Author: tworuru

  • Challenge Day 4 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 4 (of 30)

    Today is a shorter update. I worked on my Secret Project — it’s a painting, but that’s not the secret bit — and I did House Chores.1 This episode isn’t likely to be riveting for anyone playing along at home, but I think there’s a metaphor to be mined out of the boring detritus of domesticity.

    We have a set of curtains in the master bedroom that is Not Doing Well, and hasn’t been for oh, let’s say, a year. The lining, I suppose you’d call it, the stuff that blocks out light and attracts mould, is getting sun-damaged and fragile and has ripped accordingly. When the rip started it was about four centimetres long.

    “We should fix that,” Louise, or I, said.

    Of course, since then, the rip has grown up and had little baby rips of its own. It’s now a good metre long. Or I should say was over a metre long, because today I finally took the curtains down and fixed them.

    Of course, I’d figured out how to fix them many months ago. About midway through what I am, entirely without justification, going to call the Rip Saga, I’d bought some iron-on patches and tape from Spotlight and done nothing with them. As is so often the case with ADHD stuff, there were what seemed like dozens of reasons not to fix the curtains. The stuff I’d bought might not work. The ironing board wasn’t big enough. The curtains might rip even more. All these excuses, half-thought, felt as a kind of almost tangible barrier in the mind.

    So while the kiddos were out and after I’d done enough work on my secret painting I popped into our bedroom, took the curtains down — five minutes, tops — laid them out on a set of drawers, no ironing board needed, grabbed the iron-on patches and scissors, and the curtains were fixed. It took maybe 45 minutes.

    45 minutes, for a job I’ve been avoiding for a year.

    I don’t want to pin all this sort of thing on ADHD. Every person in with a house has housework they don’t get to. But that odd little barrier in the mind, the terminal indecision followed by a reflexive urge to do something else — that, I believe, is an ADHD thing. So many of the things I struggle with come down to indecision. I can’t decide, so I avoid, so I fall in to some kind of default behaviour.

    Since finishing my old job and attempting my own thing, this sort of stuff happens far less. I’m noticing I get more done, more often. Some of this is the inevitable result of having more time and more mental bandwidth; there’s a reason newly unemployed people are so often portrayed in media as taking a sudden interest in housework or arcane hobbies.

    But I feel like mine runs a bit deeper; I’m finding myself more apt to do tasks I’d typically avoid. That little mental hiccup of indecision, the stab of resistance, is somehow more noticeable and therefore more avoidable. And some of this is quite definitely because of my do-something-every-day project; instead of just letting the roadblocks get in the way I’m just smashing through them, and realising (to continue the road transport metaphor) they were more cones than concrete barriers.

    Or maybe I just give fewer ducks these days.

    Speaking of ducks! For inexplicable reasons, that duck I painted has gone almost legitimately viral on TikTok. Last I looked it had 123,000 views, which is still small beer in the scheme of things but is by far the most looks anything I’ve ever made has had. My almost-daily posting and gruelling video-making has, at last, paid off. Not in money, of course. That would be too easy. But there are a lot of folks asking for prints, and so I’m going to have to get some of those ready to sell tomorrow.

    Oh here is that large red button again I suppose. Thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions! You can pay what you want, so long as it’s more than $3 dollarydoos

    https://buttondown.com/cynicsguide?as_embed=true
    1. Then I played D&D with friends, which is why this one is late (there will be a new reason every night, I’m sure.)
  • Challenge Day 3 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 3 (of 30)

    I know, I know, I said I’d get this out bright and early, but apparently bright and early is (at the time of writing) 10:30 PM. However, this fundamental inability to get a newsletter out before sunset has given me an incredible idea, based on the shittiest, griftiest, shiftiest, outright dumbest self-help tome I ever read: The Morning Miracle. This book, with fellow travellers like The 5 AM Club, claim that your inability to rise before 4 AM is what’s holding you back in life. Well, here’s my contra-thesis, in the form of an obnoxious self-help book blurb:

    The Midnight Method

    Author, artist, entrepreneur, male model and playboy dilettante’s Joshua Drummond’s otherwise perfect life was marred by just one flaw: his urgent need to rise at 5 AM. He felt like he was cursed to be an early riser – until he discovered this one weird secret trick: The Midnight Method. In this 864 page book and accompanying webinar series, Drummond outlines the ultimate lifehack that changed it all – staying up late every single night. His rediscovery of the secret known by midnight luminaries from Benjamin Franklin to Imhotep is exactly what your sad life has been missing. The Midnight Method will teach you the seven highly effective habits that lead to being a regular night-owl, and will at last unlock your health, productivity, riches, love life, and happiness.

    There you go. Wasn’t that horrible? It’s accurate, though; The Morning Miracle and my Midnight Method have the exact same thesis at their core: go without a bit of sleep to get more stuff done, or go for a jog, or something. It’s just that one is surrounded by weird biblical hang-ups about wise men rising early, and the other is culturally frowned upon.

    I promised you a list. I also did a spreadsheet, but it’s not ready for public consumption. That will have to be tomorrow.

    I reserve the right to change the order of the following items without notice, but this is pretty much the order in which I want to get stuff done. In between these specific jobs, I will of course be working on commissions and making videos and cooking food and changing nappies: ideally not all at the same time.

    28 Days Later

    1. Ideas, part 1
    2. Ideas, part 2
    3. A 28-day todo list (you are here).
    4. Secret project
    5. Daddy Capitalism: add a whole bunch of products to the store and send out an email to customers. Work on secret project.
    6. Rejection therapy: Ring around 20 art/gallery/souvenir-ish shops and see if they’ll stock my stuff. Finish secret project.
    7. Very Specific Parody Video: I’ve been wanting to do this for ages. I figure it’ll take about a day to film.
    8. Rejection therapy, part 2: Ask customers for testimonials. Ask local cafe/venues about drink&draws.
    9. Plug me pls Ask influencers for plugs. Prepare materials for Print Club.
    10. Print Club 7: Launch preorders for print club – digital and physical.
    11. Level Up Louise: This is my awful code name for my adult drawing course. I’d like to get a few people learning from this weekend.
    12. Day of Rest: I will probably spend Sunday resting with family, by which I mean “doing chores”
    13. Again, capitalism daddy: Adding more products to the shop
    14. Business time: Business plans and investment pitches. As much fun as it sounds.
    15. Those that can’t: Developing course materials for professional development course
    16. Brand me: hitting up corporations – greeting card companies, apparel companies, whoever it is who makes jigsaws, etc – to see if they want birds or other paintings/designs on their shit
    17. Artwork for corridors: put up a website page advertising the suitability of my stuff for doctor’s surgeries or hospital waiting rooms or other depressing places that need something cheerful in them
    18. Crowd Fund: Investigate some kind of crowdfunding for Season 1 of Everybob or something.
    19. The First Rule of Print Club: Actually launch print club
    20. Look for investors: I’m pretty sure you find them under rocks, right?
    21. Send out prints for print club
    22. Moar products on the store, another email to customers. The aim is to have a print, a shirt, and a sticker available for pretty much everything I make.
    23. Stage a drink & draw
    24. Stage an art class
    25. Stage a professional development presentation / lesson
    26. Launch crowdfunding
    27. Pitch to investors
    28. Apply for a real job. I kid! If I see real jobs that look awesome I will apply for them anyway.

