Author: tworuru

  • In which I apply for a job

    In which I apply for a job

    A few years ago I did a blog bit where I’d publicly apply for jobs while determinedly misunderstanding the job description. I’d apply for jobs like “scrum master” and talk up my high school rugby experience. I also applied for a job at British American Tobacco by dressing as a giant cigarette and asking teenagers to take up smoking. It was fun, but after a few I got bored and doing things like dressing as a giant cigarette was intersecting uncomfortably with my need to actually apply for jobs. So I stopped.

    Today, job applications are back on my mind. I am spending entire minutes in the mind-melting hell of LinkedIn before getting upset at the spectacle of endless employees praising the AI leopard that their employers have hired to eat their faces. There simply aren’t many jobs out there for anyone who isn’t willing to sing paens to a technology explicitly designed to replace people. In between, I see the world’s most confidently stupid business enthusiasts opining about things like how we must dig for more fossil fuels to maintain “energy independence” – evidently their feelings tell them fossil fuels aren’t finite – and blaming renewable energy for the current energy crisis, which is as close to a Bizarro World take that it’s possible to have outside of a comic book. (If you’re wondering, the crisis is because we depend on fossil fuels, which is in turn because oil companies worked very hard to make sure we didn’t switch to renewables.)

    It was all very depressing. Then I saw the job ad for an “End of the World” library curator.

    So I’m back to the public job application, except this one isn’t a bit. There might be the occasional joke here and there but I’ve never been more serious.

    I sent the email a few minutes ago, and now I’m publishing it here. I really hope they take me on.

    Gidday!

    I am writing to apply for the job of Curator – Private “End of the World” Library at Westhaven Estate.

    This open cover letter is to demonstrate my extraordinary suitability for this unprecedented role. Firstly, you mention that you’re after someone intellectually curious. That’s me, to a T. I am so intellectually curious that I’m curious about what intellect even is. There’s a lot of that around at the moment with folks pretending that computer code is sentient: it’s become the world’s most boring sport on LinkedIn. Even more importantly, you want someone to “help design and build a private, long-term library on a remote coastal estate in New Zealand.”

    I am so prepared for this it’s terrifying. I have spent on average at least one hour of each day of my life thinking about how to design an apocalypse library. I had always thought that these cumulative years were wasted, but now?

    It seems like fate.

    You say: “The project is to curate a high-conviction, enduring collection — a library that would remain meaningful and useful under extreme long-term scenarios.“

    You guys! I am so here for this!

    As I mentioned, I have given this some thought. So let’s get some assumptions out of the way, so we don’t make an ass out of u (or me). To avoid an ass-u-me scenario, I have a few questions for you, starting with:

    What sort of end-of-the-world are you looking for your library to survive?

    Robert Frost (good collection candidate imo) said that “some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” I say: he would say ice is great and will suffice, with a name like Frost. But the nature of the world-ending event is very important to the nature of the library.

    Let’s say you hold with those who favour fire. Nuclear war, maybe. It’s a good consideration! We do have all these city-burning weapons and an errant flock of geese or Tweet could easily kick off World War Three. It’s the most probable near-term apocalyptic scenario.

    If this happens, your library will be invaluable. Paper, commonly used to make books, is a wonderfully extensible material. For one thing, it is flammable (c.f. The Day After Tomorrow, one for the End of the World DVD collection.) All those books will make great fuel for one lucky roaming band of irradiated miseries who will enjoy a useful supply of kindling after – assuming you didn’t already make an abrupt transition from biology to physics via a nuclear fireball in one of the world’s freshly obliterated cities – you have been killed and your supplies eaten. They’ll be very grateful to you! Your library will be fondly remembered for weeks to entire months until everyone is dead of acute radiation sickness, cancer, or starvation.

    If you want knowledge to survive this scenario, into a future where radiation-proof Morlocks are reclaiming humanity’s lost wisdom, you’ll want something more permanent than paper. Your options include fired clay tablets (they’ve stood the test of time, which is why we know about crooked copper merchants from 1750 BC), stainless steel, or titanium. You’re going to need quite a few metric tons of it, and a lot of storage room. You might want to get to work hollowing out some local mountains, or digging a very extensive basement. You’ll also have to choose between print via embossing or debossing. My pick would be laser engraving; it’s the fastest method I can think of to get writing on to metal.

    That does raise another important point.

    How long into the end of the world are we talking here? Like, do your hypothetical post-apocalypserinos speak English? Are they even human? That’s an important question! An English library is no good in a far-flung future where language will almost certainly have evolved into something completely different: it’s why you struggle to read the original text of Beowulf (good inclusion imo). So if you’re wanting to include “essential knowledge, foundational literature, practical survival and technical domains, philosophy, history, and culture” you are better off not actually printing it in English. (Sure, have some English books kicking around, it can’t hurt – again, choice of medium is important, you’ll want to print on something durable like vellum as a modern hardback or paperback will crumple into moldy unreadable dust within a scant century or two given modern print materials and techniques unless you have very good humidity control and an excellent and implausibly long-lived air-conditioning system.) Instead of English writings, you’re going to want a codex with an included key. Think along the lines of the Golden Record, by Carl Sagan, which adorns the side of the Voyager probe and is currently somewhere in the vicinity of the heliopause. A lot of instructions and meaning can be conveyed this way; you’d be after something like the codex that the advanced aliens in Contact (also by Carl Sagan; definitely include Contact, great yarn) send in their Message to Earth.

