of hipersterism for the sake of it. I felt this before I realised its full limitations.

You see, it just didn’t have enough juice. It had Whatsapp, but the keyboard was so hilariously bad that it was unusable. I actually wanted friction, because I don’t want to spend my time frantically typing and exchanging cat gifs, but sending a text when I really needed to was beyond infuriating.

There were other hurdles. Old phones don’t have NFC, which is what supports the ability to tap your phone to pay for something, but which also is needed for certain membership cards. The fancy gym I go to requires that we tap on our way in. I thought this was great, until the staff told me I could only get in without tapping by giving my name and date of birth at reception, which was fine, but then at the spa at the back of the gym where I like to go (do not judge, gentle reader), you also need to swipe in and there isn’t always somebody there to take your details.

The friction was too much. I had to bring two phones just to get a workout in. At this point, I decided I needed a halfway house: more tech, more capacity, but also hopefully still less stimulating, something that wouldn’t have me reaching for it every five minutes, but could still do a job. I was also inspired by the fact that some people have just gone full Luddite, like writer August Lamm who not only got rid of her smartphone, but also her computer, despite being a writer.

So, I knew it was possible, but I also knew I couldn’t go cold turkey yet.

Enter, the e-ink phone.

E-ink

You know the weird, non-shiny screens that kindles have? They are made from something called e-ink, which is a brand of e-paper, a screentype which tries to simulate real paper. Since my flipping brick didn’t cut the mustard, I bought one of these: a greyscale, e-ink phone (you can have colour e-ink too, like I have on my e-ink tablet – more on that later).

It’s an upgrade on the previous weapon. It has NFC, even though I haven’t got it working yet. It operates on Android, which is a big improvement on whatever garbage the Cat was running, and which also happens to be my personal favourite operating system. This means that you can get nice apps from the Google Play Store, although I am keeping them to a very bare minimum.

The e-ink screen is very nice. A relevant criticism is that you can just put an iPhone on black and white and get almost the same experience, but the devil is in the detail. The e-ink is much more restful on the eyes, and is great for people who want a reading device which also happens to be a phone. Plus, on the iPhone or similar, there’s always the risk you’ll turn those alluring colours back on. Ironically, there’s no point in me showing you the difference between a greyscale iPhone and the e-ink phone, since the screen you are using to assess them will negate the differences.

Is the e-ink screen perfect? No. In fact, I would much prefer if it were colour, even if colour e-ink is not very arresting (that’s the point!). But this is the biggest problem for me at the moment – I have to send and receive photos in greyscale and, to be honest, it’s as good as useless. You can’t enjoy a photograph or get the true sense of it, without colour. Equally, when you send a photograph, you don’t really know what it looks like.

Here’s an example from my phone of a kitten beside a golf club:

Colour is a big deal — I’m sure there will be or maybe there already is a colour e-ink phone. I think it’s probably worth waiting for that, as it’s a big upgrade.

There are other downsides. The phone is guilty of ‘ghosting’ which means that there is a slight delay between input and response. For those of us trained on high-tech devices, this delay is maddening at first, until you get used to it.

It’s also just not as slick. It has facial and fingerprint recognition, but they also have a bit of lag compared to top end phones. Actually, just using this phone really gave me an appreciation for just how incredible a phone like an iPhone is – it is just so fast, so responsive, so quick to navigate from one screen to the next and to find anything you want on it. But that’s a kind of high-speed technological crack cocaine I don’t really need in my life.

The e-ink phone is also just a bit janky. Every now and then, something doesn’t work for absolutely no good reason. Yes, it’s annoying. In those moments, I breathe deep and think of the payoff. It also has randomly cut out in a call twice and I don’t think that was a coincidence either, so we are far from plain sailing.

So, what is the outlook? Are we all destined to leave the fantastic technicolour dreamworld of our vivid phones in favour of pastures new?

I don’t know, but e-paper does seem to be taking off and, if regular and slightly odd Joes like me are interested in using e-paper phones and tablets, then others will be too. This might be just the start.

Still, even if it’s a good change, I see it as part of a journey, a step in the right direction rather than the whole solution. No single device will fix all of our attention and nervous system dysregulation, but the right tool can shape us and bring us closer to our goals.

For now, I admit I still keep my iPhone close by, in case something doesn’t work or I need an app to do something quickly. It’s also handy to have a very good, colour camera to hand, and also it works well as a streaming device for the apple TV. As I plan to wean off it fully in the short term, and I don’t leave it anywhere near my bed. When I wake up, I see my slightly dim and unengaging screen, and I’m more likely to get up out of bed than to look at a screen.

It’s odd to think of a future which is not composed of hyper-real and hyper-vibrant screens, but progress isn’t always shiny and glistening — maybe the future is muted in colour and slightly blurry, but it might still be a better place to inhabit.

Thanks for reading. AI wrote precisely 0% of this article. Click below to subscribe for more.

I also write another fortnightly newsletter called “The Leg Up” which discusses longevity and vitality from a doctor’s perspective. This week’s chapter covers the three pillars which I consider to be the foundations of movement health – the musculoskeletal, metabolic, and motor systems of the body. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it!

The Leg Up

Affiliates:

My friend Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible.

To assess the quality of your life, sit quietly in an empty room. Thoughts will appear and just as quickly float away, like clouds on the wind. Some will be anxieties, others will involve future plans, and some may be simple sensations.

How you feel in this moment is a function of the substrate in which you are swimming. The old joke is that two fish are swimming one day in their little tank and one says to the other, Hey, isn’t the water great today? And the other says, Water? What is water?

Imagine it like a little bubble which surrounds and nourishes you. This bubble insulates you from the World of Things. I have a distinct memory of waiting for a bus to arrive in the pouring rain. It was cold and getting late, but I had just played a game of soccer. My mood was good and I basked in the post-exercise glow of endorphins — my bubble, or substrate, was glowing at that moment, and the World of Things, in this case, rain and cold, did not matter so much.

Exercise is one way to improve the substrate, a quick high which happens to be good for you. You can also improve your immediate physical environment, e.g., by cleaning your room, decluttering your laptop tabs, or adding potted plants to your desk.

Another, simpler way to make the substrate more nourishing, is to remove harmful forces which exist within it. Examples include: negative thoughts, critical self-talk, fears about the future, a racing mind.

You want this substrate to be a pleasant state to swim in and so, every day, it is good if you can defrag the disk drive, or clean the pool. One of the great ways to do this is to filter out such negative influences, via meditation: a worrisome thought arises, is digested, and floats away into the ether.

Beautiful.

Many of us, when assailed by negative thoughts, seek to drown them out. If you have a loose floorboard on your wooden floor, it’s easier to put a rug over it than it is to change the floorboards. The only problem is that every time you walk over the rug, you compound the damage until one day you fall through the floor and land on your arse.

If you don’t feel comfortable in your living room, instead of adding a new lamp, remove the ugly armchair. Subtraction is easier, and inharmonious things, be they real or imagined, cause more pain than joy is caused by harmonious additions.

It is therefore generally more optimal to subtract, rather than to add.

Subtraction

The Five Hindrances

Subtraction is potent because the natural state of the human is contentment. Observe a baby: he is happy until he encounters a hindrance. The five hindrances of the Buddhist tradition are as follows:

1. Sensory desire: seeking for pleasure through the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and physical feeling.

2. Ill-will: feelings of hostility, resentment, hatred and bitterness.

3. Sloth-and-torpor: half-hearted action with little or no effort or concentration.

4. Restlessness-and-worry: the inability to calm the mind and focus one's energy.

5. Doubt: lack of conviction or trust in one's abilities.

You will notice that a baby doesn’t suffer from 2, 3, or 5. Hence, the baby is only unhappy when he is hungry, tired, or worried because he can’t see his mama.

He lacks the cognitive abilities which one day will allow him to survive in the world but which, for the present, allow him a more carefree existence. He is therefore mostly happy, excepting moments of hunger or similar urges, which are quickly rectified.

The adult, however, unfortunately has the ability to plan for the future, to feel jealous of his neighbour, to doubt his own fortitude or skill, and to apply himself without whole-heartedness.

Meditation will help with these.

For the other, non-Buddhist tendencies, we may subtract them from our life if they are troublesome. If you have a job which is deeply problematic for your mental state, it is better to get a new job than to paper the cracks with a new car.

If your daily existence reeks of complexity, you must distill it down into its simpler and more fundamental elements. To live well, you must live simply.