    That is a lot and obviously jobs will blend into each other or stretch out across days, it is all subject to change, but getting all the shit I need to do written out is cathartic.

    Today’s video

    I made a video about ruining one of my Everybob paintings with a duck. It did OK on Instagram, terrible on YouTube, and for some reason – I genuinely have no idea why – it is going gangbusters on TikTok. Last I looked it was getting about hundred views every other minute. This doesn’t mean much, especially in the TikTok scheme of things where 1 million views barely rates as viral, but it’s still easily the most successful video I’ve done even if the algorithm arbitrarily cuts off the view firehose in the next five minutes. Check it out here:

    @tworuru

    This absolute unit of a duck has blessed your timeline to pass on a very important message: you’re wonderful. Pass the duck on to someone who needs to hear it. #motivation #painting #rubberducky #bobross #positivity

    ♬ Wes Anderson-esque Cute Acoustic – Kenji Ueda

    Self-improvement

    I did a bunch of pullups as part of a houseworkout. Remember my New Year’s resolution? I’m still on it. I really want to get that muscle-up before December ends.

    Like and subscribe

    Here as always is the big red button that helps me out. You know what to do.



  • Challenge Day 2 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 2 (of 30)

    It’s late; I need to figure out a way to get these emails out before stupid o’clock. You know what doesn’t help? GODDAMN DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME THAT’S WHAT. Despite evidence clearly showing that daylight saving kills or maims or just really pisses off a huge number of people every year, we persist in the monumental folly of meddling with time. And it’s even worse with kids, because they don’t understand why they have to get up and go to bed an hour earlier and it is apparently bad form to give them coffee. “Oh, but it’s so nice to have that extra sunlight in the evening!” Yeah, it is, and that would have happened anyway, thanks to the axial inclination of the earth and the sun’s gravitational pull. I hate daylight saving and I will spend the next few months furious about it until time returns to its rightful course.

    Did you miss yesterday’s email?

    Some of you didn’t sign up to this until the email was already out. Luckily, I am archiving them all on tworuru dot com. Go read, comment, share, and enjoy.

    Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    Ahem

    Here are the remaining revenue plans/ideas I have.

    1. Art classes/drink&draw sessions etc
      I am good enough at art to know I’m not and never will be top-tier, but I’m also well aware that I have more draughtmanship than the average schmo. If those that can’t, teach, then surely those that can (a bit) would be better at it? Also, I enjoy the science of drawing, and I like teaching people. Some drawing classes or maybe putting on a few of those drink-and-draw sessions could help keep the wolf from the door. I was thinking of starting up an online cohort of folks who’d like to pick up some drawing skill; email me if you’re keen – josh@tworuru.com
    2. Teaching teachers how to draw
      You know who mostly can’t draw, at all? Teachers! To me, this is mind-blowing; it’s like if someone dropped a casual “Oh, I can’t add” or “Hah, yeah, I never learned to read!” in conversation. It’s not just arty-farty; the ability to sketch or diagram is a vital skill for any number of STEM-ish careers and a lot of kids aren’t being taught how to do it, because their parents or teachers didn’t know how. So I’m putting together a little professional development course for primary and intermediate teachers in NZ. The idea is just to teach the basics, to get teachers to the point where they’re “better” than the kids (children have a pointedly unsophisticated view of drawing; if you can do realism, you’re amazing) and they can take it or leave it from there. I’ve been at it for a while now and have a pilot school signed up ready to go. If you’re a teacher or principal or aligned such, ping me on josh@tworuru.com
    3. Investment/crowdfunding
      I think a few of my business plans – those I’ve detailed here and others – have legs, shapely business legs that might actually provide a return on investment. To that end, I am interested in hearing from anyone who might be interested in investing, or can simply tell me how to talk to potential investors without falling flat on my face. I also think there’s some crowdfunding potential for painting series – for example painting along with every Bob Ross episode – that might be worth looking into. If any of that is something you know about, josh@tworuru.com will find me.
    4. A day job. I am not proud. I’m aware that the spool-up-your-own business biz may not work out, despite my best efforts — and you’d best believe I am giving it my best effort — and I’m more than happy to take on another normal-er job. On the bright side, the deeply stupid AI bubble should be bursting soon, so people might start hiring humans with a comms and marketing skillset again. On the dark side, the bursting may reap pure economic chaos, so who knows, maybe I’m better off trying to convince people to buy my stickers.

    Your ideas. Give them to me.

    I have more ideas, but that’ll do for now. Is there anything you reckon I’ve missed? Hit the reply button or snap an email off to josh@tworuru.com and let me know.

    Also your money

    The big red button lies below. Do you click it, helping me hit my $1k a month newsletter goal, or do you let it languish, curious to see if I can keep up daily emails for more than two days running?



    A bit of transparency is in order here. I currently bring in about (it varies, for various reasons) $400 a month from this newsletter. That may surprise you; perhaps it sounds like a lot, perhaps it sounds like very little. Either way, I’d love to get it up to $1000, a hefty 10 percent of my revenue goal.

    Tomorrow — bright and early tomorrow, not at what is apparently 10:45 PM but is actually 9:45 PM and you cannot convince me otherwise — I will send out a calendar of all the biz stuff I’m going to do or try to do for the next 28 days. There may, and this is fair warning, also be a spreadsheet. I hope you are ready.

  • Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    For those who signed up for the Cynic’s Guide way back when, this new series may be what you were expecting (compared to whatever it is you got) it’s just me, trying on every damn self-improvement business hustle malarkey under the sun in an effort to make something stick, or at least make money, in 30 days. Let’s go.

    It’s business time

    I am wearing my business socks, mm. Because I am addicted to eating food and having a house, I am attempting to spool up a business in 30 days. This isn’t quite as follycious[1] as it might sound; people sometimes manage this stuff in a weekend. The target I’ve set myself is $10k revenue a month, which is a curious combination of lofty and about what a supermarket middle manager earns, but I’d rather shoot for the moon and miss and… end up asphyxiating during a decaying eccentric orbit? Damn my inability to let trite metaphors go unexamined. I’m giving it a damn good go, put it that way.

