Every day, the first thing I do is wake up.

In my experience, that’s the best way to start a successful day, and I haven’t missed one yet.

It is, of course, 3 AM, the time all high-functioning people awake. The bright stars shine, brightly. Elves are abroad, softly singing songs of long-lost Valinor. Normies would never witness this.

I go for my first of several runs, bowels loosened by my pre-bedtime breakfast of Soylent, castor oil, and vitamin R. Then I go for a run using my feet, and legs.

As I complete the marathon, the sun is rising. I pause to do my morning breathwork, staring deep into the baleful yellow eye of Earth’s only known star. My eyes water gratefully.

From there it’s a quick trip home, deftly avoiding the odd tree or car that seems to rise up above the black void that has opened up in my vision — as a result of, I presume, mindfulness. Then it’s to work, at whatever vague thing I do. After thirty minutes of prompting ChatGPT to give instructions to the people who I have artfully coerced to do my job, the working day ends and I do my first hour of mindfulness. Then there’s lunch, a quick skip across the pond in a private jet to do lunch with the latest PM, then golf, followed by 19.2 minutes of extremely high quality time with one of my children, not sure which. I journal on the flight home — there’s nothing like flying for getting writing done — slug my soylent cocktail, and at long last slip into bed at 5:30 PM, utterly spent. My wife nudges me with a light in her eye, but I’m already snoring, satisfied in a way that mere intimacy with another human being can never provide.

In case you can’t tell, I was being sarcastic.

Barely.

Routines are a whole thing in self-improvement land. Search Tik-Tok for “morning routine” and prepare to be (if you are me) incredibly bored by beige weirdos earnestly explaining how and why they get up at 5 AM to journal before nipping to the gym, interposed with people dunking on people who get up at 5 AM and journal before nipping to the gym. Such is modern life. Everything is polarised; pick a side.

The routines of the famous make even richer reading. Here are the daily routine and affirmations of current jailbird and former Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, written down on (of course) a piece of stationery from a high-priced hotel.

Celebrity routines are even funnier. Because the job of most celebrities is to go to the gym in between acting gigs, their routines can be as wild as their imaginations can make them. From an interview with the Sunday Times, here is Orlando Bloom’s routine:

I’m a Capricorn, so I crave routine. Fortunately my partner is really into that too1.I chant for 20 minutes every day, religiously. I’ve had a Buddhist practice since I was 16, so that’s infiltrated my whole being. I’ll read a bit of Buddhism and then I’ll type it up and add it to my [Instagram] Stories. Other than that, I won’t look at my phone yet. I don’t want to be sucked into the black hole of social media.

I like to earn my breakfast so I’ll just have some green powders that I mix with brain octane oil, a collagen powder for my hair and nails, and some protein. It’s all quite LA, really. Then I’ll go for a hike while I listen to some Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots.

By 9am it’s breakfast, which is usually porridge, a little hazelnut milk, cinnamon, vanilla paste, hazelnuts, goji berries, a vegan protein powder and a cup of PG Tips. I’m 90 per cent plant-based, so I’ll only eat a really good piece of red meat maybe once a month. I sometimes look at a cow and think, that’s the most beautiful thing ever.

There’s a doctoral thesis in there. I find “brain octane oil” especially intriguing, but so are beautiful cows and an entire food pyramid masquerading as “porridge.” Let’s not get too hung up on Orlando’s relatively sane routine, though, when we could be looking at Mark Wahlberg’s, which he posted to his own Instagram.

–   2:30 a.m. — Wake up

–   2:45 a.m. — Prayer time

–   3:15 a.m. — Breakfast

–   3:40-5:15 a.m. — Workout

–   5:30 a.m. — Post-workout meal

–   6 a.m. — Shower

–   7:30 a.m. — Golf

–   8 a.m. — Snack

–   9:30 a.m. — Cryo chamber recovery

–   10:30 a.m. — Snack

–   11 a.m. — Family time, meetings, and work calls

–   1 p.m. — Lunch

–   2 p.m. — Meetings and work calls

–   3 p.m. — Pick up kids from school

–   3:30 p.m. — Snack

–   4 p.m. — Second workout

–   5 p.m. — Shower

–   5:30 p.m. — Dinner and family time

–   7:30 p.m. — Bedtime

This came out a while ago so better sleuths than me have covered it, including the 2:30 AM wake-up, the venality of mingling “family time,” with “meetings and work calls,” the improbable 30 minute golf game, and the 1.5 hour snack2, followed by another hour spent in a “cryo recovery chamber,” whatever that is, to deal with whatever the snack was. An elephant, I assume.

This has been the stuff of mockery for a long while. In the Ancient Times circa 2016, some daily routines — from routine dudebros, not celebrities — went viral. Because the Internet is actually not the bastion of permanence we all thought it was but an ephemeral void populated by ghosts, I can’t find it anywhere. From memory, it was stuff like “I wake up to the red light alarm I had installed to deal with my SAD and go stare at the sun3 for twenty minutes, before meditating and making myself a kale shake.” At the time, it received plenty of mockery on Twitter, whose users love a new Main Character.

And I feel that is just a bit unfair.

The trick is that writing anything down in a deliberate, ordered, meticulous format automatically makes whatever you’re doing seem psychotic, even if it’s painfully ordinary.  For example, here’s how my day actually tends to go.

I wake up and listen to Leo chatter to himself in his bed. Eventually I hop up, get him out of bed, change him straight away if I smell anything suspicious, stumble to the kitchen, put the kettle on, sit Leo down and give him whatever he’s getting for breakfast. Then I’ll grab my phone and read whatever’s at hand – emails, messages I got during the night, the usual social media time-suck. Often enough I’ll follow that by grabbing my laptop and tap away at work stuff (or, too often, hop down unhelpful time-wasting rabbit holes like checking my various inboxes over and over and over) in my pyjamas while I slurp at a coffee. Some days, I’ll fit in a run or a bodyweight workout. At some stage I will have a shower, followed by making the bed, and then the day is a miscellaneous hodgepodge of work, meetings, bouncing off unhelpful websites and time-sinks, responding to a sporadic but constant patter of notifications, making food, dad tasks, eating food, putting Leo to bed, staring at a big screen while taking breaks to stare at a smaller screen, sometimes writing something like this newsletter, then bed.

Fairly normal for a dad who works from home and thumps a keyboard for a living, I assume. But watch what happens when I write out the same thing, add some extremely hypothetical timestamps, plus a bit of of flowery description and self-help psychobabble.

• 7 AM: I awake, watching the sun slip through the gap in the curtains and feeling my heart swell with love as my son laughs himself awake. I leap out of bed, stride purposefully into his room and help him begin his day.

• 7:15 AM: I begin my morning routine in the kitchen, relishing the aroma of coffee brewing. I take my coffee outside, and drink in the cool morning air and bright sun. I also drink the coffee.

• 7:30 AM: I prepare my son a healthy breakfast of oats and milk, with a touch of cinnamon and honey. Sometimes I add a little fruit — perhaps peach, or kumquat.4

• 8:00 AM: I begin my working day, responding to emails and requests from clients and colleagues.

• 8:30 AM: I drop my son at preschool, watching him skip happily away and chatter with his friends. I am truly #blessed.

I’ll stop there or it will go on for another thousand or so intolerable words. I was starting to feel queasy so I can’t imagine how you were doing.