Here are some examples of subtractions and simplifications:

• You have a long commute to work because you live in the suburbs. Get a remote job or a job which is within walking distance.

• You work 80 hours a week because you bought a second property as a holiday home. Now you have to work extra just to make the payments and you never have time to visit it. Sell it and book a rental for your holidays.

• You go to gym to lift weights to get strong. Afterwards, you meet a friend for coffee. Instead, go rock climbing with your friend.

• You order a takeaway to get dinner out of the way to spend time with your wife. Instead, make dinner with your wife, and integrate both activities.

• Remove clothes from your wardrobe which don’t fill you with joy, regardless of how much they cost (h/t Marie Kondo).

Simplicity doesn’t come easily, rather, it must be engineered. Applying this to your digital life is important, too.

Digital Subtraction

I have had success with slowing down my mind by downgrading my technology. I have changed my iPhone for a black and white screened e-ink phone which feels less stimulating. I bought a canvas shoulder bag and I keep a newspaper in it at all times. Now, if I am on a plane, waiting in a queue, sitting in a cafe, I either read the newspaper or read an e-book on my e-ink screen.

If I feel the urge to watch something passively on a screen, I prefer to watch old-fashioned TV rather than Youtube. It’s somehow more restful.

I used to write an online diary. Now, I write by hand with a stylus and e-ink screen instead. Not quite pen and paper, but it’s the tradeoff which suits me (I’m not a total digital minimalist).

At the heart of digital subtraction is a need to starve your dopamine receptors, whose upregulated status makes you feel twitchy and off-kilter. If something feels compulsive to you, kill it immediately.

Enforcing constraints

Ironically, one of the most liberating ways to increase your feeling of agency and to free up headspace is to enforce constraints and rules. These simplify your life and help you to concentrate on the important things in your life.

I learned the value of constraint when I saw the other side of the coin — absolute freedom. Taking time out to travel for a long time, I saw that there was a hidden downside to unlimited optionality. I realised then that commitment and constraints are the foil to optionality and freedom.

Here are some examples of powerful constraints:

• I want to get fit, but I often overtrain — every Saturday I will take go for a long slow bike ride.

• I want to spend more time with my wife — every Sunday afternoon is a coffee date before spending the rest of the day together, no exceptions.

• I am wealthy and overworked, I want to learn to enjoy my holidays more — every plane trip longer than 4 hours, I will fly business.

• I don’t feel rested after holidays — I will structure every holiday so that the last 3 days are spent at a beach resort so that I will be rested before I come back.

• I sometimes stress out about missing work if something goes wrong with my flight — I will never fly out the day before returning to work, 2 days buffer minimum.

• I want to stay in touch with all my friends without having to constantly schedule meetups — every Friday I will have a rolling pizza night at my place, no invitations necessary.

• I never have energy in the evenings to enjoy time with my wife — we will go to bed the same time as our kids and spend the morning together (h/t ).

• I look at my phone too much, but I need to check email, and I scroll late at night — I will check every day at 11am and 4pm, and put my phone on airplane mode at 9pm.

• I can’t focus when I work from home — I will put on my work uniform and work from a co-work space or even the garden shed.

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In a sense, constraints are all ways to ‘trick’ the body and brain. This was when I initially railed against them. I thought: I am smart, I don’t need to trick myself. It turns out that I was wrong, and that I overestimated my own bandwidth.

Imposing constraints was an acknowledgement that my brain functions like a dial-up connection from 1996 – it’s not bad, per se, but it needs to work within a certain set of parameters, in order to operate more efficiently.

Learning this was a way of learning to submit. Much of what generates friction in life results from not yielding to the secular forces within us, which must be allowed the play themselves out. If the tide is coming in, rather than swimming further out to sea, maybe just let it wash you gently onto the shore, and take a breather there.

Many thanks for reading — click below to subscribe, in order to receive my writing weekly.

I also write another fortnightly newsletter called “The Leg Up” which discusses longevity and vitality from a doctor’s perspective. This week’s chapter covers the three pillars which I consider to be the foundations of movement health – the musculoskeletal, metabolic, and motor systems of the body. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it!

The Leg Up

Affiliates:

My friend Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible.

I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers. This article was actually written with Supernote, and then converted to text within the device, before exporting to a word document

Gentle Reader,

I love reading about the evolution of the working lives of others. Tracing somebody's progression across different industries, in particular, has always been a point of interest for me.

Behind every worker, every careerist, every company man and freelancer, there is an individual. The individual who changes radically from one field to another, or from one trade to another is, in a sense, repudiating a past version of themselves.

They are making a statement which says: this is not who I am, or: this role did not nourish or sustain me.

My working life (so far) has had three distinct chapters: clinical medicine, academia, and industry/corporate. In reality, the distinction is a little less clear cut, but the overall evolution took that shape.

Let's look at these three different movements in my life, at how did they did or did not serve me in the past, and why I moved on to pastures new.

Clinical Medicine

I studied medicine almost by default. My burning passion in school was English , followed by European languages, but the prevailing opinion at the time of my final exams was that if you were smart enough to “get the points” for medicine, you should do it, since a lifetime of job security, wealth, and prestige would inevitably ensue.

Plus, since medicine is done straight out of "high school" here, and since there are no large fees for undergraduates here, the decision to study medicine was not seen as a financial burden or as something that had to be made to pay out, even if high earnings were generally expected.

A lot of my friends studied medicine, on this basis too. Looking back, I would say about 60% of my colleagues studied medicine out of this vague sense of obligation, while not really being into it.

Another 25-35% were probably moderately good fit for the career, without actually being true devotees to the cause. A final 10% were probably really interested in medicine for the right reasons.

What interests me most is that group of 60% who went into it for the sake of it. Out of this category, I would say that 90% of them still don't really understand the forces that propelled them, and many are operating at a psychological loss, whilst still hanging in there due to a sunk cost fallacy.

Why did I move away from clinical medicine?

There were multiple reasons. I was not aligned with the work. I had never really envisaged being a doctor until I neared the end of my studies. I didn't have a deep interest, and the parts which did interest me were always more scientific than pragmatic. Even as a kid, I always knew it wasn't for me, and so I had one eye on the exit, before I even started.

In terms of lifestyle, even though I had gotten past the stage of night shifts and weekends, I still would very occasionally have to hold the emergency phone and stay late in case something happened. This made me miss out sometimes on some of the simple things in the evenings, like language classes, sports, which I have come to enjoy so much. No thanks.

I'm glad I worked as a clinical doctor. It granted me lots of useful skills and the ability to help people, and to learn about the human body in a way which can never be taught by reading textbooks.

I also got a stable income from it, which allowed me to get on the property ladder (no mean feat – more on that soon).

But there came a point of diminishing returns. As I developed as a doctor, the other parts of me began to wither. My friends in corporate were learning how to navigate meetings and work relationships, how to speak, present information and how to plan prove their worth in the organisation. My friends in business were striking deals and some other friends were starting their own businesses or joining start-ups.

I am, and was, totally pragmatic about the limits of these experiences, too. I knew that they sucked in a different way, but I wanted something new, as I had an run out of road, and wasn’t learning any more in clinical medicine, I was ready to move on.

Academia

When the opportunity to work as a tutor and researcher in a university came up, I was happy to take it. Working in academia was a new departure, even if I wasn't changing fields as such.

I was using my medical knowledge to write research and to teach medical students. A different part of my brain lit up — it was very gratifying seeing medical students finally understand a topic for the first time, or being able to take the time to craft a succinct abstract for a research paper. There was also a good buzz being around a university campus and it was nice to feed off the energy of the students.

There was also a dark side to academia. Due to publication bias, research which does not come with a finding or seem novel, often wouldn't be published, even though the information within was still valuable and contributing to the scientific yield.

The other pain point was the tedious nature of academia itself. We received funding from various institutions and so, in order to explain to them what we were doing with the money, we had to make regular presentations. This makes sense of course, but it wasn't really feasible to explain to the delegates the nuances of the work, and the delegates themselves were usually dead-behind-the-eyes bodies who had been sent as part of a box-ticking exercises.

There was also the infamous problem of citing your friends and getting cited in return.

All-in-all, it was too boring. As ungracious as it sounds, I just was not interested in examining students, in grading their papers, even if I liked the hands on teaching part. And the level of boredom associated with that paled in comparison to inter-departmental meetings...

I did learn from it, however, and I ended up being able to put some research on my CV, resend which helped need me to eventually transition to industry/ corporate.