    The model I am using – because I like easily divisible numbers – is 10 revenue streams of $1000 each. Of course it may not shake out that way, chances are some will be more and some substantially less, but here’s the 10 that I think I can spin up from scratch or develop out over the next 30 days.

    1. Corporate comms and marketing stuff. I would be silly not to do this; it’s been my bread and butter for a decade now. To that end I have set up a website for a freelance case study business, specialising in being a tech whisperer for industries that absolutely suck at selling themselves. If you’re an accountant, systems integrator, infosec consultant, or your business has anything to do with Linux, you’d better make that call to the Content King.[2]
    2. Art shop. https://tworuru.com has been ticking over for ages now, but I’ve never really souped it up. I’ve been absolutely smashing out art lately and the plan is to make – at minimum – three kinds of product for each new piece I make: a print, a sticker, and a t-shirt.
    3. Commissions. A bunch of people have bought a commissioned artwork since I opened them up again and I am very grateful; you are keeping the (two) wolves from the door. You can get one of your own here if you’re so inclined: https://www.tworuru.com/product/custom-commission/
    4. Two Ruru Snail-Mail Print Club[3]. You subscribe and you get a print and a letter in the mail, each month! Like the olden days! I am actually absurdly excited about his one as I think I have come up with a really unusual twist on the fairly well-done concept of a snail mail club. I’ll introduce in an upcoming email. I’ll let you guys know first, because you’re cool. Oh and everyone who joins the Snail Mail Print Club also gets access to:
    5. Two Ruru Email Print Club. Exactly the same idea as the above, but users will subscribe just like you do to this newsletter and I’ll send you the letter and prints via electronic mail. Oh and I almost forgot; everyone who subs to either Print Club will get access to a downloadable archive of every artwork I’ve ever made.
    6. The newsletters. Yup, you’re here too! If I can get around ~200 paid subscribers a month, that’s 10 percent of my revenue requirement taken care of. And – as I hope this email proves – I will be writing a lot more. If I’ve made my case well enough, scroll down to the big red button

    That’s just the first six for now – I realise, now that I’m on a roll, that I have lots more of these in various stages of feasibility and completion, and these emails are meant to be short. So I’ll talk about the next five ideas/revenue streams in the next one of these thirty day challenge emails. And in the following email I’ll put in what I plan to be doing on each of the subsequent 29 days – there will be a new, business-time focus for each day. Today was “Explain the plan”.

    “Artwork” of the day

    I’m tired. Here’s a duck.

    It's an image of a duck on a lake, I painted both. People thought this was AI. It's not!

    Today’s video

    I made a video of me painting the black hole scene from Interstellar, one of my favourite sequences and visuals in any film. I love the painting. I’m less sure about the video, but I never know about those.

    And here’s the one from the day before, in which I painted those weird lights you see when you shut your eyes. People seemed to like it.

    What did you do today self-improvement-wise?

    I went for a run. Pre-kids I could whip out a casual 10k and now… I can’t. So I am taking it easy, because nothing will stymie me like a swollen knee. I am doing Couch to 5K. Should you be struck by the urge to join me, feel free. Because I am more bougie than I am comfortable with, I am using an app. You don’t have to use the app; there are plenty of training programs available online and you can get pretty accurate distance estimates via Google Maps or your neighbourhood.

    Lifehacks

    When I come across anything I’m doing that helps me on this mad caper, I’m putting it here.

    Making the most of your spare minutes

    I’m writing this particular snippet in the nine minutes the air fryer has to finish doing the burger patties we got in the 3 for $20 deal. If I have a useful lifehack to offer, it’s that productive activities – or, less toxically, “things I genuinely want or need to do but end up doomscrolling instead” – can be done in the same time blocks, on the same device, that you’d typically use to have a hoon on the Tok pipe. The more I do this the more I find that the phone in my pocket is a boon instead of a curse, and it’s one of the very few self-improvement plans that survives contact with kids. Things that have built-in timers work well for this method. It’ll go beep in a minute or few, and I’ll leave the laptop and go assemble burgers for me and (Borat voice) My Wife.

    Markdown

    Writer? Get yourself a Markdown editor and learn Markdown. It’s the fastest, most distraction-free, and ultimately foolproof (and I am very foolish) way to format as you write. I use Obsidian for the moment – it’s what I used to write this – but there are lots of others. Many, including Obsidian, are free. Get amongst!

    Yeah/Nah

    A few minutes before sending this out I realised that some of the people who signed up to my “Yeah” list also clicked “Nah” to receiving an email every day for the next 30 days. I am sorry about this but you must admit that it is a very funny, very Kiwi problem to have, given how we tend to use this expression. Of course it’s my fault; I simply shouldn’t have included a “Nah” option. If you’re getting this email and you’d rather not, simply reply to this one and let me know I messed up, and I’ll take you off the list.

    For everyone who did want to get these, welcome! I hope you enjoyed Day 1.

    1. This, a portmanteau of “folly” and "fallacious’ is not a word, but it should be. ↩︎

    2. Old Simpsons fans: this is exactly the joke you think it is. Also I apologise for the AI generated image; it’s a placeholder. I need to create a new File Photo as none of mine were even verging on professional. ↩︎

    3. I am thinking of setting some ground rules, and the first and second rule will probably be “Talk about Print Club”. ↩︎

    Here’s the big red button, click it to help me on my follacious journey



  • Challenge (30 day version)

    Challenge (30 day version)

    Gidday! I’ve been caught in that loop where I think constantly about sending an email out to you all but then think “but no it has to be good” and consequently don’t send anything at all.

    If I think hard about it, and I have been, given the employment situation I now find myself in, I have two traits that — if not toxic — can certainly be annoying and detrimental, and have enormous toxicity potential. They are my absurd perfectionism (see above) and my extraordinary rejection sensitivity, which some folks with ADHD/autism feel so strongly they term it rejection sensitive dysphoria.

    Those powers combined make it a wonder I ever send or write anything at all. And they’ve caused enormous problems in my life, in relationships, and at work.

    Welp, time to exorcise those particular demons. I’ll probably always have some degree of perfectionism and rejection sensitivity, but I’d rather they served me than got in my way. To that end, I have (for the hundredth time) resumed exercising, which I find good for exorcising. And I have also started, vis. my previous epistle, to upload a video (nearly) every day for 30 days. I’ve managed 18 days so far, and I’m very determined to see it through.