    Next point? Location, location location! I’m sure you know all about this in the real-estate sense: you have after all dropped twenty mil on a quite nice bach. But your library needs more in terms of location planning than stunning private coastal views and sea breezes. I hate to be a downer, but Westhaven might not be the best location for it. (Consider my town of Morrinsville instead: it is the closest thing this country has to a tectonically inert flood-and-tsunami-proof location and it could do with a tourist attraction that isn’t a giant fiberglass cow.) First, as the name would suggest, it’s on the West Coast of the South Island New Zealand. That means it’s within cooee of an Alpine Fault rupture which is more geologically overdue than a 12-month pregnancy. I checked the fault map and while there aren’t any known faults where you are, that doesn’t mean much: the whole country is essentially one large faultline and that’s especially true for the Alpine Fault. When that baby pops the entire Southern Alps are going to jolt upwards by several metres and every scenic hillside residence for a hundred kilometers or so on either side is going to be kicked into touch. Your library will come back with snow on it. Or, less poetically, just slide ungracefully into the ocean, like a prop forward scoring one of those boring British tries.

    Speaking of the ocean: The west coast sea breezes are better described as a constant howling gale, and this incessant scream carries a lot of moisture. Unless you like mould more than JK Rowling, this is not ideal for a library. The ocean is important for other reasons. Take a look at the New Zealand map: see how the West Coast is all smooth and the East is all jagged? That’s becaus the ocean is eating the West Coast at a pretty brisk clip. Which brings us to climate change! Rising oceans, groundwater tables, and even faster erosion from extreme weather events will all nudge your library towards inundation, which is less than ideal. There are all sorts of potential locations for libraries but none of them are underwater.

    Another issue I think you’ll face is that books are completely useless without stuff. You are going to need a fully-fledged workshop adjoining your library, with either some very long-life batteries, or instructions for setting up a lithium mine. In fact, this is going to be your greatest challenge. Knowledge is useless without an extant culture to produce the technology through which knowledge can be applied. A common post-apocalyptic fantasy is a bunch of sword-wielding barbarians stumbling on a surviving library (they are literate, of course) and re-inventing heavier-than-air powered flight shortly thereafter. That can’t actually happen. By way of example, there’s a bloke who – inspired by Douglas Adams, good inclusion imo – tried to make a toaster from scratch. It worked, eventually, with much cheating, and a total disregard for electrical safety.

    If you want your post-apocalypse library to endure, you’re going to need people. And the best way to make sure there’s people is to make sure the apocalypse never happens in the first place.

    Unfortunately, if we carry on the way we currently are, it’s going to!

    I am not talking about AI. The odds of a future predictive text bot taking over the world are as good as they are for a current predictive text bot, which is to say, pretty much zero. But spending money on bullshit like AI instead of on more important things, like stopping climate change? Yes, that could actually kill us all! Climate change is a bomb that’s already detonated, and the slow-motion explosion is equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic explosions per second, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (best get their bulletin in your library imo).

    It gets worse. This following is more important than anything so I’ll give each bit its own line and sentence:

    Growth.

    Must.

    End.

    Why? If growth stays coupled to energy use – and, so far, it always has – then we are cooked. I mean that literally, not figuratively: if the economy continues growing at anything like the approximate current rate of three percent increase per year, within a scant 400 years we will be using “as much energy as the Sun provides to the entire surface of the Earth annually.” (Becker, Adam, More Everything Forever, 2025, definitely include imo.) Unfortunately that level of energy use will come with side effects, such as, uh, boiling the oceans.

    Again, I am not being figurative. If growth doesn’t stop, no matter what energy source(s) we use, we are literally cooked. Do the maths, if you like: I’ll wait. (Good idea to include a few maths textbooks, maybe some physics too imo.) Looks like those that favour fire have it right.

    My point is that your “end of the world library” won’t be up to much or last for long if the world does actually end within the next several centuries, and on our current trajectory, it absolutely will. To illustrate this last point point, I will take the liberty of quoting from a volume that should be in the audio-visual bit of your library, imo: James Cameron’s 1997 masterpiece Titanic.

    “But this ship can’t sink!”

    “She’s made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.”

    You may feel my assertion (mathematical certainty) about our constantly escalating energy use turning the planet into a very large crematorium is hyperbolic, or unfair, or any number of things.

    To this I say: the facts of physics do not care about your feelings.

    They do not care about your library.

    But there’s some good news.

    It’s you!

    You are rich. Luck, or fiscal enthusiasm bordering on pathology, has blessed you with more resources than 99 percent of the global population. If you can afford to shell out $20 million on a luxury lodge plus however much more on an apocalypse-proof book collection, you can put that money to good use, chiefly lobbying. Lobbying for what? The very opposite of what most rich, powerful people lobby for: armament reduction, fossil fuel reduction, climate change mitigation, and sustainability; the end of cancerously endless economic growth and its inevitably deadly energy use. You can help prevent the end of the world. You can be a force for good that ensures that in a few dozen or several hundred years or even later there will still be a need for libraries, because there will still be people to make use of them.

    Maybe the real end-of-the-world library is the civilisation we made along the way.

    I eagerly await your offer of employment.

    Sincerely,

    Joshua Drummond

    P.S. My CV is attached

    P.P.S. You can put this letter in the library if you like.

    Thank you for reading. Constructive criticism on my approach to employment is very welcome in the comments:

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    In the event you would like to give me a job, or a contract doing something useful, the following page has a non-exhaustive list of the stuff I can do:

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  • Knowing isn’t half the battle

    Knowing isn’t half the battle

    There’s this little aphorism that I’ve heard floating around: “knowing is half the battle.”1

    I don’t think it is.