Industry/Corporate

The third chapter of my "career" involved working in what was essentially corporate private healthcare, albeit in a very innovative envrionment. I went in at a high level and I learned an awful lot.

I had to work across teams and deliver KPIs and work on strategy and all of that stuff, which can be a bit of a drag. But there was also lot of interesting development and problem-solving. I basically had to explain every decision and either greenlight or stop projects in their tracks

On a personal & professional level, the learning rate was tantamount to drinking from a fire hose. There was also quite a lot of stress & responsibility, and I was present in some wild meetings where tempers flared and where things essentially devolved into shouting matches. Wild.

Underneath the surface, there was always a kind of soullessness, and a detachment from the work which had become very abstracted. In the end, I was happy to witness first hand the perks of corporate work while also understanding the limits, especially in regard to the particular role I was in. The learning slowed down and I pulled back a bit, remaining involved but not on a day-to-day basis.

Chapter 4 ???

Reading this back, it all comes out quite negative, maybe even idealistic. I still enjoyed and loved all those jobs, in their own way. But I think it’s good to keep moving, and you can feel it in your bones when it’s time to hit the dusty trail again.

What is next? I have no idea what will happen, even if I have a rough idea of what I want, pragmatically speaking.

The thing I really love is reading and writing — since I was a kid I always loved the act of taking notes, of scaffolding words, of having a pen in hand.

I know full well this can't pay the bills, or even begin to. But I'm also fortunate I have the opportunity to live in an era of almost limitless online reach, which means my words can arrive in your cerebral cortext seconds after I hit ‘Publish.’

These words can entertain and inform others and, just as writing them helped me to digest my past and plan my future, they might be of help to those out there who want to make plans of their own, or who feel compelled to share their own career pathways in the comments.

Thanks for reading — click below to subscribe.

I also write another fortnightly newsletter called “The Leg Up” which discusses longevity and vitality from a doctor’s perspective. This week’s chapter covers the three pillars which I consider to be the foundations of movement health – the musculoskeletal, metabolic, and motor systems of the body. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it!

The Leg Up

Affiliates:

My friend Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible.

I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers. This article was actually written with Supernote, and then converted to text within the device, before exporting to a word document

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Gentle Reader,

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to join a gym. As soon as I turned 16, the minimum required age, I signed up to the nearest one.

I quickly learned everything I could about protein and sets and reps and progressive overload. The first training program I ever did was Mark Rippetoe’s 3x5, a strength program which emphasised the basics.

After every session I used to stand outside the gym, waiting for one of my parents to collect me, drinking milk by the litre and planning the next workout.

I can’t exactly say what my motivation was at that time, but I’m pretty sure it stemmed from some kind of hidden and displaced feeling of physical inadequacy, as I was always the skinny kid.

Besides, since I had gone to an all-boys primary and secondary school, I was aware that social capital in those environments mostly derived from sporting abilities, which were related to strength, muscularity and athleticism, and I knew that the gym was a place where you could become strong and athletic.

After a few years however, or maybe even sooner, I suspect that this desire transmuted itself into a wish to become more attractive to women, in tandem with the rise of the Instagram era, and general societal expectations.

In the end, I did develop a body which was strong and fit, and I’m still really interested in functional strength (to the extent that I will be putting on my doctor hat and starting another publication called ‘life is a lower body sport’ this week).

But I didn’t understand that all that time in dark gyms was dead time, headphones on, scrolling between sets, and if I had my time again, I would spend it differently…

The Gym

Gyms are dark places, physically and spiritually. There is a lot of negative energy in them. The music is loud, the lighting artificial, and the overall atmosphere is one of testosterone-fuelled alpha energy, of posturing, of furtive looks and showman (and woman)ship.

They are also quite weird. Imagine if you showed our ancestors a video clip of people working out in a modern gym. They would say, ‘Why is nobody talking to each other? What are those things they are lifting and what do they have to do with every day life? Why are people running on machines instead of outside?’

But gyms are also a safe haven for many people, especially people with social anxiety. You can go to a gym and be amongst people without having to talk to them, all while improving yourself or improving your physique.

There is a meme called ‘See you in the gym, bro’ which describes the kind of pain and agony experienced by a man who has been rejected or betrayed. Many in the gym are working through this, working through fear and a sense of not-enoughness.

A lot of these guys and gals are carrying this sense that once they reach a certain bench press, a certain weight, a certain level of flexibility, they will be good enough.

Ironically, they might be better served spending their time elsewhere.

Yet, having said that, all of this negative energy is not the reason I would do things differently, if I were twenty-something Edward once again.

Quadrant 4

The gym itself isn’t a problem. In context, however, we can see its limitations.

Going to the gym is an extremely efficient way to get fit and strong, but I don’t think it’s an extremely effective way to stay sustainably healthy, or generally to build the life you want to build, because it’s not a holistic approach.

Let’s face it: most people are going to the gym because, at some level, it alllows them to feel that they are bettering themselves. If you have swallowed the self-improvement kool-aid, and you have nothing else to do on a given Tuesday evening, you probably have a gnawing feeling that you ‘should’ be in the gym.

I am here to tell you, however, that there is another way.

When you workout in a gym, you get the benefit of improving your health in a very fragmented way, and you miss out on the holistic and dimensional benefits which can be accrued in other ways.

Let’s look at this chart from Ben James (h/t).

This chart recommends spending your time in quadrant 4, where you can derive meaning and be creative at the same time, and generally get more bang for your buck with how you spend your time.

Let’s adapt this to exercise:

You get the benefits of dimensionality: exercising while also meeting people, creating meaning, and strengthening existing bonds.

Couples understand this better than singletons – they find ways to spend time together, to do activities which are enriching and which develop their relationship, while exercising or learning.

This idea of adding dimensionality be applied to anything. For example, you can and should eat in a creative, meaningful and social way (dinner parties, pot luck, restaurants). Even more simply, you can drink coffee in a cafe instead of at home. You can read a newspaper in a library. You can say hi to a stranger on the bus instead of looking at your phone.

Time spent richly

When you start to operate like this, you fight back against the increasing siloisation and fragmentation of modern existence. As it stands, people go to the gym to work out because they don’t embroider exercise into their social routine; they go to the park to enjoy a green space modern urban environments haven’t woven trees and flowers and grass into the fabric of our cities; they develop a work persona which must be upheld because their ability to survive depends on corporate success.

These social problems can’t all be solved by a Sunday cycle with friends, by a Friday night tango or by going rock climbing every Wednesday evening, but those kinds of approaches are a start to a more integrated life.

Besides, everybody knows that running or cycling outside is much nicer than using a treadmill or stationary bike, so you will have more fun, too.

And, you can still go to the gym, if you want (I still do). There’s just no reason to be there every day, if you’re not a professional athlete.

If I could talk to sixteen year old Edward, I would advise him to keep working out, but I would tell him that there would come a point, very soon, of diminishing returns, and that if you’re trying to seem attractive to women, they actually prefer a guy with balanced hobbies to a guy whose ‘hobby’ is the gym.

At that stage, you have to ask yourself, is this the best use of your time? You don’t make memories in the gym. The best things happen with friends, in shared contexts, in motion – when you are learning and growing together.

Thanks for reading. I am also starting another publication, ironically, on working out. You will find it here. Click below to subscribe to the current publication.

Affiliates:

My friend Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible.

I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers.

Gentle Reader,

This week’s entry runs the risk of appearing to be a rant against the whippersnappers, written by somebody who is no longer young.

Maybe I am out of touch, but I have been feeling for some time that how we travel, especially solo travel, has changed a lot.

I have done a lot of solo travel. Almost a decade ago, I quit my job for about 9 months and went travelling and sort of just hanging around in various places. Before that, I entered into a period of several months of very casual work, taking shifts that suited me, and when I came back from the trip, I resumed this same pattern of casual work.

The current version of me wouldn’t have the balls to do this. Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s insecurity in the job market or maybe it’s the fact that being a solo traveller ain’t what it used to be.

The strongest reasons for this seem to be the demise of the youth hostel, the death of nightlife, and a job market which, combined with inflation, implicitly warns against prolonged periods of time off.

Separately, it seems fair to say that travelling isn’t as fun as it used to be, since the world has generally become over-touristed and since many attractions exist, above all else, due to their Instagrammability.

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The Youth Hostel

I don’t travel very often on my own anymore, at least not for longer trips like I used to. But when I do, my impression is that the youth hostel, once that core element of solo travel which facilitated meeting people and making holiday friends, is more or less dead, except for the really big successful ones.