The reason I bring this up is because we all have routines, whether we know it or not. I don’t have a set bedtime or an alarm, but since I started wearing a smart watch I’ve been amazed by how consistently I go to sleep and wake up very similar times. Without planning or meaning to, I do nearly the exact same things every morning, with slight differences.

My realisation is that if I nudge just a little bit more purpose or planning into things I already do I could get quite a lot more done with very little additional effort. To take one example: what if — once I was on my computer — I didn’t flick between social media, work emails, and random internet bright lights and loud noises, instead concentrating on just working, or just socializing, or just scrolling? Or how about if I cleaned the kitchen while my son eats his oats (with just a soupçon of cinnamon) instead of zoning out at my laptop? Going a little further — what if I bundled up my heavy day-job workload into a specific time-bracket, thereby carving out time for my elusive alleged hobby, actually fucking painting?

Doing these fundamentally sensible things has occurred to me many times in the past, and I’ve even given it a go a few times, but I’ve never stuck the landing. I think the reason I have struggled with intentional routines — as opposed to the unintentional ones I follow effortlessly — is, I think, twofold: I haven’t wanted to buy into the psychotic cult-like thinking of extreme routine-followers, and because I feel all plans are doomed to fail. The problem with a planned schedule or routine is that it will inevitably, often immediately, break. If you have anything like a normal life, something unforeseen will come up. In the likely event that whatever life throws at you is going to take more than thirty minutes, your precious schedule is fucked. And then, instead of feeling joy from having answered work emails or stared at the sun for the requisite twenty minutes, you’re staring down the black hole of an early-morning failure.

But perhaps the fact that celebrity routines are stuffed with obvious lies should be a clue: a perfect routine simply isn’t possible. So what needs to change is the expectation of perfection. Of course it’s not always going to work. It just needs to mostly work. And you don’t need to get up at 2:30 AM with the elves.

So — how about you? Let me know if you’ve had any success planning routines, or sticking to them, or if you’ve had more luck throwing yourself before the whims of chaos. I reckon both are valid, but if your plan involves shutting yourself in a freezer for an hour every day, maybe see a doctor first.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. If you’ve found this post helpful for some reason, share it, you coward.

Gidday [CYNIC NAME HERE],

We hope you’re enjoying all the cynicism and self-improvement the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement has to offer. We’re updating our our prices to bring you more great entertainment.

This update will allow us to deliver even more value for your membership like new logos I made using Canva, stories about lifting weights, not doing pull-ups, or just telling tales that simply make your day a little more cynical.

Thank you for choosing Netflix The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement, and we hope you stay with us for years to come. We look forward to arbitrarily removing your favourite content in the near future with absolutely no explanation as to why.

The catch

I hope you enjoyed my best parody of a price rise email. The catch is that I really am putting prices up, to $10 a month, but don’t worry. I’m only doing it so I can bring prices down.

On the face of it, this makes even less sense than Netflix telling you it’s putting prices up so it can cancel yet another critically-acclaimed or audience-beloved show for tax  reasons, so let me explain.

I’ve wanted to move the Cynic’s Guide to a pay-what-you-want model for a while now. People have told me they’d like to pay for my stuff, but that $8 USD a month is a lot in these financially-cursed times, and I agree. Substack doesn’t actually offer pay-what-you-want functionality yet, but I’ve figured out how to emulate it with some carefully-arranged perpetual percentage discounts. That’s why the price has gone up to 10 bucks — it’s a lot easier to fiddle with percentages when you’re working in tens. And now that I’m done fiddling, you have quite a few more options when it comes to supporting the Cynic’s Guide:

If you already pay for my work, and you’re happy paying $10 a month, carry on! It’s very much appreciated.

If you already pay for my work, but you’d like to pay less than $10 a month, this allows you to continue to support the newsletter at a rate that’s comfortable for you. Simply cancel your existing subscription (oof) and pick a new price from the links below (yay.)

If you don’t yet pay for my work because it’s a bit pricey, but you’d like to, the new perpetual discounts will allow you to contribute at any level you’d like.

If you’d like to keep paying me (a person with a day job) but you’d rather the lion’s share of your limited subscription budget went to someone who needs it more (because they make their whole living from Substack,) please, make it happen.

If you don’t yet pay for my work and you don’t want to, that’s fine. Carry on. The plan is still for the Cynic’s Guide to remain free. Please, repay me for the free content by sharing it everywhere you possibly can.

Here are the new pricing tiers. Have fun!

Hopefully these work. If something looks broken, let me know.

• Pay $1 a month / $10 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/onedollarydoo
• Pay $2 a month / $20 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/2do
• Pay $3.50 a month / $35 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/treefiddy
• Pay $5 a month / $50 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/fiver
• Pay $6.66 a month / $66.6 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/666
• Pay $7 a month / $70 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/straight7
• Pay $8 a month / $80 a year (current subscription price)
• https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/8outof8
• Pay $9 a month / $90 a year (more than the current subscription price, if you’re so inclined) https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/nine
• Pay $10 a month / $100 a year: Uh, just find the link to my current subscription page. Ah, here it is:

In self-improvement news, I did a workout today. Managed a few sets of 5 pullups. There you go. That’s what you came for, right?

Thanks again for reading. All going well, there’ll be an actual, non-price-related update later this week.

Gidday Cynics,

You’ll be pleased to know I have been extremely productive in nearly every facet of my life except writing this newsletter.

As far as writing goes, I’ve been busy. On top of a fairly intense day-job writing workload, I’ve smashed out quite a few thousand words for various outlets. I wrote an in-depth video game explainer aimed at non-gamer parents for the excellent Emily Writes. If you haven’t already read it, you might find it helpfully self-improvement-adjacent. Sample:

While video games are not bad for your brain, they are mentally taxing and time-consuming by design. They can foster compulsive behaviours that can look a lot like addiction in both children and adults. It’s very easy for kids — and me! —  to stay up late playing games, get very little sleep, and be a wreck the next day. What’s more, kids (particularly neurodivergent kids) can find competitive games difficult, especially if they feel that another team or the game itself is being “unfair.” This can lead to meltdowns; in gamer-speak, it’s called “tilted.” Adults are not immune. My language (not on mic!) during nighttime Halo sessions could melt steel beams. It is something I am trying actively to fix, as it’s not a habit I want to pass on to my kids.

That piece prompted a few of Emily’s subscribers to come here. If that’s you, then welcome! I hope you enjoy whatever this is.

I also wrote a guest sermon piece for David Farrier’s Webworm which may or may not appear in the near-to-distant future. Sneak peak:1

Bible translations vary a lot, but there is no version of the story where the Samaritan puts the injured man in a chokehold and kills him.

Plenty of people have made this exact observation, not least the Reverend Al Sharpton, who delivered the eulogy at Jordan Neely’s funeral. But I’m interested in what it says about the many people on the right-wing of United States politics — including, perhaps, up to 25 percent of the population — who call themselves Christians.

I don’t think they’re Christians at all. I think they’re something else.

Something terrible.

Sinister! In lighter news, the cult of orthodox economics has long been the funniest “science,” and the economic establishment has just now outdone themselves by begging the public to stop taking their predictions in any way seriously.  Yes, really. I wrote about this for my occasional media/politics blog, The Bad Newsletter:

Without a finely-honed economic sense of humour like mine you might have missed the joke. Let me explain while trying not to laugh too hard because I still can’t believe they said the quiet part quite so loud: because their predictions keep turning out to be wrong, economists are asking us to take a radically different view of the word “prediction.” Rather than assessing an economic prediction’s success using the conventional calibration — whether or not it happens — we are asked to reflect on whether the prediction tells us anything about the present.