    I’ve learned from doing this. Mainly to be okay with making things that are extremely less than perfect, that sometimes ‘good enough’ is indeed good enough, and to give less of a shit when something I do does not take off in the way that the deeply unfortunate perfectionism expects. In fact, it all adds up to a good working example of how perfectionism and rejection sensitivity act as a one-two team to stymie action. Perhaps this sounds familiar: you work too long on something (perfectionism) when you’d learn a lot more from doing something faster and less perfect, then expect more from it than you should (will THIS be the video that gets twenty million views?) and then the rejection sensitivity kicks in (bawwww, this one only got to twenty thousand!).

    Going through the motions over and over again seems to blunt the impact; after a while you just seem to stop caring. In a good way.

    And I’m getting a bit less weird about showing my mug on the internet too.

    You can check out the odyssey on each of the Cursed Platforms. YouTube:
    https://www.youtube.com/@tworuru/shorts

    Instagram (most cursed)
    https://www.instagram.com/tworuru/

    Or TikTok, if you’re so inclined
    https://www.tiktok.com/@tworuru

    And here is the one that seems to have done best across all three of them:

    Making up for lost time

    Of course, after 12ish days of having my creative impulses spaghettified by the internet’s supermassive black holes of short-form content, it occurred to me: why am I not doing this here?! After all, you are the ones who’ve made the effort to really subscribe to the stuff I make, taking actual time to consume it in appallingly old-fashioned word form. But of course I don’t want to spam you, either. So I’ll set up a special email list for yet another 30 day challenge. Should you opt in via the button below, I will send you an email every day for 30 days, detailing the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles, of the inherently absurd but hopefully productive effort of trying to spin up an art/creative agency business in just one month.

    Powered by Buttondown.

    Misc

    After my piece at The Spinoff, RNZ got in touch to ask for a chat about self-improvement, and I was happy to oblige. (I thought I’d posted this already, but apparently not! I’m still not 100 percent sure, but I think I managed to make it through without making a complete goose of myself. Have a listen!

    A few readers have been replying to my emails letting me know what they get out of it. These have been absurdly touching to read and I hope you never stop sending them. If you do want to send me one, just reply to this email. Here are just a few, with more coming next time.

    Charlie writes:

    I read your pieces from time to time and always enjoy them although I am often left wondering why. Maybe it’s the randomness that some how feels very familiar to me. Whatever it is, keep doing it. You make this 75 year old almost retired male feel a little less irrelevant.

    Sarah writes:

    Kia ora Josh, Not sure this is the reply you’re looking for. Nonetheless, a reply is what you’ve got! I knew you have an ADHD brain but I didn’t realise you’re Autistic as well. So that’s why you’re so cool! Relatable struggles. I haven’t had an ADHD assessment (despite my doctor’s encouragement to go for one) but I am confirmed Autistic. Our little family all really relates to Pathological Demand Avoidance. Even internal demands trigger it. It’s very frustrating for all concerned, but especially for the person receiving or perceiving the demands. I think that gets in our way a lot. The eldest one can’t cope with something as simple in appearance as a “good morning” wave. I wish I could say that didn’t result in me feeling hurt even though I understand the why (curse RSD). Both kids dropped out of school without qualifications because school is nothing but demands. I am grateful they are diagnosed and old enough for us to not be facing the current government’s ire.  I’m moving further and further towards self acceptance. It doesn’t always come easily but I mostly can’t be bothered trying to spur myself or my teenagers into action anymore, or to feel in ways other than we feel, beyond trying to be good people who help others. Maybe part of it is trying to justify my own life as a disabled person unable to properly participate in the employment market (thanks, related health conditions) but I’m grateful I don’t have to labour in paid employment and can spend my life doing things that feel meaningful (when I’ve gathered the spoons to do so). Today I went to a doctor’s appointment with someone and then in to WINZ to make sure they’re getting what they need as best they can within system constraints. On Monday night, I ran a craft gathering for Autistic gender queer people and women. I’ve found my niche, finally, in turning towards what feels good rather than what I (or others) think I should be doing, and I’m grateful that that is an option to me. I really should finish sorting that will I paid for though.  Reading is a struggle for me (and my auditory processing is even worse) but I like reading your newsletter. In part to reassure myself I’m not wasting valuable time by spurning self-help books, but I also enjoy your curiousity, your world view, how articulate you are, and the relatablility of the struggles. I’m sorry you never got your tree photo, though I hope you can treasure the feeling it gave you when you saw it. I lost virtually all my photos of the house I grew up in, my grandparents’ homes, and the rental we lived in when the kids were born. But even though I can’t share these places with anyone else now, I’m grateful to remember how they felt.  A belated happy birthday to you. I am also 42. I think a lot about death, but in more of a “this is going to happen at some point” rather than in a self-induced way. That is major progress. I’m grateful to know I’m Autistic because it’s given me the missing pieces of the puzzle to understand who I am and see that it’s ok. If I think other Autistic people are cool, worthy, intelligent, belong in this world (and deserve accommodations and understanding!), then maybe I should be more compassionate towards myself and realise I’m not so different. We can do good things.  I hope to cross paths in person one day. Thanks for doing what you do when you are able to.  Sincerely, Sarah of Kirikiriroa PS. I’ve never read Hitchhiker’s Guide (and I accept I never will) but somehow I do still get the reference!

    Joel writes:

    Hi Josh,

    Just wanted to send a quick reply to this. In recent times I have aggressively cut down on the amount of news/newsletters/blogs/social media I consume. Mainly for mental health reasons. Also because over consumption has an effective way of keeping me from doing basically anything else. For the last year or so, my blog consumption has been cut down to roughly – actually exactly – one. This one.

    Two words come to my mind: hopeful and connected. Even as I write them, they seem like odd words to associate with the impersonal activity of reading a newsletter that doesn’t always have the sunniest disposition. But there is something about a man who’s roughly a decade older than me consistently writing in a way that is thoughtful, vulnerable, insightful, often poignant…it’s actually quite aspirational. You often have a lovely way of helping me clarify a feeling or thought that I have not quite had the words for previously. I often feel ‘seen’ by your work, and tend to carry it internally for several days afterwards.

    Your consistency is of quality, if not regularity. For which I have much gratitude.

    Best, Joel

    Making a go of it

    Now that I don’t have a traditional job, I’m busier than ever. Now that I am finally in the habit (via the partially-debunked notion that it takes two weeks to form a new one) of posting something new every day, the focus for the next 30 days is to develop my various interests and income streams into something that replaces my lost full-time income, enabling such useful things as “food” and “mortgage payments.” I have a lot of ideas on this front and I’ll be posting about them every day, but for now, the most helpful thing you can do is subscribe via the big red button below. It’s a monthly charge; the suggested amount is $5, but you can pay whatever you want.