Nowadays, your average hostel has turned into a medium-term accommodation for many people who are looking for something more secure, due to the worldwide difficulties in the housing market. This stands in contrast to when ‘youth hostels’ were for…the youth.

In the golden era, everyone under the one roof would be aged between 18-25, all happily mixed together in dorms and hanging out in common areas, before hitting the bars and nightclubs, after getting exceptionally drunk on vodka beforehand.

Now, if you are a solo traveller, you will then end up in a hostel where people are basically living, rather than holidaying, which is a vibe shift to say the least.

Nightlife & Alcohol

Even if you do find some willing pals to carouse with, it’s no secret that nightlife is on the decline pretty much everywhere. This is most likely due to a mixture of inflation and people being on their phones all the time, neither a phenomenon which encourages people to go out. When people do go out, the magnetic allure of the glowing screen does just enough to break up the social flow of many interactions, and my instinct is that people are less likely to talk to strangers or strike up serendipitous conversations.

People also generally just drink less, which compounds the decline of the appeal of loud and dark places. When I was young, we all drank too much. If I was an economy, my GDP probably would have shrunk 30% due to hangovers.

The youth are right about that: hangovers are a terrible and expensive and crippling waste of time.

But I also have to be honest and say that alcohol was, and probably still is, the best social lubricant known to man, and is responsible for just about any romantic liaison I ever had, up to my mid-to-late twenties.

I think the move away from alcohol is the right one, but as a mechanism which makes socialising much easier, it is pretty much impossible to replace, especially given that, indirectly, it competes against screentime.

Overtourism

Now, looking for attractions, the young solo travellers all gravitate towards the same restaurants or cafes or ‘hidden gems’ which the biggest TikTok influencers are currently pushing. Moreover, the traditional ‘must-see’ sites at pretty much every major tourism location have become ridiculously overcrowded, which has sucked the joy out of travel.

Have you tried to go to the Colosseum, Angkor Wat, the Louvre recently? Anything which is in any way notable is just way over-touristed. As somebody who hates waiting for just about anything, spending half my holiday queueing or stressing about booking, is not enjoyable.

Part of the fun is feeling like you are doing something nobody else is doing, and the requirement to pre-book hotels and hostels and experiences far in advance, is a dementor which sucks the soul from the trip, and which deprives the traveller of the secret ingredient which adds the magic to the solo travel experience: spontaneity.

When I went inter-railing around Europe, my friends and I had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t have a single recommendation for anything. And it was great. We met lots of people and partied too much and I got drunkenly robbed in an episode of which I have no recollection. But it always felt like we would discover something, that we were off the beaten track, rather than implicitly guided by social media recommendations and expectations, as we were free from the yoke of having to Instagram our trip.

I’m glad. I can’t imagine the state of us on our trip. If I saw a photo now, I would probably cry with laughter. We didn’t take a single photo in 3 weeks of inter-railing which, admittedly, was stupid, but also illustrative of where our heads were at.

It’s the economy, stupid

To me, it feels like the final nail in the coffin, especially for those who would want to take a gap year, is the jobs market.

Unemployment is actually not high at all anywhere, but there is a general sense that many people are stuck in a job which they don’t like, because they are afraid that if they leave they won’t get another one. Plus, the competition for entry-level graduate employees, who traditionally occupy the lower rungs of the ladder, seems to have increased, which makes the youth disinclined to go on a gap year abroad, finding themselves.

These kinds of prolonged trips are now more likely to be taken by people having a “crisis” in their late twenties or, increasingly, thirties. These are people who have built up a bit of career capital, some savings, but have burnt themselves out at the hands of Big Tech or Big Pharma or just at the behest of a demanding boss somewhere, anywhere.

They take their money and bop around the world for a couple of months, albeit in the midst of a solo travel scene which is increasingly fragmented.

Instead of traditional backpacking, there has hence been a push towards more goal-oriented activities, opening the door to a new style of ‘travel’ – the objective-driven retreat.

The retreat

Gone are the days of a round-the-world trip in 3 months. Now, the average 31 year old sabbaticalist is more likely to do an activity-based retreat, as a way to find community and to nibble away at the feeling of ‘wasted time.’

Enter the month long yoga retreat, the writing course in a Provence farmhouse, the residence in a house share amongst creatives in a European city.

I was once an intrepid traveller, yet now the above kind of approach holds greater appeal to me. Rather than staring at hotel walls and dragging my suitcase from one hotspot to another, I would rather turn up somewhere comfortable, with like-minded people, and engage together in a craft.

Such experiences, however, are generally not for the faint of wallet. These activities will come at a premium, and two weeks in a loft in gay Paree will cost you as much as a year doing the old school style of travel used to cost, the kind where you would stay in hostels, eat tinned fish for lunch and dinner, and where you would chance not buying a ticket for the Zagreb metro, spending the whole trip worrying about inspectors.

Sayonara

The glory days are gone, or at least that’s how I see it. Are the youth okay? Maybe they are just fine, and my calcifying lenses have given me the wrong impression.

Nonetheless, I think the era of chaotic travel, en masse, is behind us. The new generation of travellers, those who brave the skies and the loss of income, have already seen the sights and sounds online before they set foot on the plane, and the travel-world into which they enter is much changed.

That wilderness in which we once roamed has been replaced an environment in which the pseudo-curated imagery and deceptive narratives of the glowing screen are realised, in their monotonous sterility, in the 3D world of sight and sound.

Affiliates:

My friend Paul Millerd runs the Pathless Path Community, a cozy online space where we support each other to find ways to live and work in the most authentic way possible.

I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers.

#1 Dependence & asking

Gentle Reader,

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but what about dependence?

I’m 3 and a half weeks post knee surgery, and still in the throes of a recovery which has made me highly dependent on others. I can’t do much and I went to bed at 8pm last night, out of a mixture of boredom and tiredness.

Per se, it shouldn’t be a problem to be dependent, when I’m fortunate enough to have family who are willing to help me out and, to be honest, I don’t know how anybody would do this alone.

In the course of the first two weeks or so, it was more or less impossible for me to do anything for myself, even making a cup of coffee.

This meant that if I wanted something, I had to ask.

Asking for just about anything never came easy to me, and here, it reared its ugly head again.

Why would somebody find it hard to ask? My best guess is that in childhood, they had a bad experience with asking – an ask came with a backlash of judgement or unavailability or intimidation.

Then, when you don’t ask, you suppress. And when you suppress, you displace.

This all makes more sense, now – not long ago, at the bidding of the excellent , I did the Enneagram personality test, which clocked me as a Type 5 (‘The Investigator’, ‘The Observer’).

Scrolling down the Enneagram wikipedia page, I read the little summary chart, clipped below.

Just as the Myers Briggs personality test diagnosed me with terrifying accuracy (INTJ – ‘The Architect), here we see the Enneagram getting it right on the button. The highlighted part above designates helplessness as my basic fear – a person afraid of appearing helpless will be afraid to ask.

It checks out, as the Americans would say.

The next categories, by the way, are ‘basic desire’ (mastery, understanding) and ‘temptation’ (replacing direct experience with concepts) – these absolutely are on the money too.

But all of this is getting very deep in the weeds, reader. I recommend you take both the Myers Briggs and the Enneagram, if you are interested. If you are a user of chatGPT and if it has saved your history, you may be able to save yourself some time – I asked it to diagnose my MB and Enneagram based on my chat history, and it got it right on both counts, validating the actual tests I did online. Again, terrifying.

#2 Book Recommendation – A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander

Every now and then, you come across a non-fiction book which just makes sense, which jives with your own personal viewpoint.

A Pattern Language has been revelatory for me because it contains ideas which knocked around in my own brain, but 1000x more developed, and already fitted and categorised into a system. It’s as if I had been groping in the dark, only for somebody else to turn the lights on and reveal the detailed contents and contours of a room which I had imagined only in its crudest outline.

A Pattern Language was written by architect and designer Christopher Alexander and it serves as a sort of compendium of how to approach designing just about anything. It contains 253 patterns which are recursive in society, and which lean upon one another.

It’s a sort of first principles look at which aspects we should consider when designing just about anything.

It starts with very large patterns, such as how regions and cities should be organised, before coming down to smaller patterns like a front door bench.

The book states principles which are sometimes obvious. For example, in the pattern on towns and cities, Alexander states that:

“The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement."