Now that we’ve got all those accomplishments out of the way, let us get down to the more usual business of feeling shitty about our lack of self-improvement. I’ll start by asking: does anyone else do this thing?

Running away from tasks, literally

Imagine I’m beginning something new — hypothetically, let’s say “today’s Cynic’s Guide newsletter.”  I’ll feel a charge of excitement, but instead of opening a document and writing something, I’ll spontaneously stand up and stride briskly away. This isn’t a conscious thing: I’ll often be a considerable distance from my desk before I realize what’s happened. Some mute bit of my subconscious hasn’t liked my sudden urge to get things done, has seized the controls, and steered me away.

This happens in other ways, that are less noticeable as physically running away from my work. The same process happens in miniature at my computer multiple times a day. In fact, it happened a few seconds ago, which is why I bring it up. I was stuck on a sentence and instead of puzzling it out I flicked my forefinger over my laptop’s touchpad and dug into my Gmail tab. Why? There was nothing conscious about it; I’d checked my email only a few minutes earlier (and how often I check it has no bearing at all on how often I reply to things.) A momentary lull in executive function and off I go. At its worst, this is like being a passenger in your own brain, seeing through the eye-holes of a dumb meat golem with the wrong set of instructions slipped into its skull, briskly traveling away from its work and up the stairs to do yet another line of the chocolate that’s meant to be for muffins.

I’ve been trying to think through why I might behave this way, and I’m approaching something plausible: I tend to work in all-or-nothing binge slogs. They start with frantic, productive clattering and ending with me slack-jawed, prodding dumbly at the keyboard trying to remember what words and letters are. This is exhausting and it’s probably what my helpful/unhelpful subconscious is trying to get me away from.

Now I’ve noticed this tendency, I’m pleased to have picked up a new self-help book that I might even finish reading. This one rejoices in the unwieldly title of How To Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique To Boost Learning, Writing, and Thinking. It is by a bloke called Sönke Ahrens and is translated from German, which means its title is probably expressible in one lengthy word, perhaps something like Schmartnötenteknikallerninundwrittenschen. So far, it’s excellent, because it does something no other book I’ve ever read does: explains how to take notes in a way that works for my perpetually scattered attention.  Here is one of my notes: you can decide how smart it is.

As it turns out, writing down every ridiculous thought circling around in my head — projects I might do, ideas I have, topics for articles, everything else — is incredibly freeing. It pins thoughts down and stops them taking up space. I’ve always struggled with systems, like project planners, that try to get you to write your ideas or todos down in a linear way: I’m finding it much easier to just write all the thoughts down and find the connections between them later. I like the idea of doing more tinkering, and less binge-writing.

I’ll write a piece on the book once I get through it. On that note, here are some scattered thoughts I’ve been able to shape into something sensical now I’ve yanked them out of the formless ether of my brain:

On schedules and routines

Those might be the two most boring words in the English language and they’re about to become a major part of my vocabulary. After last weeks’ even-more-obvious-than usual revelation that I will not become swole by writing about how I might one day become swole (in between bouts of video games) I am starting an exercise routine that involves picking up heavy things and putting them down again. I’m also returning to scheduled posts. I’m thinking Wednesday mornings NZ time, but if you have strong opinions on when you’d like to get this thing, let me know in the comments. Here’s what you can expect in the upcoming weeks:

• A thing on Smart Notes
• A thing about routines, habits, and self-help’s obsession with bed-making
• A thing on Getting Things Done (the book, not the tantalisingly abstract concept)
• Some more stuff on sleep and sleep hacking, which I’ve been working on for ages

Now, to brighten or possibly darken the end of your week, here is some of the weirder self-improvement stuff I’ve seen in recent online travels.

Long bow of the week:

In a field full of grand, sweeping, often evidence-free conclusions, this is one of the grander and more sweeping ones I’ve seen. But wait! There’s more:

Clickbait has a lot to answer for, but it did inspire me to experiment with today’s email title to see what happens. In an effort to make writers feel terrible about themselves (evidently not realising this happens to most writers anyway,) Substack  introduced a new dashboard that shoves the most recent stats for your newsletter right under your nose. I will be disappointed, but unsurprised, if the open rate for this one is higher than normal.

Possibly unintentionally funny self-help book title of the week:

“It’s OK! I can stop overthinking! All I need to do is recall one of the 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and aaaaaaaaargh!”

Brutally ironic Reddit post of the week:

I subscribe to several self-help subreddits, mainly to see what people are talking about in the space. I’m starting to wonder if that was a mistake.

Graphic design is my passion

I made a logo and wordmark for this newsletter for some reason. There are few things I hate more than reading some exhaustive, design-wank-laden account of why so-and-so brand or such-and-such publication picked a particular font or line weight or something; anything that goes beyond “This is what our CEO eventually said yes to” is an overwrought lie. I’ll leave it to you to discuss why I picked this combination of heiroglyphics and words, should you be so inclined.

Any designers reading this who are triggered by my treatment of kerning or whatever are welcome to get in touch and pitch how they’d make it better.

That’s all for this week. As always, I’d love to have a yarn in the comments. How do you take notes (smart or otherwise), navigate through endless clickbait, avoid thinking too much about overthinking, or make logos for your newsletters? Take it away.

Gidday Cynics,

Important news: There is a new video game out called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it is the best video game I’ve played in years, possibly ever, and it is ruining my life.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you play as a lad called Link who dives out of the sky to save a princess1 after acquiring incredible powers that allow you to create great and terrible machines and attach mushrooms to your sword and (most importantly) swim through ceilings. This makes much more sense when you play it.2

In real life, I play as a very-late-30s man with a demanding day job, a young child, a mortgage to pay, and an inexplicable newsletter about my self-help obsession. I have no incredible powers, getting a mushroom stuck to my chopping knife has no enjoyable gameplay implications, and all my attempts to swim through ceilings have ended in failure.

In this, I am far from alone. I am the target market. Nintendo knows this, and cruelly made their Tears of the Kingdom ad about specifically me.3

The combination of a demanding day job and a demanding game painted a picture that — from a very slight distance — looks uncomfortably like a cocaine addict in the midst of a relapse. After a hard day’s laptop-screen-jockeying (in between, of course, scrolling sessions on my little screen) I would curl up on the couch to binge-play the latest adventure of Link on the big screen (which is powered by a medium-sized, portable screen).

Other commitments, like fitness, or this newsletter, or my great nemesis The Lawns fell by the wayside.

Reddit is full of people like me. It understands.

I felt guilty. I dealt with this the only way I know how, by over-committing. My clever friends with excellent Substack newsletters were obvious targets. I have a guest article due for Webworm, because I pitched a guest article for Webworm. Meanwhile, Emily Writes about how she bought her children a “Game Boy thing” (a PlayStation 4.) She’s one of many parents who are, sensibly, flummoxed by gaming and its weird allure for children — and adults.  “How would you like a guest article on this?” I texted.

She would, it turns out. Shit. What to do? Better play some more Zelda.

