My nights have started getting late again. In my defence, the daughter wakes up at 11 pm sharp every night; her body clock seems infallible. (It used to be 10, but then we were hit by the curse of daylight savings. She, being one, sensibly ignored it.) So it hardly seems worth going to bed before then when we’re only going to get woken up anyway.

I spent the day with the family, taking our son to the miniature trains (autism and trains; they’re like peas and carrots), visiting the plant nursery, getting some new berry bushes, weeding, planting, planning. It’s been wonderful. What’s been less good is that I’ve finished the first draft of the AI article and I can honestly say I hate it. Not for the normal reasons I might dislike my writing, I think the prose is more or less OK, but because it is such a catastrophically depressing topic. An internet full of slop is among the least upsetting things about AI; the path that the tech-overlord lunatics has us on ends in giga-ecocide and I wish I was exaggerating. (And not because of some fabled AI superintelligence either. Superintelligence is bunk.)

This is such a difficult tension to work with; on one hand I am trying to live a good life, beset by First World luxury and my beautiful family, trying to start a business and spread a little joy with my silly paintings. On the other hand, climate change — the field I’d most like to work in, because it’s important, but my life’s trajectory has so far sent me otherwise — is bearing down on us; a slow inexorable bomb with the power of hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons. It is a bomb we have the power to stop, or at least prevent from detonating catastrophically, and civilisation’s leadership has so far decided on “no.” It would impact share prices, you see.

Again, I wish I was kidding.

So I’m doing the only thing I can, writing what I know, which isn’t much. But it’s something. And at some stage soon I hope to do a new video essay combining the article I’ve just written with the sharp juxtaposition of a beautiful painting time-lapse, because that’s the world as it is and perhaps always has been. The beauty and the horror, the two sides of the same coin.

There’s something I’ve heard that I can’t fully attribute, probably because it’s common sense, or perhaps just sense. I’ve variously heard it from friends and relatives and a therapist and social media memes, and it goes along the lines of: sometimes, when you become a parent, you end up parenting yourself.

So often, this is the case; especially when the things you find yourself frustrated with your child over are the things you find frustrating in yourself, or when one of the ways in which they are starkly different to you throws your similarities or difficulties into sharp relief.

Our son is autistic, and for him this means he has what is sometimes called a “spiky development profile.” In practice it means he can go a very long time avoiding or not doing something before very suddenly starting to do it.

Today we took him, together with his sister, for his first swim in a while. This was a challenge because he has never vibed with the water — in sharp contrast to his little sister, who has loved it pretty much from the first — and he struggles. We persist with the swimming not just for water safety reasons but because he wants to enjoy the water and says as much; he just hasn’t found the key to unlock it yet.

He spent a lot of his time in the pool yelling and clinging, and Louise talked him through it. “You can do hard things,” she said (both children are Saint Ms Rachel fans). “You can do hard things.”

Our daughter was getting cold and clingy so I took her to get changed. While I did that the volume from the pool area seemed to turn down. Eventually it stopped. Had they got out?

No, he’d just found his key. Something flipped, something connected, and suddenly he was ecstatic to be in the water and climbing along the side and being brave. When he came back to the car he was buzzing. “I loved it! It was the best! I love swimming. Can we go again soon?”

And in witnessing it all I was reminded how much it is that life’s triumphs almost always come from facing the things we are frightened by, even when — sometimes especially when — those fears do not entirely make sense, and when they originate in things we would so very much like to do.

This newsletter and my video series is an experiment in facing down rejection sensitivity and over-thinking, and it is working, but even as it rides buoyant other things bob beneath the surface. Some things that very much need doing, often things that I have avoided because of semi-rational fears about being rejected, have fallen off in the course of this start-a-business experiment, and if I don’t pick them up they will never get done and I will never know what might have been.

So much of my self-improvement stuff has been about this; the longing for certain things to go from inscrutable eldritch horrors to easy. And some hard things have become easier; other things turned out to be unnecessary, but some things remain that are simply hard and may always be so. But they only reap any reward if they are done, and the only way they get less hard is in the doing.

“You can do hard things.”

Ms Rachel really is always right.

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If I find myself getting particularly snappish or shrewish or off-centre it’s almost always one of three things:

1. Not enough sleep
2. Forgot to eat
3. Haven’t been exercising

And to this list I am tempted to add a fourth item; Haven’t been touching enough grass. And perhaps a fifth: Haven’t seen friends enough.

Well, today I managed to fix all five. Charlotte finally gave us a sleep worthy of the name, and then I went for a hike with some mates.

I am deeply suspicious of the traditional introvert/extrovert continuum; while I know there are people who trend more in one direction or another, we all want to see some people sometimes and other people no times, and there’s a lot of in-between. So I put the increasingly scary lawns to one side and all the work stuff I might conceivably do on a Sunday and walked up a bush-clad hill and down again with a couple of good friends.

I’ve had plenty of hikes where deep and meaningfuls are exchanged but this was not one of those occasions. From the moment we arrived in the carpark we were each a more or less continuous fountain of bullshit. Unmitigated, unadulterated shit-talking; there were bants and witticisms and non-sequiturs and Your Mum jokes. It was all the stuff that you can’t really exercise around the family unless you are a particular kind of dad (bad). No-one hiked near us; people got wind of the sheer malarkey in the air and stayed well clear. It was a mediocre day for it; low cloud put an end to majestic views, and we got drizzled on. None of us cared.

Coming back in the car I felt cleansed, despite being liberally smeared with trail-clay. Sometimes you just need to get some shit out of your system, and sometimes you just need to see your mates, and sometimes it’s both. Yes, this meant the lawns didn’t get mowed. Well… too bad, lawns. You’ll wait another day.

Of course once the kids were in bed I was straight back to work. The business isn’t going to start itself, as much as I might wish it would. And now I’ve done what work I could in the little evening interregnum and now I suppose I might actually try for another early-ish night myself, kick off some kind of virtuous cycle.

And if you too have felt a bit scratchy lately I really can recommend an honest grass-touching session, combined with a bit of hearty intra-friend bullshitting as needed. It’s good for what ails you.