He goes on to say that the magic of the big city comes from its vibrancy, whereas

“To live well in the country, you must have a reasonable piece of land of your own - large enough for horses, cows, chickens, an orchard - and you must have immediate access to continuous open countryside, as far as the eye can see.”

He expands upon how cities should be designed to optimise access to both the magic of an urban nucleus and the relaxing open plains of the countryside.

I enjoyed his reflections on home design even more. In pattern # 111, entitled ‘Half-Hidden Garden’, Alexander surmises that a front garden is not ideal, since one does not have privacy. Nor is a back garden ideal, because one feels too isolated. His compromise is that the best garden is ‘half-hidden’, a side garden where one can have privacy while also being adjacent to the street, getting the best of both worlds.

Naturally, such a garden should be south facing (patterns #105 and #161), and allowed to partially grow wild (pattern #172).

The book is full of such gems. Shout out to for recommending it on the David Perell podcast.

#3 A Winter Fugitive, Part II (read Part I here)

Italy: September

I had left the Australian winter only to burn under the too-hot sun of Italy whose heat, now in late September, was finally beginning to dissipate. There were a few last days when I needed the shade of the portici, when I hid there, kicking up red dust, and watching the city move sluggishly.

Shortly, the weather became more palatable. Then, ironically, I knew it would soon be too cold, another winter – I began to wonder if I had overstayed my welcome, if I had lost my way and forgotten my mission.

What was my mission again?

A late afternoon. I came down Via Bocca di Lupo, pausing where the alley met the main street. At this junction, my attention was arrested by a very beautiful sight – a window in the brickwork of an old wall, enclosed by wooden shutters.

They looked very ancient, the shutters, if wood could live so long, dim under the shadow cast by the profuse green of the bush which ran along the top of the wall. I love this city, I thought.

I turned left, coming onto the street where, the week before, I saw the Pope, waving to the adoring masses from a white jeep, and I came out near where she lived – I wondered if I would see her there.

Would that be a good or a bad thing? There was always a feeling that one or both of us was under a misapprehension.

Turning right, I approached the grand double doors of the Collegio di Spagna. Cast iron bars framed the lower windows of the college, darkened from where I stood; I wanted to look in, to see inside; I didn’t. No sign of life stirred from the balconies up above, only silence from the old stones, from the resolute iron scrolls that curled under the balconies.

Around the corner a young woman, not her, with big dark eyes and curly dark hair, came wheeling a bike. She wore a long overcoat; she felt the creeping chill that was starting to invade the city. I wove outside the bollards to grant her passage; I wove back in; the spokes of her bike ticked like a fading clock behind me.

Then I felt it; the winter I had fled from; it was here again.

When I reached Via Farini I remembered that, one day, when I was with her we met a giant marmalade cat, with golden eyes and a pink tongue, who suffered bypassers to stroke him, bellyup. Further along, there had been a door which she said she would put in a film scene, sturdy oak, iron fittings, a wicket-door: a door within the door. A lantern hung just above it, where the arcs intersected, and our footsteps had echoed under the portici.

What else did we see? A Madonna, muralled upon a streetcorner; the red dot of a lit cigarette suspended ghostishly at a high window. She took me down that little street, it was, she warned me, how to say, a bit - losca?

Her English failed her at times; less often than my Italian. Come si dice..?

Now, the sign on the café door tinkled to greet my entry. I took a seat out the back, on a cast iron chair in the courtyard, my favourite spot, here again. Wherever you go, there you are. Remember those Australian days?

The waitress approached me:

“Ci sei?”

Two middle-aged women paused to hear me speak, an outsider, resumed their conversation.

I ordered, then there was the vacuum, the immediacy of my work. Ought I to call it work? Pages, self-indulgent ink this time, ornate, illegible. Criss-cross, underline, arrow here, what does that say?

The self confounds you.

Plots: you lose them. They blossom, wither, die. Last resorts.

That was another time her English failed her, the night when we climbed the grand steps of her palazzo, stopping halfway to see the owner’s apartment, the wrought iron entrance, the grand hall; we marvelled, we went on, upwards. The heavy lock on her door, the cumbersome key, the lugubrious retraction of the bolt, loud and echoing on the hard floor.

All was poised.

There was a faint ashen tang of cigarettes on her breath, her hand on my chest, my hand tracking across her, before her she pulled back to say:

“No, I ‘aven’t been to the…”

A beseeching look; a silence. Views out the window, onto the street; the vasiform balustrades, concrete, of a balcony; a row of vespas in the glow thrown by the lanterns that illuminated the portici; the stillness of the witching hour.

“...estetista.”

Aesthetic, I thought. I was a B1 in Italian, a low intermediate; as a man I was an A1, a beginner, grasping and clutching.

In the cafe, I heard the waitress before I saw her.

“Un caffè macchiato.”

She clinked the little cup and saucer onto the table beside my notebook, butterflied, its runic symbols bared. Did she see? Words waxing fat.

“Grazie.”

“Prego.”

An alveolar trill. Was she impressed? She turned with heedless grace on a heedless heel. Bronze ankles peeped out beneath the wellfolded cuffs of her black jeans.

Long-legged Italy took a bite out of Sicily.

Speckled sunlight cast chance rays through the aperture, through the awning, ran prickling along my neck. The last dying rays. I took up my pen; the page took umbrage. I wanted to make amends, but we always quarrelled.

It was like Australia all over again.

Maybe it was time to go home. To my ‘real’ home. I replayed scenes from my little European escapade and I thought of the sour rubbery smell of the U-Bahn, a certain je ne sais quoi. An ich weiß nicht.

Then, there was searing greyness, spat out into a Soviet-Bloc hangover, haunted by the memory of the drug dealer who wheeled up beside me outside the nightclub, with his bipedal minder, with a lurid smile, to say: Ich hab’ alles.

I didn’t doubt him for a minute.

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I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers.

#1 Being a doctor has become less prestigious

I graduated from medicine more than ten years ago. When I was studying, it was seen as the elite career pathway, at least in Ireland, and it was the most competitive course to get into.

Over the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, I’ve noticed that being a doctor is generally regarded as less prestigious than it used to be. As somebody who didn’t do it for the prestige, I’m not too bothered, but as a trend it’s interesting to observe and to speculate on the reasons.

Salary

A doctor’s salary has historically been good, albeit with high variance geographically and according to specialty. However, in recent years, software engineers, finance bros, high-end influencers, and many other jobs or roles now rival medicine or exceed it, in terms of remuneration. In countries with minimal private healthcare, such as the UK, wages in particular are quite low for doctors – see below salary of 33 - 53k GBP for a fully-qualified cancer neurosurgeon.

There’s a middle ground here. This salary advertised above is clearly too low, but its also true that many doctors were wrongly incentivised for many years, especially in the private system.

Dr Google & AI

Medical knowledge used to be shrouded in a kind of mystique, very much gatekept by the profession. With the advent of the internet, people gained the ability to Google their own symptoms or, now, to ask ChatGPT about them. This can be helpful or it can provide misinformation or make somebody unnecessarily scared.

On the net, this has deleveraged the power imbalance between doctors and patients. Patients often have a particular expectation or desire when they go to see a doctor, and they can see that clinician as being obstructive if they don’t agree or facilitate their wants.

In some cases, patients feel they can’t trust their doctor or be honest with them. In this instance feels she has to lie to her doctor. The problem is that she wants a contraceptive pill which is not allowed to patients who suffer from migraines with aura. She has read the medical literature and sees that the absolute risk is very low – she would be happy to take the pill and absorb the risk.

Aella is right. If she knows and understands the risks, why can’t she take it? The problem lies with clinical guidelines and international consensus. The absolute risk of a stroke or another bad outcome for a patient with migraine with aura taking certain contraceptives is indeed very low, but still deemed too high.

I have sympathy with Aella here and I think it would be reasonable to prescribe this medication to her. However, medicolegally, if a doctor prescribed her this medication and she died, that doctor would be tried by a council of his or her peers, whose job it is to determine whether the doctor’s actions were reasonable amongst his or her peer group. In this instance, prescribing is not standard, and the doctor could be struck off the register or even criminally condemned as being guilty of gross negligence.

The commodification of healthcare

Healthcare used to be sacred. Now, it’s a commodity. Patients come and see the doctor and ask for prescriptions or MRI tests the same way they would add something to their online shopping basket on Amazon. In a way, this is a progress of sorts – medicine was previously too paternalistic.

However, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Private and online clinics now are often solely interested in getting patients through the doors, and this is facilitated by one thing above all else: patient satisfaction.