Nostalgia is a drug. You can’t go home again, but that won’t stop you trying. And for as long as I can remember, videogames have been a home. My formative experience with the Legend of Zelda is at a friend’s house, in 1999, with the groundbreaking 3D adventure game Ocarina of Time. We’re on the Water Temple; the most difficult of this unforgiving game’s dungeons. After a maze of watery corridors, we open a door, and are greeted with a vista: an endless plain, covered in shallow water, the horizon shrouded in mist. In front of us is a leafless sapling — like That Wanaka Tree, but before it was even a seed.

It stopped us cold. Two sneering teenage kids, rendered speechless.

My mate was the first to get his breath back.

“That is art,” he said.

Over the next few years, my brothers and I would play through Ocarina of Time and its sequels together. I missed them terribly when I went to university, and I needed to escape the baleful gaze of my horrible Christian Vegan flatmates, so I bought myself a GameCube and played through The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I managed to acquire a bad flu at the same time, so my memories of the game involve rivers of snot staunched by handkerchiefs that might as well have been sandpaper. I played it on a 12 inch CRT television, wrapped in blankets and pajamase and drinking cup after cup of the only thing I can stomach: herbal licorice tea. To this day, a sip of licorice tea will yank me back in time to a place that doesn’t exist: The Wind Waker’s gorgeous cartoon-style climate-changed world.

And why wouldn’t we play games? Humans are innately game-playing creatures; play is largely how we learn, and video games shape and mold that intrinsic drive into something extraordinarily powerful. As that Tears of the Kingdom advertisement cleverly shows, videogames give you something that modern life doesn’t: a sense of agency. In a game, every decision you make seems to matter, even if you’re following a pre-ordained narrative. Life will happily tick on with or without you, and the unjust machines of the world will not be unmade by your furious online raging, but in a videogame only you can save the world. People want to matter. Games let them.

Back in the present, Tears of the Kingdom has a mechanic where you can rewind pretty much any moving object through time. Look out! Enemies have set an enormous spiked boulder rolling at you, Indiana Jones style. Not a problem! Rewind it through time and use it to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the Bokoblins.

What would I do if I could rewind all my misspent time? The bingeing tendency isn’t a new thing. I have always been like this. Games are a dopamine hook through the jaw, and I struggle to ignore the bait. I’m going to bed late and waking up tired. Worse than tired; fatigued. I’m spending hours and hours at my keyboard smashing out content for the new website and I just need a break but the break I crave most is the total release from care that only Class A substances and an infuriatingly good video game can provide. The mute frenemies in my subconscious give me their burnout warnings. A brain-buzz here; a muscle twitch there. Gravity seems stronger than normal.

A trip to the big city provides a few hours to catch up on my non-work writing.  Instead of doing that, I plummet into the hotel bed and into a stupor. When I wake, I start writing this.

What I’ve woken up to is less an epiphany and more delayed-onset common sense. So far, my self-improvement experiment has been additive. I’ve been increasing the number of new balls to juggle, new plates to spin, all while running out of the spoons I mix metaphors with.

It’s not sustainable. For this experiment to add up to anything, other things will have to be subtracted.

What to start with?

I’ve got Lee Reid staying for a few days and I’d intended to have a sit-down discussion with him about the neurological basis of videogame’s allure, but we only got as far as agreeing that a day playing videogames is pretty much the same (in brain terms) as a day’s hard work before fiddling with Tears of the Kingdom’s hilarious build mechanic until 11 at night.

Awake this morning, bleary-eyed, making a beeline for the kettle to make coffee, thinking: I really have to get a newsletter out, it’s been well over a week. And: it’s time I started taking this self-improvement jag more seriously. Writing newsletters at it won’t increase the number of pullups I can do.

Something has to give, or all the ambitions and ideas I have will wither and die on the vine. But what should I subtract? I just can’t think of what to leave behind.

It really is such a good game, you guys.

Gidday Cynics,

We’re a few months in to this project now and I’ve noticed something interesting: the most engaged subscribers here aren’t men.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But it’s definitely not what I expected. I figured a newsletter that tackles big themes like “increased productivity” and “how many pull-ups I can do” would attract mostly dudes. It makes me interested to see how people receive this week’s topic — something that’s been bugging me for ages now.

Fellas, are you OK?

Please note: the following contains discussion of self-harm and suicide.

In many ways this question is already answered. Men, collectively, are not OK. It’s been a while since I browsed the statistics, so I’ve been able to react with fresh horror: By a staggering proportion, men commit most crime, including the worst crimes such as violent sexual assaults and murder. Here are the New Zealand police proceedings demographic data, neatly stripped of their unfathomable human tragedy and rendered into graphs:

Men also kill themselves at an awful rate: in New Zealand, the suicide rate for men is around four times that of women — a statistic that seems to hold true for other countries. I know there are caveats to consider here, but the sheer discrepancy is shocking.

Because it’s well-known that men are not OK, and because the causes and circumstances of this malaise are complex, men’s wellness has long been easy fodder for grifters. The current cure, touted by a seemingly endless parade of (usually) male griftfluencers, is that men have become soft and simply need to, uh, man up.

As far as science can tell, this isn’t true. The shittier traits associated with masculinity — often called “toxic masculinity” — aren’t good for men’s mental health, according to a comprehensive meta-analysis published in 2016. As the Smithsonian Magazine reports:

“Sexism isn’t just a social injustice,” says Y. Joel Wong, a psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington and the study’s lead author. “It may even be potentially problematic for mental health”—men’s mental health, that is.

But facts have never got in the way of this terrible story, and the people telling it are making out like bandits.

Tucker Carlson is famous for a lot of things, most recently for being sacked by Fox News. But before that, there was… whatever this is:

Tucker’s special The End of Men, feat. testicle tanning, men milking cows, shirtless dudes wrasslin’ each other, and all sorts of other weird shit is classic Fox infotainment; baiting both concerned conservatives and easily-enraged liberals with equal aplomb. As usual, there’s a core of truth to this bullshit pearl; testosterone levels in men are dropping over time, at a population level, and no-one knows exactly why.1 There are also plenty of people for whom careful monitoring of testosterone is part of necessary health or gender-affirming care. My intention is not to have a go at them, but to point out that the solutions articulated by right-wing media personalities and manosphere grifluencers are intended to stoke anxiety in people whose testosterone is probably perfectly fine.2 But wait, there’s more. Parker Molloy, author of the excellent Substack newsletter This Present Age, has an explainer at Rolling Stone:

As ridiculous and easily mocked as these videos are, they represent an ascendant ideology on the right and an extension of Carlson’s long-standing belief that there is a war on masculinity that threatens to destroy society itself. This theme of social collapse is a mainstay of Carlson’s Fox News show, with immigration, LGBTQ rights, and the battles against racism and sexism are all framed as threats that must be beaten back to maintain Carlson’s preferred patriarchal social order. In short, the video’s not actually about the benefits of sunshine on one’s scrotum at all.

More recently, in February of 2023, Vogue magazine put singer Rhianna on the cover, together with her husband A$AP Rocky and nine-month-old son.

Naturally, completely normal men immediately drew diagrams all over it.

This “green line” stuff, which was briefly the subject of a Tik-Tok trend too painful to discuss at length (but which is easily Googleable if you want to induce a headache) was the creation of an incel-adjacent manosphere Twitter guy with 175,000 followers. Clicking on a few links or suggested follows — thank you, socially destructive algorithms —  quickly turns into a bottomless shitmine. Here’s just one of the nuggets from near the top that shows exactly where these people’s minds are at:

And here’s what gets me about this stuff, all these keyboard worriers publicly bemoaning the state of men: it’s not very manly, is it?