    When it comes to self-improvement, I think it’s assumed that knowing is at least 50 percent of the battle. Perhaps more. What else are the books for? They’re to fill you up with knowing and then all you have to do is some (often somewhat unspecified) battling to sort your life out.

    These days I wonder if this is even slightly true. Knowing seems a maximum of ten percent of the battle, perhaps much less. For instance, I don’t think my life would be much worse if I had never heard the phrase “executive dysfunction.” Sure, it gives me a term, a shorthand, for “why the flipping heck am I not doing the gosh-darn thing that I cannot stop thinking about”2 but that’s just a slightly more efficient form of frustration.

    I wonder if this is the source of my combined bugbear with relatability, the prevalence of memes, and therapy-speak in the ADHD community. Yes, thank you, billionth executive dysfunction explainer video in my timeline, but does this really help? I run into the same issue with political awareness content: is it actually useful to know that the world is all flipped up, without explicit instructions following on how to unflip it?

    For irony’s sake, here is the exact kind of video I am complaining about. I found it very relatable.

    I am kind of done with new names for old frustrations. I know what procrastination feels like; I can summon that flop-sweat sensation at will. What I need to learn is what it feels like to shift out of that mode, to understand what specific switches got flipped, to map the terrain as I go so I can backtrack and do it again next time I am caught in a spiral.

    We all know what flailing feels like; doomscrolling, Netflix surfing, snacking, whatever form avoidance takes. We need to find a way to remember, to embody, doing the stuff we want or need to be doing.

    I am not sure if this is making sense so I’ll change tack. I like to interrogate the aphorisms I write about so I searched for “knowing is half the battle,” expecting some kind of lineage from “knowledge is power” (France is Bacon) or something like the Art of War or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

    It’s from GI Joe.

    “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” is the catchphrase from the little safety PSAs that followed GI Joe cartoons.

    The more you know.

    Possibly everyone knew this except me. I wasn’t allowed to watch GI Joe as a kid – either for demonic or financial reasons, I’m not sure which – so I don’t know where I picked it up from. Pop culture osmosis, maybe?

    Anyway, that reminded me of the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSAs, which were doubly funny to me when I watched them because I had never seen the originals, and I was stoned out of my gourd. University!

    The remixed PSAs are 24 years old now. We’re flipping old, you guys! So old! And our rest homes are going to be so weird. They’ll be playing these things to dementia patients and watching their eyes light up like it’s Mozart.

    I had intended this to be a shorter post followed by a digest of some of the stuff I wrote about last week, but I’ve gone long. Here’s the stuff anyway! Four articles for the price of one! (My writing is free.)

    Hip hip hooray, the world didn’t end today
    The Third Way
    Most people are good sorts

    Also! Here’s a link to that podcast I make with Emily. People have been getting in touch to tell me it’s good, which is probably a good sign?

    Thanks, as always, for reading. And listening too these days, I suppose.

    Now, comment! I want to know if you knew about the GI Joe thing or if it just percolated its way into pop culture and we’re all going round quoting a cartoon designed to sell plastic dolls to boys like it’s some deep profundity.

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    1. What should a new aphorism be called? A neoaphorism? We must continue the research. ↩︎
    2. Sometimes bits of my brain that had deep grooves carved by my evangelical upbringing switch back on unexpectedly and I find myself using swear-word substitutes. I have decided just to roll with it. ↩︎
  • Most people are good sorts

    Most people are good sorts

    A lot of folks with ADHD have a thing they call “rejection-sensitive dysphoria.” In the olden days we would have called this being a sensitive wee sausage. RSD is a bit of a meme in the extremely memetic world of ADHD-posting, and it tends to activate my annoyance with overly-medicalised terms and engagement-driven relatability that doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions.

    Whatever we call it, the term doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the “everyone hates me” anxiety that burns so hot that it’s sometimes almost impossible to leave the house.

    I have/had it pretty bad, to be honest. It can be an awful closed loop; you’re oversensitive to inputs; you overreact, that causes people to treat you with a bit more real or imagined side-eye, you notice, the loop tightens. I’m very aware of it and yet I still let it get me. Just recently I put off following up on a job because I had managed to imagine a very detailed scenario where the recipients of my email hated me (reasons unclear). I did eventually follow up, reasoning that if the world blew up then it wouldn’t matter if they were pissed, and it turned out they were busy and hadn’t seen my email. Because of course.

    Things like this make it all the more important for people who suffer from RSD to have an offset. Some kind of collection of all the nice things people have said about you which you can turn to when you’re feeling the RSD pinch. Which, naturally, I have never really had.

    A pivot to business: I am forever telling my clients that it’s vital to capture customer feedback in the form of testimonials and case studies. Why? Because your biggest single selling point what other people say about you.

    I suspect the reason many shy away from this is because we almost all get some amount of RSD. Reaching out for feedback can be nerve-racking.

    But if you don’t do it, people don’t say things like this:

    We’ve been delighted with our Marketing support from Two Ruru. 

    Josh hit the ground running. He understood our business, the terminology we use, the customers we serve. We’re able to provide rough inputs to Josh and he turns them into well crafted and relevant outputs, suited to the various modes of communication we use. 

    Our transition to HubSpot CRM has also been assisted by Josh as a by-product of his engagement. He created our new website using HubSpot as the underlying platform, got us up & running with direct email messaging from HubSpot, which also required us to get our data in order and segment customers. We’re streets ahead of where we were with our HubSpot evolution.