How do you improve patient satisfaction? Give them what they want. They want an unnecessary MRI of their brain? Go right ahead. They think they need antibiotics for what is a virus? Prescribe them stat. They want a letter to say they can’t fly because they want their money back from an airline after deciding to stay at home? Write it up, doc.

This is, obviously, bad. It also erodes trust at the margins, a trust which was weakened during Covid. Not only does it hurt patients in the long run, it also deskills doctors and turns them drones who run on autopilot, without using their critical brains.

As a result, the quality of healthcare has dropped, almost universally, wherever I go, in spite of advances in medical treatments and also in the availability of testing. Both as a patient and as a doctor, I very rarely see elite clinical skills anymore, that really strong ability to connect with a patient, to explain, to reassure, to contextualise.

The fall of doctor exceptionalism

Consultant doctors (referred to as attendings in the USA) used to be able to do whatever they wanted, more or less.

In the old days, there was just about no medical evidence to guide what treatment was good or bad, so they basically just did what seemed right. Their power was vested in clinical experience, rather than data. When private healthcare became big, these doctors would double job, drawing a public salary while running over to the private hospital and making money over there at the same time.

Nobody really complained about it, because people were afraid of doctors and of their perceived power over life and death. Now, this exceptionalism has started to abate.

Part of it is due to access. Now, with many online digital health platforms, instead of waiting in the doctor’s waiting room, you can open an app on your phone and see a doctor very quickly.

This experience of being greeted by a doctor in a dark room somewhere, possibly working from another country, wearing a headset and churning through patients, removes the aura and mystique that used to shroud the profession.

The other aspect of exceptionalism which is on the way out is working conditions. Again, consultants who finished their training used to have the pick of the private patients, and could dictate their schedule. Now, public healthcare systems are constraining doctors to tighter working schedules with less overtime incentives (see the banding system in the NHS), and those who work in private are often managed by businessmen who run large entities, who treat doctors no differently to nurses, secretaries, or anyone else who works in the clinic.

Such private interests are happy to cut corners everywhere they go, and won’t wait on doctors or treat them differently due to old-fashioned ideas about prestige. Previously, as a consultant you used to be your own boss – that’s not the case anymore, with hospital or private clinic managers breathing down your neck and trying to squeeze your productivity and slow-playing your annual leave request.

#2 Immigration

The sentiment around immigration on the ground is changing in Ireland.

The left remain leftist and the right remain rightist, but those in the middle, and there are many of them, seem to be shifting more towards the right. In this country, our population is growing extremely quickly, and we took in a lot of migrants, such that our population grew at 10x the rate of the rest of Europe, placing us firmly in the category of African countries in terms of growth.

This happened in concert with a generationally bad housing market crisis, all of which combined to brew up a perfect storm.

Now, I hear more anti-immigration sentiment being murmured around the country from those who are, more or less, centrist. The key development revolves around seeking an explicit distinction between asylum seekers and economic migrants, and seeking to limit the former and take only the highly skilled of the latter (as it is done in other countries, e.g., the Australian points-based system.

Political will is shifting in that direction now, too, and with recent scary stories of anti-immigration tactics in the US, or outright bullying of non-citizens at airport border checks, the tone around immigration has certainly changed.

#3 Real-world dating

There has been a recent backlash against online dating, a movement which is not unjustified. Our swiping, en masse, has facilitated a kind of scale depersonalisation and commodification of the human form.

It also doesn’t really make sense. Women judge men based on their aura, how they behave socially, how they move through the world. Men tend to be more superficial and to prioritise looks. Both men and women often have unspoken checklists which prevent them from seeing something they don’t know they want, leading them to disqualify each other mistakenly.

The kickback against dating apps often takes the form of joining a running club or approaching a woman in the street or hanging out at coffee shops.

There is nothing wrong with these activities per se, but in a way they are not natural either. Humans developed in clustered societies – we are supposed to marry from our friend groups, from our work colleagues, from people who live nearby, from friends of siblings.

As society has become more fragmented, and more aspirational thanks to apps like Instagram, people’s wants and desires have outpaced what is achievable or what is actually good for them. I don’t have a good solution here – maybe it’s okay to expand your friend group, to swipe online, to run in clubs, to do everything, but it’s still not easy out there.

#4 AI as a sounding board

I’ve been using AI this week to learn about python and machine learning. It’s really good.

In this use-case, it’s best employed in a kind of question and answer format. I like to study a topic, read about it, and feed any questions and uncertainties into ChatGPT. Or you can just ask it to teach you straight up, but that’s a little clunky still.

I learned a lot this week by doing an online course on python and also by doing a Google developers course on machine learning.

I’m excited at the idea of using python for work but also to track training data, if and when I get back to exercising (see below). I’m not really big on quantified self, on heart rate variability or on tracking my sleep, but I would love to put in some exercise heart rate data, wattage, and so on, to make some fun calculations.

In the meantime, online friend Khe Hy’s resources remain the gold-standard for teaching you how to leverage AI at work.

Future-Proof Your Career with AI

A break down of the most important developments in AI for busy professionals.

By Khe Hy

#5 Knee surgery is hard

I had knee surgery recently (for the second time). It sucks.

Recovering from a knee operation is quite difficult, as the knee is the main weight-bearing joint in the body. I had a hip operation recently too, and that was much less of an ordeal.

What’s more, the surgery I had, and the medical problem I had, were reasonably complex. Surgeons and physicians couldn’t really agree on what was wrong with me. I received many different recommendations from doctors here and from many countries overseas. I was recommended everything from do nothing, to shockwave therapy, to injections (hyaluronic acid, steroids, PRP), to many different types of knee operation, some of which involved taking out some of my own knee cartilage and then re-implanting it, embedded in a cellular matrix, back into my knee. Another procedure that was suggested involved inserting a cadaver’s cartilage into my knee, in isolation or in concert with a realignment of my knee joint, called an osteotomy.

In the end, I went with the surgeon who seemed the most trustworthy, whose methods were less sexy but more tried and tested.

As a doctor, this whole experience was very difficult to navigate – I have no idea how I would have managed without both medical knowledge and contacts amongst doctor friends – it shows how tough it is out there for patients.

The operation which I had done has been around for a very long time. Outcomes used to be…not great, but have gotten better. Interestingly, this is not really chiefly due to advances in surgical technology or instruments, but due more to broader factors, such as patient selection, emphasis on pre and post-operative rehabilitation, as well as surgical understanding of how to use implements and how to operate more quickly to minimise complications.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you like this more ‘rapid-fire’ format. I love each and every reader and subscriber and I love to read feedback. Give me a like or a share if you got value from my writing this week.

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Australia: Winter.

I moved under the leafless boughs of barren trees, under the spire of a church, etched into the sky.

It was here, the winter I had long-awaited, with dread.

I stowed my hands in my pockets and thought about how it was like being back in Ireland again where the wind cuts you and the rain comes in sideways. Except in some ways it was worse because you didn’t expect it, because the cold came in through the thin walls and took up residence, and there was no roaring fire to vanquish it or to offer solace in the flickering dance of its flames.

It wasn’t that bad. But I was habituated to the heat and felt the sting of the change in the weather. I knew a nice café on Church Street that had a stove and so I headed that way, down the hill, bidding my breath appear before me and then watching it float away as the sun, low in the sky and wan, unspooled her pale and almost heatless rays, sharp in the brisk of morning.

With the change in the weather I knew I wouldn’t stay long, now. Just like the bats that nightly speckled the soft twilight sky as they flew over the house we rented on their way westward into the parks, I too would go northward for the winter, but further, crossing the equator.

Very soon, I thought, I will go.

I kept going and, reaching the base of the hill where parked cars were slumbering under blankets of dew, I saw that the droplets on the windscreens traced patterns which were like pastiches of those stark trees by the roadside.

I looked at every windscreen until I came to the café. It was open and, like the winter before, they had put up a plastic wrapping for warmth around the terrace.

I went in, it, my footsteps hollow on the wooden boards. It was full of early morning quiet – not a soul.

I took a table at the back near the stove and unpacked my laptop. The whole day was mine and I didn’t want to waste it like the ones before. There was an Australian girl that I was seeing at the time and I thought that if I got some work done I could see her. She was tall with mid-length brown hair and a fringe and eyes that were not uncompelling and maybe we would get a drink later. She had a softness about her which I was thinking of, when the waiter came over.

He knew my order – I ordered the usual. He went away and I took out my laptop and began to write.