Obviously, I don’t think caring about the state of the world makes you unmanly or in any other way unworthy. If I did, I’d have to stop writing. But this overwhelming preoccupation with a lack of masculinity, particularly among the Profoundly Online Dudes that are the vanguard of our endless cultural wars, just seems to me to be kind of weak. Think of the state of the discourse around “alphas” and “betas,” which started as a misunderstanding of how wolves work3 and has since been carefully nurtured by incels and other manosphere denizens. And as long as we’re appealing to the animal kingdom for examples of how people should behave, which these people always do, let’s use it to dismiss the notion that strength and nurturing fatherhood are mutually exclusive. Silverback gorillas are quite capable of lazily separating a human’s arms from its body but they play with and cuddle their babies all the time.4

The content peddled by these belligerent yet fretful male influencers is, at best, total pseudoscience, but the fact remains but a sizeable proportion of the male population seems to both care about this stuff and take it seriously. To which I say: why? If alphas and betas existed (they don’t) the only people who’d devote any time to worrying about being alpha would be betas. And, weirdly, that’s exactly what a lot of these guys do.

I’ll change the tone of my address a bit here: if you, or anyone you know, is caught up in this stuff I think there’s a relatively easy out — or, if you want to put it that way, a shortcut to alpha-dom.

Stop caring about it.

Seriously. Stop giving a shit about whether you’re manly enough, because fretting about being manly is not manly. By way of proof, I’ve got exactly what every griftfluencer telling you to care about the state of your gonads so they can sell you powders or red-light machines has: an appeal to ancient wisdom. Tell me, have you heard of… the Spartans?

Well, they were an ancient society of Greek warriors and blah blah blah. You’ve all seen or heard of 300 and the associated memes and learning opportunities. Did you know that there weren’t just 300 Spartans at Thermopylae there were actually thousands of Greeks ugh, I’ll spare you the rest. But there’s one thing that’s well worth remembering about the Spartans, and is easily the thing I find most endearing about them: they were laconic.

Spartan children, for whom education was compulsory, were taught from an early age to be laconic in their speech. Essentially, it’s being concise to excess.5 This example is often given:

Persian commander: “Our arrows will blot out the sun!”

Spartan: “Then we will fight in the shade.”

According to a wildly funny Wikipedia entry, this might actually have happened. It certainly seems to have been in keeping with the sort of thing Spartans actually said.6

Back to the point: while Spartans obviously cared very much about being masculine, I can’t imagine that these bloke’s blokes would have been even mildly interested in drawing diagrams explaining how a rich and famous man who performed the actions necessary to produce a child with someone as infamously hot as Rhianna is actually a cuckold. If it’s masculinity you’re looking to cultivate, then there are plenty of methods I’d argue are non-toxic, more fun, more accessible, and much better for you than worrying about it. Here is a short list, pulled entirely from the top of my head:

• Exercise (if your arms work, pullups are free and satisfyingly difficult yet easy to improve at)
• Learning a manly art of some kind. Go find a woodworking class, or learn to paint. Build a table or something.
• Channel the masculine urge to protect and serve into learning about and dealing with actual problems, like climate change, instead of pretend ones like how much sun your balls do or don’t get
• Make a good cup of tea (there’s an art to it)
• Learn an instrument: you can get an OK second-hand guitar for $50 and tablature can be found for free online
• Get in the sea. Seriously, ocean swimming is good for your soul
• Get a bunch of rocks or other small objects and throw them into a bucket; my flatmate and I got hours of entertainment from doing this when I was at University and a literal bucket of rocks is leagues smarter than Andrew Tate
• Touch grass. Just go for a goddamn walk

It’s not that I think any of the above should be the exclusive province of men; it’s just that I think there are lots of useful and manly things that dudes can do on the cheap without needing to spend their time worrying about how manly they are. By all means, go to the gym. Shoot arrows at targets. Acquire a collection of flannel shirts. Grow a beard. Do other forms of male-gender-affirming self-care. Just get off the goddamn internet for a bit and stop worrying about whether men are leaning correctly or whether a given celebrity is a simp or the state of other blokes’ nuts. Because, if that’s something you’re giving undue attention to, you’re being grifted. Here’s Molloy again:

By presenting men insecure about their masculinity with an enemy in need of domination, fascist-friendly media personalities can pull their audience to the right. This is what’s currently happening with the moral panic about “grooming” playing out across right-wing media and being implemented as policy by right-wing politicians. A recent video of the crowd at a Trump rally chanting “Save our kids“ shows just how successful this type of messaging continues to be, consequences be damned. The goal is to not only halt social progress, but to reverse it by painting pro-equality messages as part of nefarious schemes to undermine Western civilization.

If you’re a guy, and you’ve been caught up in anything like what I’ve described — please, take a step back, and think about how weird it all is. Whatever positive masculinity is, all that shit is its opposite. The world needs good men. Go be one.

I’m about to take my own advice and go for a walk, but to keep you on top of my own self-improvement experiment, I managed to do a colossal eight consecutive pull-ups the other day, and there’s a new painting did. Even better, this one has a video to go with it. Go on, lick and subscrub. I’ll see you in the comments!

@tworuruCan I fix this Pikango painting in Breath of the Wild? #botw #breathofthewild #legendofzelda #totk #art #fanart #artistsoftiktok #gaming #fyp

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Gidday Cynics,

It has been a Week. The day job Matrix has me, and while this is definitely cause for celebration — having a job is an increasingly rare privilege these days, plus I actually like what I’m doing and suspect I may be borderline good at it — it has left scant time for newsletters.

So I’m going to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and throw over to you, the readers. Although Cynic’s Guide is still just a baby in the newsletter lifecycle, I’m thrilled to have already acquired a brilliant and engaged commenter community. Imagine the comments on typical news website Facebook page, then imagine the opposite. That’s you. Be proud!

So for the rest of this newsletter I’m going to take some of the best reader feedback from the Webworm that kicked off this whole boondoggle as well as the newsletters that I’ve put out since, and give some more in-depth responses.

Let’s start with Michele, one of many readers who offered solid feedback and insight on that first Webworm article.

Michele says:

Yes indeed ‘the fields are ripe unto harvest’ for the opportunistic grifters (who are simply me or you with the volume turned WAY up) to ply their message of hope and validate our distrust of anything we are not.

This is extremely true. A lot of people in the self-improvement space really are just randoms with unwarranted confidence: living embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Whether or not they deserve the term “grifters” is debatable. I’m pretty sure some are intentionally grifting, but is it worse if they’re amplifying and manipulating people’s dissatisfaction unintentionally?

Emily says:

I’ve always felt like churches, cults, mlm’s, and the self help industry all recruit in a similar fashion. They look for an emotional vulnerability they can lean on, hit it as hard as they can, and then offer you both a solution and a community. The thought of a solution to your problems draws you in, and then the community traps you. It’s hard to pull yourself away from something when it feels like your whole life is wrapped up in it.

Yup. It’s all part of a continuum. I’m pretty sure a lot of my own distrust of cultish self-improvement communities comes from bad religious experiences. Even exercise classes tick that box for me, and for a long time I disliked participating in improv warm-up exercises. Too culty!