    There’s also a bit of icing on the cake. Josh is the Master of Case Studies. We’ve done our first one with him, and it will be used for many any different purposes and shared with several key stakeholders.

    And a cherry on top – Josh is great to work with!

    So there you have it. Apparently everyone isn’t annoyed at me all the time, which is a bit of a narcissistic the-world-revolves-around-me thought, now I think about it. I am going to ask a few more folks for things like this, which will help me build up my business (and when the feedback isn’t so good, it will help me improve, which is the point of all this!) And it’ll help with the RSD too.

    Oh, and if you’re in business and you need someone to do stuff, check out my About page, where I have a non-exhaustive list of all the stuff I can do.

    About / Resume

    If you’re not in business, consider flinging me a few dollarydoos here and there. It all helps.

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  • Hip hip hooray, the world didn’t end today

    Hip hip hooray, the world didn’t end today

    But it could still end tomorrow, depending on what whispers the Mad King hears (real or imagined) that cause him to thumb a button in a fit of demented pique.

    I’m a bit over it, honestly! I suspect we all are! Some of us would like to get on with our drinking water problems and go for walks with the kids without the threat of global thermonuclear war or even just the wanton unprompted murder that we’re all somehow used to now.

    Good news: we could sort it all out. We could do it today. Here’s a piece in which we do just that and the hideous Wendigos who run the world finally get their just desserts.

    A Two Bedroom House
    The next new rule was: You first. Guy wants to start a war? Go for it buddy. Go duel the other guy who wants to start a war. You get a knife, each.
  • Weird about water

    Weird about water

    An excellent online acquaintance messaged me about some health stuff the other day, and the strange tension of living with unprecedented and difficult issues whilst also dealing with the everyday mundane. “Birds chirping in the yard, you still gotta put the bins out,” they said.

    Doesn’t that just sum up what it’s like to live in the world right now? The Mad King with the Power to End All Life has issued one of his terrifyingly vague Truths, and tomorrow, we get to find out if the world ends, or if it’s just the more usual kind of murder with bombs. In the meantime, I have the kids at home on holiday, keen to play all hours of the day, client work to sort out, and I really wish I could get on top of this strange issue I have with water.

    I am hydrophobic.

    I don’t know why, but unless I’ve been exercising heavily I don’t really get thirsty. I can quite easily go an entire day where my entire liquid intake is the two coffees I let myself drink. Obviously, this is not good for me, and while I don’t get thirsty properly I do suffer the predictable effects of not drinking. I get grumpy and cloudy-headed and headachey, and occasionally some kind of physiological switch will flip and I’ll wake up at 2 AM with a suddenly raging thirst.

    Samson drinking water ass's jawbone
    Look at Samson. I bet he never didn’t want to drink water.

    And what’s weirder is that I don’t want to drink water. I don’t know why! Objectively, I like water! It keeps me alive! But I’ll look at a full drink bottle or glass and a perverse bit of brain will go “yeah, nah,” and just kind of steer me away from it. I just checked and there is indeed a nearly full drink bottle on my desk. It’s been there all day. It’s a rare day where I actually manage to finish anything close to the recommended amount of water.

    Perhaps I have a case of Mild Rabies. Or maybe it’s an autism/ADHD thing. Apparently folks who land somewhere on the autism-ADHD continuum can struggle with interoception, the ability to feel and understand the body’s signals; and lack of thirst (or excessive thirst) are common enough among autists that there are a bunch of people posting on Reddit about it. My brothers both get it too. It’s odd. And I’d like to get on top of it.

    So that’s the plan for tomorrow. Remember to put out the bins. Try not to get lost in the endless terrible news. Keep the cat’s litter clean. Try to work towards a world where evil narcissists aren’t handed the power to destroy all human life. Drink enough water.

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  • The Third Way

    The Third Way

    Daily blogging! What fun. I’m kicking off today by talking about a specific kind of procrastination that I get, and who knows? Perhaps you do too. That’s why we’re all here, right?

    Let’s say there’s something you want to do, or need to do. Bad news: there’s some kind of unpleasant association or anxiety that’s making it hard to get started.

    And there’s something else you’d really like to do. There’s a videogame you’d like to play, or a movie you’d like to watch, or a walk you’d like to go on; something that is unabashedly leisurely and rejuvenating and fun.

    Do you do either the hard thing or the fun thing? No you do not.

    You do a stupid third thing.

    You go, “Oh I’ll just check this one thing.” Either on the little screen or the medium screen. Or maybe even the big screen, lining up something new to watch on the ‘flix. Because it’s not a commitment. It’ll only take five minutes (you tell yourself.) It’s productive. After all, you need to know what people are saying. It’s irresponsible to be uninformed. You can get back to either the work thing or the fun thing in a few minutes sweet Jesus it’s been four hours, where the hell has my day gone.

    (My hand lashed out like it was its own alien thing to grab my phone in the middle of writing this which is truly upsetting when I think about it; I realise this actually happens quite a lot. Thank goodness for my Brick.)

    When I find myself seeking this kind of Third Way distraction it’s usually a messaging app, or an app with a messaging function. Have any of my friends got in touch? Is there anything I would like to say to my friends? What are some good memes we might send each other? Oh, maybe this algorithm will suggest some. What is happening in the world today? Oh, it’s all terrible. Is there any good news? No, there’s not. I Can’t Believe What This Person Said (Their Third Screenshotted Tweet Shocked Me!). Better make my own snarky Bluesky post about it.

    horrible former UK prime minister and ghastly person Tony Blair
    Look at this absolute ghoul

    And so on. The reason I call this kind of not-productivity The Third Way is because choosing to do nothing is still a choice, and much like Third Way politics – a doomed “centrist” attempt to reconcile the ravages of neoliberalism with milquetoast pseudo-leftism – it simply doesn’t work. You do not get your work done. And you don’t get any fun done either. Your shows go unwatched. Your strolls go unwalked. We avoid the spending of any perceived large amount of time in favour of spending much larger amounts of time on atomised activities that seem shorter but, in aggregate, aren’t.