This is how this story starts, in the café. But in reality it started long before that: and it followed me. Wherever I went, there it was. And it was here, I realised, in the café, by the stove, on the table, and I couldn’t get away from it, from the fact that I wanted to write and the words would not come, not then nor when the waiter brought the water bottle, amber in colour, and glasses, nor when the clock struck the first hour.

For distraction I looked at the photographs on the walls. The café used to be a barber shop and there were photos of men in bow ties standing beside sinks and chairs and of cut-throat razors, of bristly neck brushes, and of a ceramic shaving mug, the sight of which evoked the smell of a felt that i and I felt almost as if I could smell the spumy lather it would give off.

The heat from the stove began to percolate through me and soon there was the telltale double knocking thock thock and then the familiar whirr and grind of the coffee machine. I began to search within for the stirrings of a muse. There was a fear of seeking too keenly, of frightening her off further into the depths of the subconscious, where, presumably, she sequestered herself. I probed tentatively; I needed her, but the nullity of my creative intellect felt every bit as barren as the vast nullarbor that stretched west of me, and the blankness of the page was a mirror to the blankness of my soul.

Just like on the bad days, I felt that I would never produce a single word of merit again, and desolation crept into my heart.

People began to file in to the café. The words began to file in too, but without the blessing of the muse. They were hardfought words, artless and unevocative. They bore no secret sign; I dismissed them with callous keystrokes and I began to colour the page with work which, later, I knew I would disregard.

The morning passed and the words slackened. The chef was visible now above the patisserie display cabinet, and fumes of smoke curled before him, amidst the hissing of a pan. Cooking smells began to waft towards me, beginning to appetise and distract me.

I thought of the girl. She had a tattoo below the nape of her neck that I couldn’t recall exactly, something intertwining or helical. I thought of the rhino beetle she had taken up into the palm of her hand and let clamber over her fingers as she bade me listen to its angry little hiss, up close, late at night. Hers was a country town, somewhere northeast, with two pubs and a shop, where she fell asleep listening to the kookaburra’s cackle, the cicada’s throttled hum, the cricket’s stridulating chirrup: her lullabies.

I pictured it: The Never Never, the outback, the woop woop: the tumbleweed and the terracotta dust and a car coming up in the far distance, fuming a gentle jet of smoke into the heated air that miraged above the tarmac.

But I couldn’t write. The words were drying out, the words that weren’t very good anyway, the words that reached too far and came up short and I was leaving anyway and leaving her but deep down I knew it would be the same anywhere else: wherever you go.

Then it grew cold: a sudden chill. Someone had opened the back door from the store room, and a nipping breeze infiltrated the café.

The door closed; warmth began to tiptoe back in on silk slippers. But it was too late:

My pimpled gooseflesh, an empty cup of coffee, vapid words.

I unravelled them, found underneath a virgin page, steadfast in its featureless pallor.

I had seen it before; I would see it again.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will stay tuned for Part II – Click below to receive it straight to your inbox.

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My mind has often alighted on the topic of the perfect desk setup. After all, how should one write?

Marcel Proust used to write from bed, using pen and ink to annotate fresh paragraphs into the margins of his manuscripts. Jack Kerouac harnessed the power of a wave of manic energy whilst writing On The Road by scribbling it all down on a single continuous scroll of paper which was 120 feet long. Nabokov used index cards which he eventually compiled into a full novel, and Maya Angelou famously used to rent hotel rooms to create a sensation of space and freedom.

There are many ways to work. For example, which of the below setups looks more ‘optimal’ to you?

vs

It is perhaps a little bit of an unfair comparison, given that one of the setups has a sea view, but the obvious answer is that it depends on what you intend to do, and it probably also depends on what you require physically and ergonomically and…spiritually.

Right now for example, I am lying in bed, propped up by pillows, with an over-bed desk positioned across me. The desk did not initially fit under my bed and so I had to buy blocks to raise my bed, adding another step to the eternal pursuit of perfection. This position will be comfortable for maybe 1-2 hours, before I will want a change – flexibility is important, to be able to work from different positions, in accordance with what our body calls for.

Yet, in the eternal search for a ‘perfect’ desk setup, the latest approach to catch my eye came from a note by .

I loved the simplicity of his approach, a keyboard and an e-ink device called a Daylight…but am I just fooling myself again that I need another device? Probably.

What appealed to me about this setup is that, recently when on a plane flying home, I typed quite a lot on my iPad and found it to be a good experience.

This was counter-intuitive as I thought that everything about it would be sub-optimal: the screen too small, the keyboard too small, the position of screen and keyboard, linked as they were, potentially a cause of back pain, and of course the general jankiness of the keyboard.

Yet it felt nice. I decided to ask ChatGPT why – here’s an abbreviated version of what it gave me:

1. Simplicity and Focus

• Fewer distractions: iPads tend to run one app at a time in full-screen or split-screen mode, so your workspace feels cleaner. No tabs, popups, background apps buzzing.

• Minimalist interface: Many iPad writing apps (like iA Writer or Apple Notes) are designed to be stripped-down and calm.

2. Posture and Environment

• More casual posture: You're likely lounging or sitting comfortably when using an iPad, rather than sitting at a desk like you would with a laptop.

• Different setting: You might take your iPad to a couch, bed, or a sunny corner—so the whole context feels more relaxed.

3. Tactile and Cognitive Shift

• Touch-based interaction: Even if you’re typing with a keyboard, you're still tapping and swiping sometimes, which can feel more direct and intuitive.

• "Not work" association (no pressure to be “productive”): Many people associate laptops with work, pressure, or deadlines. iPads are often associated with reading, browsing, or drawing—so the act of typing may feel more playful or less pressured.

I think GPT is onto a winner here. The inability to easily swipe across to another tab, combined with its usability sitting or lying down, and the casual nature of the device definitely seem to help.

Is there a way to simulate even more organically? Perhaps Nat has done so with his Daylight device, but the present writer has bought enough gadgets to last a lifetime, so I won’t be going there just yet.

In the meantime, I’ll stick to optimising my desk setup. I have a bookmark saved for years of a video from Ali Abdaal entitled ‘My Most Productive Desk Setup Ever’, which I refer to occasionally to let myself dream of endless productivity, without having any real intention of buying the items in the video.

Ali’s setup is the best of the best, with the most up-to-date and highest spec devices, but I would be curious to know if Ali’s desk setup really meaningfully improves his productivity. I say that not with scepticism but of genuine curiosity.

I think there is a good chance that it does, but I think that he and I are wired differently and that some people respond more to functionality in order to work, whereas others respond more to aesthetics.

In the video, Ali himself says “I’m not trying to optimise for aesthetics here, I’m trying to optimise for functionality” which is a great insight. A writer of fiction or a newsletter is going to have different demands compared to somebody like Ali who juggles videography, coding, meetings, writing, etc.

Functionality vs aesthetics

The tension between functionality and aesthetics is a time-honoured clash of two titans. Think of that spare room you see in many houses – going by cliché, if the wife gets her hands on it, it might end up being a charming little spare bedroom, or if the husband gets his grubby hands on it, it may well end up as a mixed-use space, with both a home-office and home-gym setup.

At a certain level, the craving for an aesthetic is that it sometimes, deep down, suggests an elite kind of functionality. The simple desk in the image at the start of this article evokes a kind of functionality in a time before social media and widespread computer usage, a time when, allegedly, you had no choice but to write. But this comes from a yearning, a dangerous kind of poison of the mind which one must be wary of.

Yet it rings true that such a space could be the most functional space possible for the right person. It could be both aesthetic and functional, if it were beautiful and beautifully in harmony with the life of the writer, and in harmony with his or her objectives in life in a way which facilitates the work of the true self.

The Hardware

Yet, the software developer or the analyst must bow, ultimately, to functionality alone. He or she will have to go all-in on standing desks, on under-desk treadmills, on multiple monitors. Context being king, such setups always look better in an office rather than at home.

I technically own a standing desk and a little treadmill, although neither reach the dizzying heights of what we see in Ali’s video. The standing desk is not electronic, which means I have to haul it up and down, with a grunt, by the hinges. It was actually designed for people who cycle at home to leave their iPad or laptop, which simulates their virtual race, on top of it. The treadmill is not quite so fancy as Ali’s either. I tried it out but it didn’t really work that well for me, I really just couldn’t concentrate while walking slowly. Probably it would have been fine in meetings, albeit possibly regarded as a bit odd by co-workers, and it probably would have been fine for somewhat dull non-creative work, which I don’t currently do a lot of. Either that or I’m just too dumb to walk and think and operate at the same time, as I remember it was a little difficult to write while using it.