Bentia says:

It’s wrong to mock those who are trying to improve themselves but it’s well and good to truly interrogate those who are selling it to us because they are so often, deeply sick themselves… I try to stay away from self improvement for my own sanity since I don’t deal well with failure at all (I don’t even do New Year’s resolutions) I truly believe that the only safe form of self improvement involves therapy with a licensed professional and possibly an actual psychiatrist. There are too many scams out there and too many unwell people who are trying to get better by selling you something that hasn’t even worked for them.

Yes! A lot of people selling self-improvement are deeply fucked up. This speaks to a big part of what I’m trying to do — I want to find self-improvement stuff that isn’t being hawked by people who are themselves doing it to feel less broken, and that’s relatively safe to try doing yourself. Here, like before, there’s a continuum, and people are going to have to find their own comfort. Technically, going for a run is unsafe — you could have a heart attack, or get hit by a car, or be savaged by two wolves1 who aren’t inside you — but it’s rewarding and long-term it’s probably going to be quite good for you.

Karen says:

I have been involved in some of the wellness world a bit and here is how it sometimes goes:

1. You’re very special

2. You’re also fucked

3. Only I can fix you. Give me your money

I have read too many self-help books with that exact plot. It’s too predictable. They need to mix it up a bit.

A. Michelle says:

most of self-improvement pop culture is a grift. I think that monetizing the grift has shifted from books to influencers, the latter actually being *worse* because anyone who likes taking selfies and pointing at invisible pop-up text boxes can do it. It doesn’t need to be accepted by a publisher or go through an editor.

Fucking hell. This is too real and it makes me feel old. I can’t be doing with TikTok, I just can’t. It stresses me out. The app got wind of the fact I’m interested in self-improvement so it keeps trying to hook me on tradwife influencers peddling Christo-fascism and weird Jordan Peterson acolytes trying to sell me the benefits of testicle-tanning and (judging from the adult zits and haunted eyes) steroid use. I just about manage to put my art on YouTube but doing dances while pointing at the blank space where a text box could be while that horrible obnoxiously cheerful robot voice reads out the caption… fuck that all the way to hell. I’ll stick with my text-heavy newsletter like a common ageing millenial troglodyte, thank you very much. Humbug!

Denis says:

Self-improvement was considered to be a vital part of being “successful” in MLM ! We were forcefully encouraged to BUY, read and study books by Zig Ziglar, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, Robert Kiyosaki (net worth $100 million) – in fact you couldn’t “go core” until you’d bought these books and introduced a certain number of people to the business in one year! Basically “going core” meant you were sucked in by the carrot offered to you – work hard at recruiting and selling for one year with the promise of an afternoon on the Amway super yacht rubbing shoulders with one or two “Diamonds” in the business!

When I was a kid I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and found it exciting (I was 16) but disquieting. If I remember correctly, it was an cheat sheet for becoming a slum lord. I soured on it completely when I realised that Kiyosaki had become rich by selling a board game called The Cashflow Quadrant about how to become rich. So yeah, spot the grifter.

Jamie says:

I think grift/scam is actual a semi positive term for some of these self help gurus, these people are after far more than just your money. They want to program you, and they’re very open about their objective, they want your money, time, endorsement & your success stories.

Yup. Like so much in our current state of so-called late stage capitalism,2 you and I are not just the customers; we are the product.

JP says:

Second, the unhealthy-ness that comes with people taking self-improvement too far has always facinated me but I don’t see it discussed so openly. I’m frustrated how self exploration and educating yourself in history, philosophy, psychology and spirituality so often bumps up against this unhealthy obsession with someone trying to ‘fix’ you and nothing ever being enough. It’s so healing to see this being talked about. Thank you so much.

Thanks JP! I’m sure there are healthy ways to explore this stuff. I’m convinced self-improvement is a pretty fundamental human impulse and I’m tired of seeing it monopolised by grifters and earning a reputation as garbage.

Kat says:

I feel like your assessment of self-help is quite gendered as you haven’t identified any of the ways parents (mostly mothers) are preyed on and all the ways they could be improving their parenting. I hope that’s included in your longer project 😊

This is true, and a good point. I replied to this comment when Kat wrote it on Webworm, but I wanted to do it again here. I’m looking at the world of self-improvement from my perspective, which is as mid as it is possible to be. I am a married straight white man with a corporate job, approaching the pointy end of my 30s, who has become overly interested in pull-ups. Fortunately, I have friends who identify otherwise and have different perspectives, and some of them have offered to write guest spots. Others have agreed to interviews. I’m looking forward to showing their perspectives here, and if you have expertise you’d like to see shared, I’d love to hear from you.

Some more recent comments! This one popped up just a couple of days ago but I forgot to reply. Linda says:

If you could share some tips on how to get out of bed when the alarm goes off that would be great!

Putting your phone away from your bed is just cruel to your morning self, I can’t do that to poor morning me.

Uhhh. I’ll share what works for me, in order of “sometimes effective” to “100 percent guaranteed effective:”

1. Putting my phone in a different room. Sorry! I do this most nights, and perversely, I find that the antici3 of getting up to see all the exciting messages that have undoubtedly arrived in the wee hours can help yank me out of bed. Then I get up and reply to work emails. Brains are weird.

2. This one is embarrassing, but it works. I pretend I’m a robot. Instead of trying to will myself out of bed, I just watch as my limbs kind of autonomously operate to drag me to the kitchen kettle where I can make coffee. Binary solo.

3. Acquire a child. Having a screaming infant in the house will get you out of bed at any hour of the day or night, repeatedly. I guarantee it. The human brain is hardwired to be unable to shut that sound out.

And, stealing advice from others: you might benefit from more sleep, if that is possible for you, and more exposure to sunlight in the morning. Both can really help.

More comments I forgot to reply to! Amy Smith says:

I once played assassins creed so much during highschool (HSC Trials) that I experienced the Tetris effect and was playing it when I closed my eyes and hearing/hallucinating the eagle scream 😳

Ugh, shut-eye hallucinations after doing the same thing too much during the day can be really intense. It’s happened to me with videogames many times, but the worst ones I ever experienced were when I worked as a beekeeper. I’d shut my eyes and they’d be full of bees.

Here’s one of my favourite comments, from the Two Wolves fakelore article, courtesy of my friend Jackson:

Shaped by late stage tech capitalism we’re being reduced to ‘gramable characters of ourselves with all the gory details almost literally filtered out. All this unfactchecked trite superficial bullshit is easy, it’s a nice story that helpfully neglects the complex’s realms of neuroscience, psychology, and physics (how the fuck do two full grown wolves fit inside a human let alone have enough space to fight?)

Now there’s nothing wrong with having a yarn and spinning a tale — even if it is a bit of a shit one. The problem arises when we’re so bombarded by these simple black/white narratives which just do not stack up with out insanely complex lived experience. They start to make us feel shit. If I could only tame that wolf. Next thing you know your YouTube recommendations are all videos about how to tame wild animals and your Insta ads are all at home surgery kits.

The weird thing is that Seneca kinda foresaw all of this. His works are littered with aphorisms which, 2000 years later, still ring true.