    I do not have advice, I’m as floundering as anyone, but I know what I’m going to try: just committing to doing either the hard thing or the fun thing. I will have either ticked something off my list, or enjoyed myself, and both are preferable to the weird singularity of just kind of mucking around and choosing neither. And I can tell you that it is already kind of working, because I am writing something I committed to doing – this post – instead of scrolling.

    And, as it turns out, the thing I needed to do is also something I had fun doing.

    Funny how that works out.

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  • We have to go back

    We have to go back

    And we’re back.

    I have been quite tired, and more than a bit sad, and very busy, in that weird way that eats all your time while not providing nearly enough money that seems unique to freelancing/contracting/self-employment. Other freelancers will know what I mean. I find myself in an odd bind where I feel like being honest about this stuff will depress my readers, which I’d rather not do, and then I don’t write, which makes me depressed, and… it’s a nasty cycle, isn’t it?

    Oh and there’s the absolute state of the world right now, the endless crises all domino cascading into each other and the way we’ve blithely accepted, as a species, that we will just kind of let the worst people in the world run everything, that occasionally we will wave some signs at them and post some snark online and then continue to let them keep running things. Oh and then there’s setting the world’s hard-won capital on fire in crypto minds and data centres in a hubristic, doomed-to-fail quest to build an artificial god.

    Yeah. That gets me down, on occasion, which is to say, every day without fail.

    Because it’s me, and after long acquaintance I feel like I’m getting to know this character reasonably well, I wonder if I am also selling myself short. While I’ve been quiet here, I have completed case studies, designs, videos, and a website build for a client. I have done all the Dad Stuff like looking after the kids and cooking the food and such, which I always feel doesn’t count towards my personal productivity score, but of course it should; the unpaid job you do at home is still very real work. And I have started a podcast with Emily Writes (we are three episodes in, two of which are available for public consumption). Here it is, on Apple and Spotify.

    We also began a new series called The Brighter Future. This means a lot to me. Do try it.

    The Brighter Future is a big deal for me; I wondered if other people were fed up with the endless procession of doom and wanted to script an alternative future, one that doesn’t absolutely suck. Turns out they do. So that’s nice.

    In other news, I’m going back to daily blogging.

    That month where I did things each day was the only time in… years? Decades? during which I felt like I was in some kind of control. Sure, I was flipping out, but it was more like aerobatics than the kind of uncontrolled spiral I feel like I’m in now. And when I made something small but tangible each day, opportunities just kind of… cropped up. I do wonder if I am constitutionally unsuited to doing this sort of thing; I often think my ideal job description would be “beachside hermit” but that is not the world we live in. And there is value to creating every day. Loathe as I am to look like I’m engaging in hustle culture, writing something (or making anything) sure beats an hour or more of aimless scrolling.

    Don’t worry; I won’t be emailing you a post every single day. I’ll just make the posts here and send out a weekly digest. That way you can play along at home without me annihilating your inbox.

    I’ve also done a bunch of Bob Ross paintings: once they have received the required additions and adjustments, prints will be going out to subscribers. Here is one I did today. Doing these helps keep the doom at bay, a little.

    As always, I am taking recommendations on what I could add to the paintings.

    img_9651

    Perhaps that will be an incentive for you to comment! Please do. The comments are always a highlight.

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  • All the ways we accidentally procrastinate

    All the ways we accidentally procrastinate

    And be “we” I mean “me” but possibly also “you.”

    Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ways I procrastinate doing all sorts of things, up to and including this post which has been rattling round in my head for… a month? Well, here it is now:

    Waiting until the perfect time

    There’s a meeting coming up. I just finished a meeting. It’s only 10:12. I’ll just keep scrolling until 10:30 exactly. Oh, no, it’s 10:32. Can’t start at such a weird time. I’ll start at 11.

    Waiting for the perfect conditions

    I’m feeling low today. I just finished a big task, so I deserve a break. I’m feeling energetic so I might go for a run instead. I can’t write with the Internet on so I’d better turn it off yet, but what if I miss something? Better look at Bluesky. The kids will be home soon. It’s too late. It’s too early. I’m too depressed.

    Small things get in the way

    I’m too scatterbrained. I’m too hungry. I need a coffee. The desk isn’t set up right. I need a new screensaver. Maybe a new todo app will help; I’d better start comparing them. I need to mow the lawns. I haven’t done a drawing for ages. I could read a self-help book, that might help. I’m hungry again. I forgot to have a shower during the school prep rush, better do that now.

    Being distracted by finishing a task

    I’ve finished a task! Miracle. I feel glorious. Well, I feel a mild sense of relief. Well, a brief escape from perpetual panic. I’m going to celebrate by doing something I’ll regret in five hours when I realise I’ve lost my day to it.

    Picking a task from things I see

    Right, the kids are at school and the day is mine. Time to get started on the urgent thing. Wait, there are several urgent things. Which one to pick? I can’t decide. Time to walk aimlessly around the house. Oh man, there’s that bit of wall that I patched up and never painted. I should sand that back and get some paint. Wait, I don’t have any paint. Better head to Mitre 10. Wait, the car needs vacuuming. Wait, the vacuum is full. Wait, the bin needs emptying. Wait, the hedge needs trimming. Wait, why do the kids need picking up already?