    Upgrade now
  • Pivot to video

    Pivot to video

    Thanks so much for the incredible response to my previous newsletter. People wrote a lot of very kind and thoughtful emails and comments; I think I’ve managed to respond to most of them, and some of them are so insightful that I’ll be spotlighting them in an upcoming edition. So here we are, a week later — using the most flexible possible definition of a week1 — and, as promised, I have a new newsletter, and an update on what I think the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement will become.

    The short version is: I’ve started making video essays.

    Here’s a bit more “why.”

    I started this project in the hope that cracking the self-improvement code would give me the power to get more stuff made. I wanted to make several kinds of things: fiction; and non-fiction columns, essays and features — the kind of thing I used to write for media. I also wanted to make art, and videos of me making the art. And while it’s true that all that is a redonkulous workload, and probably impossible, it’s also very true that I spent a lot of time avoiding doing any of it, mainly by reading and scrolling life away on my phone.

    I have managed to write a lot of self-improvement articles! But that isn’t all I wanted to make. And, on another selfish note, the move away from Substack that I made for personal morality reasons has completely munted my subscriber growth. My subscriber numbers have been static or diminishing slightly for months now. Substack has a semi-decent recommendation engine that was my main source of subs, and while it is flawed — a lot of subs are spammy, and they recommended a Nazi newsletter the other day! — it was something.

    I’ve been mentally wrassling with all this for months now. Some time ago whilst scrolling, I came across a timely YouTube video essay which was about why you should make YouTube videos and was set entirely to gameplay footage of Sonic the Hedgehog 1.2

    This fascinated me, because the essay was very well written and the visuals — while compelling — were completely tangential to the video.

    This last part was the most important. I’d made quite a few art videos in the past, but they were always mostly about the art I was making. I’d found this restrictive as well as time-consuming. Now I realised: I could make art videos that were not actually or only tangentially about the art; where the visuals of painting just served as an interesting backdrop for the content I wanted to make anyway.

    Essays like this one.

    There’s another factor at play. The event I hinted at in my last newsletter is this: My day job, in the tech industry, is finished. And while I’m actively looking for another job, either in or out of the tech industry3, I would very very very very very much like for a decent proportion of my income — ideally all of it — to come from the art I make, or things related to that art. Yes, this is another lofty goal. But people achieve it all the time! I know a number of full-time, non-starving artists, as well as quite a few who make a living from their newsletters. Why don’t we have both?

    Summed up:

    • I need income from art/writing stuff
    • I can’t have that without a following
    • One of the best ways to get a following is to play the content game.

    Which brings me to this video that I’ve spent quite a lot of time making. The other half of the project is explained there. I’m calling it “Everybob.” That should make sense once you watch the video.

    Astute readers will realise that you have not actually seen this so-far mythical video, or a link to it. Well, if you’ve read this far, chances are you have the attention span for what I’m about to ask. Sneakily, all the text above — in addition to being fascinating — is serving as a gatekeeper for skimmers. And I can’t have readers watching the video for thirty seconds and then clicking away. Can’t embed it here either. The Algorithm will punish me for that. It is a cruel master, but we all serve at its whim. If you want to watch the video — and it’s fine if you don’t, but significantly finer if you do — it would help me enormously if you did the following. Click on the upcoming thumbnail image, which will take you to my channel page, and click/tap on the video to start playing it, then, in diminishing order of importance:

    • Watch it all the way through
    • Leave a Like
    • Leave a comment
    • Subscribe to the YouTube channel
    • Share the video with at least one friend who you think will like it enough to watch it through to the end, or one enemy who will hate it so much they watch it through to the end.

    For all the reverential talk about the Algorithm, it isn’t black magic; fundamentally, it rewards videos that get watched all the way through to the end and that get engaged with. That’s it. The only place luck comes in to it is with the initial crop of people the video gets shown to. If you wonderful people, my real subscribers, can signal to YouTube that people will watch my video, there’s actually a very good chance that the Algorithm picks it up and shows it to many many more.

    Whew. Nervous. Here’s the link to my channel page. If you’re keen to help out, watch the video through to the end (important!) and let me know what you reckon in the YouTube comments.

    For the avoidance of doubt, here is a ginormous red link that will take you to my YouTube video page

    Don’t worry! This isn’t going to become a newsletter where all I do is urge you to watch my videos. If anything, it’s the opposite; the videos exist so hopefully more people will find my writing. Instead of asking viewers to Like and Subscribe in the traditional way to you my video content, I’ll be asking them to Subscribe (For Real) to my newsletter. Think of the videos as another medium, as way of watching or listening to the newsletter content, at your leisure. And subscribers will get early access to the vids, behind-the-scenes content, and they’ll often get to read the actual essays before they become video essays.

    Oh, and if you want to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, that would be absolutely mint — not just because paid support is going to be extremely personally helpful, but because I’m finally going to start offering some proper benefits to paid subscribers.

    If you’re a paid sub, look for something special in your inbox soon.

    Subscribe now – pay whatever amount you want!

    There’s a lot more I’ve got planned and ready to go, but that can wait for next time. Thanks, as always, for reading.

    And as of now, thanks for watching as well.

    Another shout-out: If you have any jobs that need doing, or know of jobs going, just hit reply and let me know. Likewise, if you’d like to commission a or buy a painting (examples of the sort of stuff I can do are in the video!) now would be a really good time to do that — just hit reply. And feel free to get in touch if for no other reason that you feel like it; I like reading your replies.

    Also, comments are back! And they’re on a website I own and control so they’re never going away again. You can make a comment right here, just below the footnotes 🙂

    1. It’s 11 days later, but we’re still technically in the week following the week where I wrote the last newsletter. Unless you believe that the next week starts on a Sunday, which it absolutely does not. Blame ISO8601 if you don’t like it; I don’t make the rules.
    2. It’s well worth a watch!
    3. Hit me up if you know of anything going! I’m going to do an online CV kind of thing soon but for now know my skill-set is comms, marketing, and most things relating to those areas.
  • Life, the Universe, and

    Life, the Universe, and

    I had a birthday the other week. The numbers are starting to run together but this one is special because it’s 42. If you know, you know. (I suspect quite a few of you do; even the title of this newsletter is a riff on what you know it is).

    As befits the number, it was an ordinary birthday. I mostly got books — well, money, which I spent on books. I went for a walk in a wetland with my son. We got a curry. There was a thoughtful, bird-themed cake made by my wife — as in, stuck to the icing was a piece of paper on which was written the word BIRDS in permanent marker.