To boil this all down to one pithy quote — and tie up this little story where I’ve railed against little narratives which fit nicely in gift wrapped boxes replete with bow — here is Seneca:

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”

Oversimplifying problems, then trying to solve them, is at the root of so much of what is wrong with self-improvement. Alphas and betas. Two wolves. Crows and eagles. The mating habits of Maine lobsters. You can’t fix those things, because the metaphors are too tortured and have devolved into nonsense. It’s a brilliant insight. Thank you, Jackson.

Final word on Two Wolves goes to another old friend and welcome presence here on CGTSI, Lucy:

For my coaching work I’m learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and was listening to a podcast interview (ironically, on a podcast called The One You Feed) with Russ Harris, who is an excellent writer on the topic. Check him out (The Happiness Trap should be required reading). Anyway, he doesn’t like the metaphor, because he thinks as long as the wolves are fighting neither will win – better to have the wolves learn to coexist and make peace with each other, to co-operate and work together, because neither can dominate the other for long.

I really like that. Starving wolves are notoriously troublesome. So don’t starve the wolf. Befriend it. If you’re going to indulge the metaphor, this seems like a healthy way to do so.

And, lastly, here’s my increasingly insurmountable reading and podcast list, as recommended by you. Feel free to suggest more in the comments! I look forward to reading them at some point in the next decade or so.

Podcasts to check out

• Conspirituality
• If Books Could Kill
• Maintenance Phase
• What Matters Most

Books to check out

• Feeling Good by David Burns
• The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry
• Keeping House While Drowning by KC Davis
• Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
• How To Do The Work by Dr. Nicole LePera
• Suckers by Rose Shapiro
• Slow by Brooke McAlary
• The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris
• Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong by Kelly G. Wilson and Troy DuFrene
• The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A Fuck by Sarah Knight

YouTubers to tolerate

• WheezyWaiter
• Iilluminaughtii

Even more self-improvement stuff to do / strenuously avoid

• Reiki
• Tai Chi
• Sound healing(!)
• Crystals
• Oils
• Wellness festivals

That’s it for now! Thanks for your kind and thoughtful comments. You make this newsletter what it is, and I’m stoked to have you here. Now, I’ve got a request: please talk amongst yourselves! I’d love to hear from those who might have been feeling a bit shy up until now, and for you to let other readers know what you’re about. Let’s hear your ideas about self-improvement, and (especially) in what ways you’ve found self help has actually helped your selves. It’s all valid and interesting. Sound off in the comments, and then I can do another one of these clip-show newsletters when I next have a frantic week at work.

Also here is a painting I did. First watercolour in a year and a half.

Gidday Cynics,

I hope you like my new idea, which is to give every newsletter a title that looks like it’s straight from a self-help book. Readers should be able to pick which one I’m riffing on.

I’m still experimenting with the best time to send these things out, which is code for “I got all up in my head about writing a newsletter for four days.” Once I managed to extract myself from Instagram, a terrible app run by awful people that I almost never actually post to so why God why do I even use it, I tried to dig in to what it was I was actually avoiding. It’s weird. I like writing this newsletter, just like I genuinely enjoy doing  other things I chronically avoid, like art.

That line of inquiry didn’t go anywhere, so I tried instead asking myself why I couldn’t get started. And I think I may have figured it out:

Trying to hype myself up to do things fucks me up.

This, seemingly, flies in the face of all recieved wisdom about motivation. Think of dudes like Dave Goggins giving a lecture about how we need to “stay hard” while running his daily marathon. That’s what motivation is, right? Surely, or why else would YouTube be stuffed with videos bearing glorious clickbait titles like “David Goggins – STAY HARD – The BEST OF Motivation – Motivational Video” (4.9 million views.)

I suspect a lot of us have the same idea; that motivation is that raring-to-go buzzy feeling we get before diving into something we very much want to do. But the more I think on it the more I think it’s not. I think that feeling is simply excitement, and we all know excitement’s fretful counterpart — anxiety.

Maybe I avoid things because I am excited about them. Or, put another way, anxious about them.

Maybe I’d been making myself anxious about things because I think that’s how we’re meant to make ourselves do things.

Maybe that’s not quite right.

Look. This newest epiphany probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. Obviously, the harder things seem, the harder they are to get started.  “Hard things are hard.” Well done, Josh. That’s the kind of insight everyone’s signed up for. But what I have found, looking back on the occasions where I’ve managed to pull off a surprising variety of somethings ranging from stupendously boring to genuinely frightening, the same feeling seems to be at the centre of it all.

“Meh.”

That’s right. Chalk one up for Generation Meh, the Millennial slacktivists, the perpetually bored, the Simpsons-poisoned sardonic ironists. Maybe we had it right all along. Because, if I’m being honest, “Fuck it, may as well,” seem to be the magic words that move me through the invisible wall of inaction into actually doing a thing that needs doing. The motivating factor isn’t excitement, it’s a total lack of thought, an infintesimal brain blank that’s helped me with everything from:

• actually washing the three-day-old handwashing dishes I’d spent maybe an hour trying to talk myself into doing, to
• that time I went rock climbing with my brother and jumped from one wall to another, twelve metres up in the air, which is kind of a big deal for me

It might not be just me. People who making a living from doing hard things seem to make use of it as well. I just spent twenty minutes trying to dig up a half-remembered quote from someone —  snowboarder Shaun White, I think. In my memory, the exchange went something like this:

INTERVIEWER: “When you’re standing at the top of a halfpipe for a run that might net you a gold medal, what’s going through your head?”

WHITE: “I’m thinking ‘I don’t care.’”

It took a while to find anything close to what was starting to seem like one of those weird “did I actually hear that or did I just dream it” memory artifacts, but I eventually pinned down the source of the quote —  a seven-minute-ish snippet from a cringeingly-named Apple TV show called The Greatness Code. I had to sub to Apple TV to get this, so I hope you’re happy. Here’s Shaun White:

The weather is turning, the shade is coming over, the clouds are moving in. It just was looking like Mordor. You know what I mean? I’m like, “Oh, great.” And I’m complaining to my coach. “I don’t think I got it. Like, I’m so tired. My legs are giving out.”  That’s when the pressure really started to be put on me.

I got these, like, visions going through my head of, like, being this huge hype and not even making the team, which is something you don’t want to have in your mind. I’ve always described those pressure situations as being completely focused on what you’re about to do and then having a slight bit of, you know, “I don’t care what happens.” Because you need that sort of thing to take the pressure off, to put it into perspective. And it all comes down to this…

A bit more looking around suggests this purposeful mental de-escalation is pretty common, especially among performance atheletes. Maybe it’s a shortcut to a Zen moment, a kind of mind-meets-matter koan that acts as a gateway to a flow state.

I don’t know if this will come as a surprise to anyone else. Part of what worries me about this project is the idea that the things I find surprising or helpful are just  garden-variety banalities that everyone else already does.  But the more of this shit I do, the more I think that it isn’t just that things are banal and obvious, it’s that the trick is reminding yourself of banal, obvious things. And the reason they might be a bit obvious is because, well, they work.

So yeah. Time to do a couple of things I’ve been anxious — sorry, excited — to do for a while. There’s a painting that wants doing.

And a newsletter that needs sending.1

Gidday Cynics,

First, a warm welcome to the new readers who’ve signed up after reading my Webworm guest post “An Insult To Life Itself” on AI. It was… interesting to write. AI is complicated and confusing, but I think it’s best viewed from a few steps back, where it becomes clear that it’s mostly just gas on our cultural garbage fire.