    Sudden overwhelming interest in previously uninteresting topic

    I have a task to do but I’m going to look at a social media site. Argh, doom. Wait! Is that… an article about the history of asphalt?!

    Actually it’s called bitumen

    (four hours later)

    Ugh, I’m sick of doing all this pointless reading. I should review the ruleset for that awesome-looking TTRPG that my friends and I will definitely have time to play one day.

    Just abruptly walking away from my desk for no reason

    I wrote this down because I just did it.

    Being mean to myself

    A lot of procrastination happens because I’m horrifically cruel to myself – in ways and in language I wouldn’t even countenance visiting on another human being – and my brain associates this cruelty with tasks, or the anxiety I associate with the assumption that other people will be as mean to me as I am to myself, and so creatively avoids the source of anxiety: the task itself. This works until it abruptly doesn’t. Clever, stupid brain.

    Of course, I’m talking about me, but it might also be about you. Your mileage may vary, but it might not vary that much.

    I was lying awake a few nights back, a toddler pick-up having precipitated a late night freak-out about all the undone urgent things in my life, and some cobweb corner of my mind came up with: what if it’s all right? What if your readers don’t mind? What if your clients don’t hate you? What if the things you’re worried about will be okay if you do them?

    And I don’t know why but that just about had me shedding sleep-deprived tears, and I went back to bed and slept much better than a baby.

    A little logic (puzzle)

    If it helps, imagine this riddle emerging from a wise Sphinx-like figure instead of me.

    You have two choices, permanent procrastinator: you can be mean to yourself as you always have, and get no work done, or you can try being nice to yourself and (possibly) still get no work done. In the first scenario you are miserable with undone tasks. In the second you still have the undone tasks, but you’re happy.

    Which would you pick?

    I know, I know, it’s the first one. That’s the one I usually pick too. But maybe give the second one a go.

    My love of comments verges on the unnatural

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  • You and your monkey mind

    You and your monkey mind

    In this age of bait, it’s always nice when a headline explains exactly what the story is about. “Neuroscientists Decipher Procrastination: A Brain Mechanism Explains Why People Leave Certain Tasks for Later” is exactly the sort of headline I like to see. It’s a lot more likely to get me to click than “What Neuroscientists Discovered About Monkey Procrastination Is Jaw-Dropping (Don’t Ignore This!)“1

    Anyway, yeah, they figured out procrastination. Or rather, they added to a body of rather chunky existing research across neuroscience and psychology. The reason this research is interesting is because, to the best of my knowledge, evidence-based understanding of the precise neural circuits involved is a new development. As detailed in the Wired story, the scientists discovered that turning off a specific region of the brain would turn off the urge to procrastinate. Here’s Wired:

    The experimental design incorporated an unpleasant element. The monkeys were given the choice of drinking a moderate amount of water without negative consequences or drinking a larger amount on the condition of receiving a direct blast of air in the face. Although the reward was greater in the second option, it involved an uncomfortable experience.

    As the researchers anticipated, the macaques’ motivation to complete the task and access the water decreased considerably when the aversive stimulus was introduced. This behavior allowed them to identify a brain circuit that acts as a brake on motivation in the face of anticipated adverse situations.

    If you’re hoping that this development might help with your procrastination problem, you might be waiting a while. You definitely won’t want to make use of the method involved in the study — Motivation under aversive conditions is regulated by a striatopallidal pathway in primates — as it probably wasn’t a pleasant experience for the two macaques involved. The details in the Wired story are obfuscated, but the study is not: the monkeys had brain implants that let the scientists inject a drug that acts as an agonist for DREADDs (I don’t make this stuff up, it’s an acronym for Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated By Designer Drugs) into a specific region of the brain. Lovely!

    I recommend reading both the Wired story and whatever you can make out of the study, because both are interesting, and only the study has wonderful diagrams like this.

    Scientists are in more dire need of artistic and UX training than any other group in the world.

    While there’s no doubt this sort of research might eventually lead to a pill (hopefully not an implant) that you can chomp to overcome procrastination, that might not be a good thing. As much as I have longed for a way to cauterise the inconvenient bits of my personality but procrastination exists for a reason; when it’s functioning normally it’s a very smart way to both conserve energy and avoid horrible things. What we’re interested in, here at the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement, is when procrastination becomes a personal problem that gets in the way of things we want to be doing. And this is where I’m going to veer off the superhighway of science and into the off-road track of pure anecdote-infused speculation.

    Ape clipart, vintage barbary macaque

    Imagine a kid who takes things very seriously and works very hard. Bright, but anxious. Sensitive. Eager to please. And the person they most want to please — and therefore their hardest taskmaster — is themselves.

    Imagine they really like… it can be anything, but we’ll say it’s colouring-in. They’re good at not going over the lines. And they like the praise they get for being good at it, and therefore their anxiety about not going over the lines increases, and then they do go over the lines, because to err is human, but does the kid know that? No. And their bitter upset at this mistake is going to overwhelm them utterly, to make them feel useless and horrid; they are going to scream at themselves internally (maybe externally too) because that’s the only thing they can think of that matches the intensity of pain they are feeling, and when adults coo and caress “don’t worry, it’s only a colouring-in!” everything will feel worse because not only is the kid upset at their failure but also the adults around don’t comprehend the maelstrom, and on top of that is the knowledge that the adults are right, that the kid is overreacting, and it is just a colouring-in that has no right to make them feel so comprehensively awful.