    If there is a lesson to be taken from a nondescript number attached to an arbitrary date, it’s that much of what makes life meaningful is ordinary, and given the seeming rarity and sparseness of life in the Universe, it’s extraordinary that we live at all. That some of us have lives of (sometimes relative) comfort and joy may seem unfair, but it’s also a reminder that with great privilege, comes great responsibility.

    A chocolate cake covered in raspberry icing and candles, with a piece of paper stuck to it that has the word "birds" written on it in permanent marker. Three smaller sketchy birds are visible to the right on the paper.

    The Big Tree

    My son likes things that happen reliably; they lend form to the world, make it make sense. One of these is an enormous, gnarled, and quite dead pine tree that stands about halfway between our town and the relatively bustling cosmopolitan metropolis of Hamilton. “Here comes the Big Tree!” he would exclaim, in one of his first full, non-scripted sentences.

    I also like the Big Tree. I have always meant to take a photo of it. There is something about way it stands stark in the paddocks against the sky, shedding bent limbs, leaning a little more precariously each time we drive past it. I’ve been doing that for years, each time thinking “I should take that picture, it’ll fall down soon.” But it is in a tricky location, on a corner. I’d have to park the car on the verge a few hundred metres away and walk up to the fence line. Hardly insurmountable, but just enough of a barrier to stop me. Once we thought it had fallen down, but we’d just been distracted and looking in the wrong place for just one journey; our son eventually corrected us on a later trip. This was a shock, a sign that I’d better take that photo soon.

    A few weeks ago, the Aurora Australis flared on a reasonably clear night. It was the perfect chance to grab the best possible picture of the thing. Silhouetted by the dark hills, lit by the glow of stars, Southern Lights and passing cars. It would be epic. I got my DSLR ready and didn’t go. It was cold. I was tired. Not absurdly so, but you know.

    A few days later there was a storm and the big tree fell down. I will never have that picture; I never even snapped one on my phone as we went past. Leo calls it out each time we drive past. “That’s the place where big tree falled down,” he says. “Big tree’s gone now.”

    Dead wood

    I planted some citrus trees several months ago. They’re doing all right, thanks to a climate that renders citrus unkillable by even the worst gardener. One even has limes growing. To plant them I had to dig up some stumps and hack at some unsightly camellias. I made a pile of the dead branches and stumps that I would take take to our green waste bin, which we pay to be emptied each month. Often it gets emptied empty.

    Each morning I make coffee, breakfast, and lunch for Leo, and look out on the back yard where the dead wood is and realise I’ve forgotten to take it to the green waste bin. And each day I remind myself that I really must take the wood to the green waste bin and then I forget to take the wood to the green waste bin.

    The other morning I looked out at the dead wood and felt that familiar clout of guilt, the one-two punch of “I’ve forgotten to do something” and then the numbing balm of some helpfully unhelpful subconscious subsystem coming online to take away the shame of forgetting to take the dead wood to the green waste bin, by… making me forget about the dead wood that I need to take to the green waste bin.

    Then I saw the birds. Sparrows, chaffinches, silvereyes, fantails. They were flocking to the dead wood, hopping all over it, feasting on the insects, rubbing their beaks on the bark, scolding and flitting and swooping as tiny birds do. It was a cold, misty morning; the dead wood was their haven and playground. There were at least twenty. They moved around too much and too fast for me to get a good count.

    I heard them piping their ineffable songs and felt less bad about the dead wood for the moment. I figured I would write about it, then just kind of didn’t for multiple weeks.

    Now I have.

    The wood is still there.

    A tweet from a Twitter user called Evan DeSimone, @smorgasboredom. He writes, "Every time we're forced to talk about Joe Rogan, I am reminded of my best and most immutable axiom. Nothing that only men like is cool." In a second tweet he says, "Everyone is mad about this so let me just clarify that I'm 100% correct."
    It’s true, though

    Those might have been metaphors, who knows

    For all of my adult life and quite a long time before that, I wanted to understand why I don’t do the things I want to do. Or, more worryingly, why I don’t do the things I need to do. Why I struggle so mightily with such inscrutable inertia. All I ever really wanted was to make things I liked making, regularly enough to earn a living from making the things I like making. Books, mainly; I want(ed) to write, both fiction and non. But also art. Comics. Paintings and whatnot. Artifacts, I suppose.

    I found out some of the why. I am autistic. I have ADHD. It’s like the Two Wolves meme, if it were real, which it is not. Unfortunately I don’t really get to choose which one I feed. They share the same stomach; they’re both me.

    I always assumed knowing the “why” would unlock the “how.” That it would be my spider bite. If you are a regular reader of my irregular newsletter, you will know this is not the case. Some days I think knowing why is helpful, or a kind of comfort. Other days I just feel like diagnosis is a box containing infinite smaller boxes, also labelled “why.”

    A freeze frame of the spider biting high school student Peter Parker from the film The Amazing Spider-Man

    The spider bite

    You might have heard this story if you’re alive and have either the ability to hear, to see, or both. There is a high school student. He is bitten by a magical spider (don’t quibble, I know the story, but face it: it’s magic.) The spider bite confers upon him tangentially spider-related powers. He is very strong and very coordinated and very alert. It is everything he ever wanted. He does a cool parkour thing on the way down the stairs to have breakfast with his adoptive aunt and uncle.

    We want self-improvement to be our own spider bite. We all long for a one thing that will give us or unlock in us what we’ve always wanted to do or be. While we all know there’s no such thing as magic, obviously good things take time, but it’s the unlocking that’s the point. The spider-dam will burst and our inner spiders will pour forth. We’ll finally be able to write the 400 words nearly every day we’ve been promising ourselves we’ll write since 2004.

    With each self-help book consumed this doesn’t happen, so we read a new one.

    “This one,” we think, “this one will be the magic spider.”

    Unfortunately spiders are not magic and when they bite you it tends to fester.

    I thought that writing about self-improvement might unlock some self-improvement. 🎵 Spider-bite, spider-bite. All I want is a spider-bite. 🎶 I’ve been doing this for some years now and I can’t honestly say if it has helped. I take cold showers. I like it. I’m reasonably fit for a bloke of 42. I can play with the kids and not puff when I take the boy to school on the bike. Those are good things. But as for the self-improvement: to what end was it? Did I need to read books to know that I should exercise and eat good food and that if I do things regularly, things would get done?

    I did not. But I did want to feel less alone in the struggle to do simple things that are not easy, and to believe that change might be possible despite what seems like a lifetime of evidence that it’s not.