And so, even if the health benefits are obvious, it was a no for me. Plus, there were additional drawbacks, most notably the vibe shift borne of having a treadmill by your bedroom desk and also the space occupied by such a device.

It’s hard to not feel like a bit of a wuss for relying on technology to accomplish basic feats like writing – imagine Ernest Hemingway walking on a treadmill desk with dual monitors, airPods in his ears and both mouse and trackpad at his disposal.

Ali himself addresses this later in his video, mentioning that it is great to have two desk setups for different ‘modes’ of working. He seems to have relegated the walking treadmill to his secondary desk, where he takes meetings, plays games and also writes.

Harmony with the work

Let’s return to the topic of the type of work which we are doing. One setting which might be optimal for productivity may not be optimal for creativity. Creative work requires, to my mind, a vacuum of sorts, and the overly-optimised productive environment perhaps fills too many gaps, creates too many certainties for this kind of mindset. But of course, people are different and what stimulates one person’s creative impulse might be anathema to another’s.

One gets the feeling, however, that the desk should be in harmony with its output and with its environs. If you cannot have two workspaces (unlike Ali), and if you are a sensitive type like me, your chosen space must be an extension of its environment and, to some extent, an extension of yourself. If you live in an old cottage by the sea, it will most likely look odd if you have a desk with three monitors and an ergonomic chair and a folding treadmill.

All of the above, of course, goes without saying that desks aren’t the only way to work, at least not in their traditional sense. As I said before, it’s more about finding a mode which works for you.

Right now, this over-bed desk works for me. Lying down in bed worked for Marcel Proust, although I’m not really sure what he did about neck and back pain, but having said that he probably didn’t spend his non-working hours looking at a smartphone.

In the end, it does perhaps seem a little silly to discuss the minutiae of work environments, when for all of modern history some great works which may never be surpassed were produced with a simple pen, paper, worm-eaten desk, and a crick in the neck. All of this without mentioning that Shakespeare produced his entire canon without drinking a single cup of coffee – one can only conclude that he must have been ‘locked in.’ Of course, he was also not distracted by notifications, thirst traps, or antibiotics, or drinkable tap water.

For my part, maybe one day I will buy that big fancy desk when I have some real estate to put it in.

Until then I will keep tinkering and daydreaming, and maybe I’ll even buy that fancy device of Nat’s. But for the present, the good old Macbook will suffice, occasionally interspersed with periods on the iPad, all of which is much more than the greats ever had access to, and should be good enough for me.

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I also recommend the Supernote e-ink device, which I use for reading, writing, and annotating documents. This affiliate link is only valid for EU customers.

Gentle Reader,

Ex-Irish rugby coach Joe Schmidt had a philosophy of ‘winning the moment.’ Instead of focusing quite broadly on tactics, his principal direction to his players was to make the next tackle, catch the next ball, look for the next pass.

In a way, it’s the same as how kids play sport. They don’t ‘zoom out’ and think about the implications of the choices they make in every moment of a match. Instead, they do what the moment calls for – they focus on the next thing, on executing it as well as they can, allowing them to get into flow state.

As an approach, I like it and it seems highly generalisable – I believe many people are too strategic in their lives.

Generals always fight the last war

In many enterprises in life, we are called upon to be strategic. In a war, an army general must have a strategy. For example, the first combat army tanks appeared in World War I, and by World War II the usage of battle tanks was central to the land strategy employed by both the Allies and the Axis. The Germans famously employed Blitzkrieg to overwhelm enemy lines, a strategy which proved initially successful. Later in the war, the Soviets mass-produced tanks much more quickly than the Germans, which allowed them to repel the German advance during Operation Barbarossa, and eventually helped to turn the tide as the Soviets retook territory and advanced into Germany.

A new military doctrine was born: large numbers of tanks were central to military success.

Fast forward 80 years, to when we saw Russian tanks rolling across the Ukraine border. On paper, the Russians had about 12,000 tanks, whereas Ukraine had about 2,000. Such a large delta between the two was a bad sign for Ukraine.

However, it turns out that warfare had moved on. Tanks, once viewed as almost indestructible, can now be blown up with anti-tank missiles and drones which cost a fraction as much to produce as the tank itself. And so, we saw the power of such tanks as being greatly diminished.

In this respect, the Russian generals were fighting the last war, which hindered them in the current war.

All is fair in love and war

Being strategic is not a problem per se. However, it is almost impossible to know the optimal strategy for just about any objective in our lives, due to the stochastic nature of reality.

And when you don’t have the right strategy, and you rely on an old strategy, you miss the cues which would have lead you to a superior course of action, which is why I like Schmidt’s ‘winning the moment’ cue.

An example from day-to-day life:

Tom meets Sally. They develop a relationship. Eventually, Sally finds that Tom is distant and not loving, and she attacks him about his fear of commitment, and dumps him. Tom is single and sad. He takes time out and works on himself and learns to be more open, to be able to receive and give more love. This is good. He re-enters the dating market, but with every new woman he is nervous and tries to get the point across that he is committed and someone who can love. This strategy fails since he has skipped the rituals applicable to the early stage of relationships, and he is projecting past needs and dynamics onto a new context where they may not belong. Tom needs to win the moment and, all that work he has done on himself will come into play, if and when the time arises.

Similarly, if Tom decides to start doing yoga because he has heard it is a good way to meet women, his strategy will probably let him down. Sweating and shaking in downward-facing dog, he is not truly winning the moment – men and women are attracted to those who pursue their own desires and curiosities, who seek their own truths, rather than faking an interest in order to meet a woman.

Tom’s strategy will be transparent to the zen ladies who, sitting criss-cross applesauce, intuitively understand that he is there on false premises, and they will not be attracted to him.

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

Strategy is often tied to objectives. You want to become rich, so you start a software company. Then you realise you know nothing about software, and you fail.

On the other hand, Steve Jobs was tinkering around with technology since he was a kid. At the age of eleven, he rang Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to ask for spare parts to build a frequency counter for a school project. Jobs didn’t want to get rich, he just wanted to finish his project. Hewlett was so impressed that he offered Jobs a summer job at HP. Jobs eventually became wealthy because he pursued his interests doggedly, not because he wanted to become rich.

The book ‘Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective’ (thanks for the rec), speaks to this truth. Many of mankind’s greatest discoveries came about through the process of meddling and tinkering, of winning the moment in front of you. For example, Alexander Fleming famously discovered penicillin by observing that a mould in a contaminated petri dish killed bacteria. During the space-race, the advent of satellite technology turned out to have broader applications in warfare. And the development of combat radar itself led to the discovery that microwaves could cook food. In war, the provision of durable clothing such as chinos, fatigues and pea coats, eventually lead to the popular adoption of such clothing recreationally.

The point is that the process of discovery often leads to novel applications, and that pursuing an objective expressly, rather than following your own curiosity, can be less effective, due to the puzzling and sometimes unknowable nature of reality.

Philosophy

‘Winning the moment’ also happens to be a more fun way to live your life. It’s not that you can’t have plans or goals or strategies, but that you must be open to changing tack and altering your course, when new information arrives or something intriguing happens. Rather than steadfastly sticking to your original plan, you must be flexible, you must win the moment which arrives, rather than the one you were expecting.

This little moment will not be just a moment. This little moment contains the whole world, in microcosm. James Joyce knew this. In his writing of Ulysses, a book which pays homage to the small details of life, he championed the idea that the particular is generalisable to the universal.

Schmidt and Joyce are alike in this way. By focusing on the small detail which holds your interest, you may find it leads you to greater discoveries and greater works of art in due course, discoveries which could never have been successfully approached strategically.

There is a place in life for strategy, but you must be careful where you apply it. In the realms of chess and other board games, where a limited number of moves are theoretically possible, where human emotion and stochasticity don’t come in to play, where there are known knowns, known unknowns, you can apply your strategy. But very little of life is like that: life is full of unknown unknowns and of actions whose consequences exert ripple effects.

The path forward is never all that clear. But what is clear is the choice of the next step to take: which pathway intrigues you the most?

The next time you are stuck in your life, think about how you can follow an interest or win the moment you are in, rather than browbeating yourself about grand plans or goals or strategies. Happy discovering!

Thanks for reading! If you unstrategically pay for my work, a mass transfer of wealth will occur and I will become wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, and you will achieve a success unexpected in the common hours.

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