    Maybe it’s not that hard to imagine. It wasn’t for me.

    The kid wanted to do a colouring-in, but this sudden emotional hell is so much worse than a blast of air to the face.

    Now multiply this effect by everything, forever. Every action and reaction that for some reason has importance attached makes them feel this way.

    The solution? Escape. Avoid the things that make them feel so awful because the emotional cost of doing that is somehow less than facing the maelstrom, and because they’ve inadvertently discovered the world’s most damaging yet effective life-hack: desperate terror makes them act. It might even make them feel like they’re finally doing good, which is all they wanted, and eventually their treacherously malleable brain will not know any other way of achieving anything.

    I’ll put it another way: why do anything you want to do, when everything you want also comes pre-packaged with self-inflicted injury and insult?

    Macaques monkey clipart, vintage animal

    For me, at least, I think this explains… a lot of things. Not least the illogic of procrastination, the way it feels awful at the time but you can’t stop it. Procrastination is one bit of your brain and body trying to protect another bit from yet another bit, all of which are you. And it highlights the importance of being very intentionally kind to yourself, even when/especially if that’s hard to do, and of CBT rituals like the ones outlined in this post which is somehow over an entire year old? Where the hell did that time go?

    The best self-help book I’ve read

    Remember something we’ve said a lot here: if being mean to yourself worked, it’d have worked by now.

    Or — because it does work to a certain extent, else we wouldn’t do it — it doesn’t work well, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

    On a related note, here’s something dear to my heart. I have noticed a tendency for those of us on the political left to sniff and sneer at anything smacking of self-improvement because of the inherently individualistic and capitalistic framing and… yes, that is a problem! But so is not knowing how to organise yourself well enough to live well, or to help organise others. While I’m at it, dunking on things online and on podcasts, as fun as it is, isn’t winning. So there.

    In lieu of all that, here is Time Management for Anarchists: a well-argued and straightforward here’s-how-to-sort-your-💩-out guide for those of us who don’t have bosses, or would like to not have one, or who would prefer to keep the bastards off your backs as much as possible.

    Time Management for Anarchists

    It was written back in the More Analogue Days, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’ve found the best systems either are analogue, or most resemble analogue in digital form.

    These are good quotes:

    I hate the bullshit moralism connected with being organized. All this stuff about get started early. If you know how long something takes you can indulge yourself and leave it to the last day.

    Yes! Invalidate procrastination and toxic productivity simultaneously whilst doing the things you want to do!

    I don’t really believe in lazy, I don’t really know any lazy people. I know people with low self confidence who find it really hard to believe in their own projects. I know people who have never learned the pleasure of stimulating and engaging work. I know people who are too worn down by eight hours of pointless, meaningless tasks to take on new projects.

    Precisely.

    Thanks, as always, for reading. God willing — and as we have learned, gods are frequently unwilling — I’ll be back with something new next week.

    Now, leave a comment!

    This place actually has good, non-toxic comments! No, I don’t know how I did it either!

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    I’ll let you do the maths on which is better.

    1. For irony’s sake, I almost made this the title of the post ↩︎
  • It’s the most blunderful time of the year

    It’s the most blunderful time of the year

    Well, aren’t we glad that’s over?

    Christmas is tricky and exhausting. New Year’s is fraught.

    It’s the time of year overachievers make lists of all the things they did in the previous 12 months. Reading these makes me want to throw up – all they ever do is remind me of all the stuff I didn’t get done – so I won’t subject you to one. If you’re keen to get a picture of what did and didn’t self-improve you can always go back and read the archives.

    And I’m not keen to do an New Year’s Resolutions post, or even an anti-New Year’s Resolution post, because I feel like there are enough of both of those? And mine would be deja vu all over again, again; I’d like to be fitter, I’d like to spend more time doing the things I want to be doing but never want to do in the moment instead of the stuff I have no interest in long-term but can’t resist at the time.

    So here, have some scattershot reflections, disguised as not-resolutions.1 It’s what you’re here for!

    Become suspicious of entertainment, and things that are labeled leisure but aren’t

    While it’s definitely possible to burn out on overwork, it’s just as possible to burn out on lack of sleep, shitty food, and too much scrolling or streaming or videogames.

    If certain things fall into a mental “leisure” or “chilling out” or “giving myself a break” or “#selfcare” category, we have a tendency to ignore that they are often very tiring.

    Maybe that’s why we’re all all Surprised Pikachu when the holidays turn out to be exhausting.

    Then there’s entertainment. Like everyone else, I have my Shows, but I watch less than I used to and it’s not just because of parenting. I’ve never quite articulated this in a way that I like (I have tried, like in this Webworm article) but I suspect our modern media surplus is an “opiate of the people” situation; that the consumption of media that explicitly teaches about the danger of billionaires and power-mad dictators and even provides us with instructions for their disestablishment is actually inuring us to the status quo. That if we content ourselves with imagining a better world, there’s no need to build one.

    Which kind of leads on to:

    Dream purposefully

    So much of our time is spent in an escape, dreaming ourselves elsewhere. Fancying ourselves other. I think scrolling fits into this category too. Peel away the pop science of “dopamine hits” that we currently use to frame our relationship with technology – especially phones – and shed some of the cultural baggage, and we are left with a kind of augmented daydreaming and personality projection device, something Phillip K Dick would write a cautionary tale about during a palpitating amphetamine haze.