Why AI is Arguably Less Conscious Than a Fruit Fly

Hi, Thanks for all the feedback on the 3-Year Anniversary newsletter! Your comments warmed my cold dead heart! “I’ve been here since the beginning and Webworm has been a bit of mental refuge. I read it during the depths of covid, in the hospital while waiting for my son to be born, in the middle of dozens of boring work meetings. The eclectic mix of artic…

Webworm with David Farrier

If you’ve read that piece, or my previous Cynic’s Guide piece “A Scientist’s Guide To Self-Improvement Science (For Non-Scientists)” you’ll be familiar with Dr Lee Reid. He’s helping me out with a problem I’ve been perplexed by since I started this newsletter: how can normal people tell good advice from bad, or good science from suss?

The last newsletter was a really deep and quite dense dive into stuff like the philosophy of science, but this one is all practical. Here’s how you — whether you’re a layperson with a casual interest in scientific topics, a die-hard gym-bunny, a dedicated psychonaut, a journalist, or just an easily-distracted dilettante like me — can apply some of the tools scientists use to the big claims we’re so used to seeing all over news and social media.

Dr Lee “Actual Neuroscientist” Reid’s Guide for Adults Who Can’t Science Good And Who Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too

Books

Books are not where reputable new science is published. If a book appears to makes new claims, or new leaps in understanding of something, leave it on the shelf. If a book aims to make published science understandable, this might be for you… but see if other scientists who work in that area stand by it. What do the quotes say on the back cover? Some examples:

Toss it:

“This book revolutionizes our understanding of…”

“Dr X provides creative insights into…”

“… digs into X to reveal…”

Consider it:

“Does a great job of summarizing…”

“… clear writing style provides an accessible overview“

“… cuts through the jargon with straightforward…”

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

All reputable new science is published in these. Non-reputable science is as well. These are split into review articles and original findings.

Go straight for the review articles. The author has done the reading for you. Google Scholar and PubMed (health only) are the best places to search.

Find the primary (first-listed) author’s bio on Google Scholar. Ask yourself: before this article, did they publish many things on this topic that have citations? If so, it’s likely to be a high-quality review. It not, double check that the bio of the most senior (last-listed) author looks OK.

What’s the journal? Journals get ranked. Generally, the better-ranked the journal, the more fierce the peer review. For most niche topics there are fewer than 10 top journals, but hundreds of journals available to publish in. If it’s not a Q1 (top 25%) journal for this topic, then abort. You can find Q1 lists online.

Skim read. If it’s covering what you want to know, read it again more carefully. If it doesn’t have enough depth, take note of some of its citations and look at them.

If there are not enough publications in a new area for a review, this probably means there’s not enough evidence to make a financial or life decision on. If you want to move ahead anyway, dig into the original research. Reading too much of this in a day can melt your brain, so getting through it is all about efficiency. There are plenty of guides for this, but most are for new graduate students. Have a read through a guide like that, taking special note of the order to read the article’s contents in. As you’re probably without much academic background in the topic, some added advice:

• You’re going to need to Google jargon as you go and note down what words mean. That’s normal. Don’t get too in-depth as some things take a long time to grasp.
• Recall articles are broken up into Abstract (a summary), Introduction (background information), Methods, Results (results without interpretation), and Discussion (interpretation of results).
• Before tackling these, try to first find an “accessible abstract” or “plain language summary” on the article website. Famous articles also sometimes have a commentary that sums them up well.
• If this is one of the first few articles you’ve read, DO read the introduction. Most articles will provide a mini literature review to get you started.
• You’re not likely to understand the methods section or even much of the results – skim read them at best.

Before trusting what you read, make sure the results have been replicated multiple times by multiple groups. Anything short of that is interesting but frankly inconclusive. Most importantly, look for red flags:

Big Red Flags:

• Authors:

  • Work in industry (check for disclosures), politically-interested institutions, or a non-reputable institution.

  • Are from a non-scientific field like Law or Economics.1

• Methodological issues:

  • No statistics, or not mentioning the statistics.

• Misrepresentation

  • Any limitation that seems clear to you as a layperson, and yet is not discussed.

  • The sample size is small – say, 1-10 people – and they make a strong conclusion or advice-like suggestions to the general population.2

  • The study doesn’t mention other papers that you know contradict this study.

  • Cherry-picking their own results by only discussing those that support the conclusion.

• Reputation

  • Not a Q1 journal

  • The article is 5+ years old and it has only been cited 2 – 3 times. It’s likely other scientists have simply ignored it. (Note that a high citation count can mean the article is important or it’s controversial.)

  • Being rubbished in the media by multiple scientists.

Borderline Red Flags:

• Authors:

  • Are sponsored by industry.3

  • Are all from a mismatched scientific department, like the Psychology Department when the topic is Cellular Biology.

  • Are fronting a study on thousands of people, that does not have an epidemiologist, public health expert, or statistician as the first or second listed author.

  • All lack PhDs. This includes all-MD publications. MDs are very skilled but rarely have equivalent scientific/analysis experience.

• Methodological issues:

  • Lots of statistical values (e.g. > 10 p-values) when the sample size is not in the thousands.

  • The work relies entirely on the honesty and good memory of people via surveys.4

  • Populations studied do not match the population being compared to. A study on the mental health of Orkney Islanders, or hormones of lobsters (yeah, that’s a dig), is unlikely to have much relation to people living a bustling lifestyle in New York.

• Weak Peer Review:

  • Publishing occurred very quickly after submission5

  • Methods sections seem too short for another scientist to assess the work.

  • Any discussion using words like “groundbreaking”. This is rarely true and suggests peer review was weak.

  • Any result that just sounds off, and the authors don’t discuss it as such.

Also, before changing your life based on what you read, there are some real scientific language and statistical gotchas that trip people up:

• “Significant” means reliable, not “big amount”. Things need to be significant and represent a big change or difference to matter.

  • i.e. If someone says a new pillow design results in “significantly more sleep,” read that as “reliably more sleep”, then ask “how much more?”

  • If someone says their new pillow design gives an extra hour more sleep per night, but this is not significant, take that as meaning that there’s no good evidence you’ll get that extra hour of sleep.

• When people talk about risk or odds, look up the exact term they use. A 10% increase in risk sometimes can mean your chance increases by one-in-ten, and sometimes means something else.6

• Scientific graphs can be more complicated than what is taught in school. Instead of looking at the graph, base your understanding on the text description of results, unless you feel you really understand every squiggle, dot, and bar on that chart.

There you go. You now know how, in the words of astronaut Mark Watney, to “science the shit out of this.” You’ll probably note that the methods Lee outlines are often both difficult and time-consuming. Welp, that’s science for you! It’s no wonder that a lie can race around the world when the truth not only takes several months to lace up its boots but first has to go through several cycles of intense peer review on the best ways to tie them.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. This post is free, so you’ve found it helpful in any way, please share it.

In personal self-improvement journey news, sleep week is going well. Ish. My watch tells me I got 8 hours sleep the night before last, which is a very rare thing. The following day was unusually productive, which might be a clue to how helpful getting more sleep might be for me. Let’s see if I can do it more than once. I’m also getting a lot more exercise than before. Art is still languishing, but I have an idea on how to deal with that. I’ll talk about it next time.

Also, thanks again to the new subscribers. It’s great to have you here — feel free to introduce yourselves in the comments!

— Josh