    A couple of weeks ago a media outlet got in touch asking me if I wanted to write something about self-help. Surprisingly, I did. It feels like a fitting coda to The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement — or, tantalisingly, a reset.

    Here it is at The Spinoff. Go give it a hoon.

    Everything

    This project, the one you’re reading, isn’t over. But it is changing. I feel tapped out on self-improvement, if for no other reason that the books are incredibly boring and often — when you’ve read as many as I have — very depressing.1

    As I’ve written in the above article, reading is certainly a way to be thinking, but it’s a terrible way to be doing. So I’m changing the project to have just one goal: make something and get it out each week. When I am honest with myself, the main form of self-improvement I want to achieve is that long-elusive consistency. And I think I’ve hit on a way to do this that encompasses a bunch of my other interests — chiefly art, art education, and making silly videos — and broadens a focus that I feel has become myopic and cloying.

    If you’ll allow me to paraphrase three years of this project and however much self-improvement consumption before that, nearly every book renders down to regularly do something that is hard but helpful.

    And that is the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement.

    I’ll have something new for you next week.

    Do me a solid? I would love to know if this newsletter has helped you in any way, however arcane or tangential. This is a bit of a selfish request, but it’d be quite lovely to hear some nice stuff around now. You can reply to this email, or if you’re reading this on my site, you can leave a comment. Thanks so much.

    1. There is some other Life Stuff going on (don’t worry, we’re ok) which I can’t really talk about at the moment, but which has also had an impact.
  • Taxpayers’ Union pet policy to cost taxpayers billions, again

    Taxpayers’ Union pet policy to cost taxpayers billions, again

    I did not want to take this newsletter out of hiatus. I really didn’t! I have my kids to look after, I have projects to do, I have lawns to mow. As I write this my absurdly cute 8 month old daughter is chasing my laptop around the house, as she has picked today to learn how to crawl. As much as I’d like to I do not have time to fish around in the incredibly depressing minutia of New Zealand’s one-degree-of-separation think-tank powered politics.

    But I have to, because the think tanks are at it again, and somehow the media is mostly neglecting to mention it.

    In its latest deeply neoliberal austerity Budget, the Government has managed to find billions – potentially tens of billions, or more – for big businesses, in the form of capital expensing. As usual all this is hidden behind frustrating obfuscatory language, but what it means is that if you’re a mining company that wants to buy the Leveller from Fern Gully you can now claim 20 percent off the cost of the thing upfront, against the taxes you’d otherwise have paid. Tax deductions for depreciation already existed, of course, but depreciation is a recognition that things slowly break down and have to be fixed or replaced and this costs businesses money – as time passes. Capital expensing is going “oh, this would have broken or worn out at some point in the future, so look, why don’t we just kind of buy a bunch of it for you?” And that I suppose is fine if you’re a small or medium business. The issue here is that – as per Marc Daalder’s excellent reporting – there appears to be no limit to how much this misbegotten corporate tonguing will cost the country which means that we’ll soon start subsidising, oh I don’t know, oil rigs.

    This is largely the result of months of Taxpayers’ Union lobbying. They’ve been in the ears of MPs, sending them asinine “briefing papers” (their latest is a frothing neoliberal wet dream dripping with outright disinformation about government debt1 that can be summed up by the words “PRIVATISE EVERYTHING”; naturally, it landed TPU Executive Director Jordan Williams a spot on 3 News). They then spruik these efforts in their horrible newsletters that go out to all their members and anyone who thought they were getting a Ratepayer’s Report from Stuff, and in these missives they meticulously document their policy and public discourse wins.

    an excerpt from one of the TPU's nightmare newsletters that reads: Our number one policy we’ve been pushing for in this year’s Budget to boost productivity and New Zealand’s long-term prosperity is full capital expensing. Back in March, we published a paper and launched our campaign to make the case for allowing businesses to immediately write off the cost of new equipment, machinery, and technology, rather than spreading the deduction over years under complex depreciation schedules. This policy has been successfully implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, driving economic growth and productivity. Bang for buck, the economic literature suggests it’s the best form of tax relief in terms of growing the economic pie. Yesterday, Mike Hosking picked up Nick Stewart’s Hawke’s Bay Today op-ed on capital expensing. Nick is a longtime supporter of the Taxpayers’ Union, and said the opinion piece is a direct result of our paper and campaign. I’ve copied the op-ed below (it’s behind the NZ Herald paywall). Christopher Luxon’s answer to Mike Hosking’s question on whether this week’s Budget contains full capital expensing is encouraging. Have a listen and judge for yourself. That wasn't the only part of our Go for Growth briefing paper series that is getting media attention.
    You are reading an excerpt from a Taxpayers’ Union newsletter. Roll 10d12 psychic damage.

    The TPU’s position was for full capital expensing; that the government should rebate the total cost of the Leveller, not just 20 percent of it. They are calling the upfront rebate – which is, to reiterate, a gigantic sweetheart deal, just imagine if you could write off 20 percent of a shiny new flatscreen TV against your next tax bill! – a flop.

    This is posturing. For the TPU and its junk-tank Atlas Network fellow travellers like the New Zealand Initiative, anything other than total victory will always be a flop, and for them total victory would be the government abolishing all taxes and public services, and ceding sovereignty to a consortium of noble captains of industry. They will be privately pleased with the developments in this miserable budget. For them, they represent progress. What bothers me, as always, is that these groups are deeply entrenched in business, media and Government decision making; their policy prescriptions are often picked up either piecemeal or wholesale, and despite this (or because of it) the media tends to take their pronouncements about fiscal responsibility at face value while ignoring the catastrophic cost of the policies they’ve advocated for.

    Let’s recap some of those, shall we? Before the latest boondoggle, the TPU took full credit for torching Labour’s 3 Waters, legislation that aimed to take the (very high) capital costs of water infrastructure off ratepayers and on to Government books. Achieved through a racist whataboutism campaign aimed at Maori, the TPU’s successful campaign meant that many councils were forced to massively hike rates to pay for their decaying infrastructure instead of handing it off to Government. Thanks for the enormous tax hike, Taxpayers’ Union!

    Before this, the TPU embedded their chair Casey Costello – also formerly an Act party candidate – on the NZ First party list. Upon her election to Parliament, she immediately set out doing practically everything the TPU (and NZI) had lobbied for around tobacco policy; scrapping world-first tobacco legislation, cancelling excise tax increases on tobacco products, and purchasing vapes from tobacco companies to hand out to smokers – policies that came out of mysterious anonymous briefing papers that spontaneously manifested on her desk. The cost of the thwarted and introduced policies once again runs into the billions; the cost of healthcare for smokers, the lost revenue from excise taxes, the subsidies for the tobacco industry’s addictive, environmentally ruinous products, and the deaths of an estimated 5000 New Zealanders each year.