    I think dreaming or looking around to find ideas is fine, but I’d rather be writing them down and turning them into projects and story plots than just letting them run, unharnessed, not taking me anywhere in particular.

    Put another way: I have spent hours, days, years, thinking about the things I want to do. How much more effort would it be to actually do them?

    If I’m going to mention dreaming I should probably lay into the other way that dreams manifest:

    The horrors

    I started drafting this post after Christmas, in the little interregnum before the new year went comprehensively to shit. I could be talking about any number of things but, this time, it’s about Venezuela.

    It is not ideal that mad emperors with the power to extinguish all human life have started getting feisty in their dying years. Someone who by rights should be an incontinent crank yelling at the aged-home nurse is instead toting around a global doomsday device while invading neighbouring countries and making it clear there’s more where that came from. It is unquestionably terrible, and I do think it vital that the rest of us rapidly find ways to disestablish dictators, foment true democracy, mitigate climate change and end the looming threat of nuclear destruction, but you know what won’t help do that? What I’m always tempted to do, which is scroll the doom and occasionally make a snarky post about it. It doesn’t help the situation at large, and it doesn’t help my brain either, no matter how much I try to tell myself it will in the moment.

    you realise he'll press the button, right? and you know who I'm talking about and what the button is

    — Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer (@tworuru.com) 2026-01-05T03:38:20.457Z
    this doesn’t help anyone, much less you! just stop it!

    What I do think will help is:

    Be more present and more sociable

    I want to be where I am. I’d like to learn the names of the plants in the garden. Identify native trees. I’d like to learn the constellations, so I can tell my children the names of the stars.

    I want to spend more time with friends. Not with my friends on the other side of a screen. Making the effort to go meet them, or have them over for food, and hang out in person.

    I want to play with my kids more. Sure, I need time away from them to do work, but I can be a bit more purposeful about this than I sometimes am. If I am letting the kids go on devices just so I can spend aimless time on devices, what have any of us gained?

    I want to seek out friction. Technology is a boon and I love a lot of it, but so many tech things that should be easy are too hard, and things that probably should be harder are too easy. For instance, I want to find ways to get my money directly to artists instead of routing micropayments through rapacious intermediaries like Spotify. Listen to music on CDs or MP3s that I’ve downloaded from Bandcamp. I want to restore my old iPod. Get that valve radio I found at the side of the road working. Make myself less dependent on tech rented to me by megacorps that are so eagerly throwing in with a dictator.

    Being more present and less tech-dependent might have some side benefits. How much of my neck pain is from simply staring straight ahead, at a small rectangle, or a slightly larger rectangle, or a road?

    How much better off would I be if I did a bit more looking left and right?

    That isn’t a metaphor. I just think I’d like to be more of a monk.

    Become a schemer

    I feel like lot of folks – particularly young men – took Heath Ledger’s Joker character a bit too seriously, which is much funnier when you consider the character’s catchphrase, but I still want to use this now 18 year old movie to make a point.2

    There’s a sequence where Joker claims that he doesn’t make plans because he’s not a “schemer”. “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

    Of course, Joker is lying; he is a meticulous planner! All the same – maybe it’s the ADHD – something about that scene really rang with me. I grew up thinking plans were a bit pointless: something is always going to go wrong, so why bother?

    Of course, I know logically that not planning is sophomoric at best, but this tendency clings to the back of my brain, and in many aspects of life I still end up winging it.

    So in an attempt to provide a better metaphor than that offered by a fictional psychotic clown, I think plans are more like sailing ships. You can’t control the wind, but you can harness it. You might get blown off course from time to time, but you can still set a course, and do your best to return to it.

    On that sober note, I’d like to propose that next year:

    Be more unhinged

    So much of what I do is because I’ve spent a lot of effort learning about what made people like and dislike about me, and acting accordingly. This is true for us all to some extent, this is simply the way that cultural and social dynamics are, but I feel like with non-neurotpical folks it can be a bit… extra. If you have really extreme rejection sensitivity (clue: were you called a “sensitive child”? Subsequent clue: were you perhaps a bit sensitive about being called sensitive?) it can become both map and compass; things that might carry rejection risks are automatically avoided and you end up spending life drifting down the lazy river of “don’t make waves.”

    This may go some way to explaining a personally perplexing trait where I suddenly stop doing something the moment I experience mild success: the urge to achieve is suddenly absent and all that’s left is “people might be mean to me”.

    Here I’ll mention, in passing, that I often worry that writing about rejection sensitivity and the like will be seen as a bit pathetic and self-absorbed. In other words, it’s rejection sensitivity about rejection sensitivity.

    At least I’m not the only one afflicted:

    So this year I’d like to be a bit less afraid of pissing people off. Or, at least, I can make a priority of pissing the right people off. And I’d like to stop avoiding projects I very much want to do because there’s some real or imagined rejection risk. That’s where the good stuff happens!

    Thanks, as always, for reading.

    Also, comments! I love comments. Get amongst it in the comments.

    Add a comment

    “And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

    “It’s a lot more complicated than that–“

    “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

    Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

    Thinky links

    I don’t like the thought that we’re living in a post-literate world but we kind of are.

    And I keep meaning to read this piece about reading:

    We Used to Read Things in This Country

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    I’ll let you do the maths on which is better.

    1. And if you’re thinking about the New Year’s resolutions post I made last year – I didn’t quit! I’ll have an update on that for you next time! ↩︎
    2. The Dark Knight is now almost as old as Tim Burton’s Batman was when the Dark Knight came out. Enjoy your day. ↩︎