    Some media, to their credit, tried to identify links between the TPU and Costello, despite widespread and illegal stonewalling. But in doggedly searching for or turning up the usual paper trails – names on briefing papers, emails, overt commonalities between Costello’s mysterious documents and tobacco industry propaganda – they missed the wood for the trees. Costello is the Taxpayers’ Union! She stepped down as chair of the TPU to be parachuted into a job as an MP, doing many of the exact things the TPU advocated for during her tenure as chair, and once she finishes her catastrophic innings, she’ll be launched right back into the loving arms of some cosy industry body or lobby group. This is New Zealand politics; everyone knows everyone else, and they all gets a sweet job after their time in the trenches is up. (The media are not exempt from the merry-go-round; political journalism is practically a job interview for the job of a party comms person or corporate executive. If you’ve ever questioned the weirdly out-of-touch, navel-gazing, anodyne, optics-obsessed quality of the Labour party’s public statements, you will find your answer in the fact that a chunk of their comms team consists of ex-Press Gallery journalists.)

    Given the state of things, it is probably folly for me to beg the media to make the link between the think tanks, the ruinous policy they so successfully advocate for, and the resultant costs to the country – or, to put it another way, the cost to taxpayers. But I’m going to do it anyway. The Taxpayers Union, NZI, and others dress up their advocacy for greater corporate control of the commons in the language of freedom and choice. They are frequently platformed and even embedded in our media, often for sneering at public projects like overly-expensive playgrounds or a set of steps at a beach. But these so-called blowouts pale in comparison to the multiple billions the policies championed by the TPU and their ilk cost the country as a whole. The least the media could do is tell the other side of the story: the outsize effect that these groups have on the formulation of public policy, and the catastrophic cost of those efforts to all New Zealanders.

    1. The report makes the case that the Government’s debt is both unsustainable and like a household’s, a nonsense which is still repeated ad nauseam by political and financial reporters. Verity Johnson’s excellent op-ed makes short work of this absurd claim. ↩︎
  • Your phone is the mind-killer

    Your phone is the mind-killer

    Today’s TLDR

    • Yes, the medium is the message, and it might be rewiring your brain
    • If digital media modes are leaking into your meatspace, try putting the phone down
    • Litany Against Smartphones
    • Unlike, Unsubscribe

    I am here, in my mode

    There’s a thing called Tetris Syndrome I think I’ve remarked on before; essentially it’s that thing where if you spend all day playing a videogame you’ll keep seeing it when you shut your eyes. I get the same thing, but for books; if I read something compelling enough I spend the next while hearing my inner dialogue as if narrated by the author. I assume this happens to other people, although when I’ve mentioned it to other people I’ve weathered a brief stare followed by a quick subject-change. It can be like time-travel, especially if you’re reading Austen or O’Brien or something in similar prose.

    It happens with other media as well. I know that if I spent too long – any amount of time, really – on Twitter or the increasingly Twitter-like Bluesky, I start to think in terms of tweets, replies, the omnipresent strident snark, witticisms I could render into Tweetish form (which I would get oh so many likes and reposts for). This is as horrible as it sounds. Lately, I have been wondering if something similar happens with all our regular digital diets and interactions.

    Medium, meet message

    If you did media studies or similar you may have come across the theories/ramblings of a bloke called Marshall McLuhan who is remembered today for coining “the medium is the message,” a tricky little phrase that essentially means that the meaning of a piece of media is inextricable from the way it’s delivered. A letter has a different vibe – and a different effect – to newsprint which is different to a movie which is different to TV which is different to hypertext on a computer screen which is different to the endless algorithmic scroll of TikTok on an iPhone.

    McLuhan’s mostly impenetrable but prescient guff came to mind again when I went to Bluesky to try to copy my username and accidentally found myself scrolling for what was probably only a few minutes. Afterward, I felt the echoes of the online conversations I’d glanced at for hours.

    (And even now I feel a silent urge emanating from the smartphone within eyeshot. It’s like having a Tamagotchi, except it waterboards you every time you pick it up.)

    My contention is that the mediums of modern information delivery – hypertext, email, algorithmic scrolling, doomscrolling – are modulating how we think, act and react to things in the non-digital realm; if you find yourself absently composing tweets while you’re doing the dishes, mentally framing conversation as comments, or ruminating about something you read on that curiously addictive gossip site before realising you’ve got no idea why you walked into the kitchen, this could be why. This isn’t an original idea; it’s essentially what authors like Johann Hari are on about with the likes of Stolen Focus, but if I pay attention I can quite definitely feel it happening, live, in my day-to-day.

    O rly?

    My anecdote is one thing, but actual evidence for this specific effect is harder to come by. My research well ran dry on this one (perhaps readers can help) but there’s enough here to put a glaze on my half-baked theory. For instance, there a psychology paper called “Linguistic Style Matching in Social Interaction,” about “the psychometric properties of language in dyadic interactions” which makes me think of researchers trying to talk to oak trees. But of course that’s a dryad; a dyad is a sociological term for the smallest possible group of people – a pair. This, and other research, shows linguistic style matching or interactive alignment; essentially that two people talking together start talking like each other.

    In this scheme, two interlocutors simultaneously align their representations at different linguistic levels and do so by imitating each other’s choices of speech sounds, grammatical forms, words and meanings. For example, if Peter says to Mary with reference to their child, I handed John his lunch box today,’ Mary is more likely to respond with And I handed him his coat’ than with And I gave him his coat’ even though the two alternative responses have equivalent meaning.

    This lines up with our understanding of how human interaction works. It’s like accents. If you hang around French people for some reason, you will start to sound French. It makes sense that it would happen to some extent for reading – and doomscrolling. Perhaps the medium really is the message, and it’s hacking (apart) our brains.

    I’m not sure how to fix that, but here’s one idea.

    Litany against phones

    I rewatched Dune: Part 2, helped by my wife who requested frequent pauses to explain some arcane facet of Dune-lore. I’ve only read the first three books – the Dune sequence is occasionally and accurately referred to “Diminishing Returns: The Series” or “Stop With The First One” but I’ve read enough fan-wiki summaries to handle the questions. Dune is gloriously dense and weird, and the movies have done a good job of retaining the vast sense of scale and strangeness of the books while shedding some of Old Man Herbert’s unnecessary authorial foibles, like his virulent homophobia.

    One of the better things from the books that it’s hard to render into film, though, is the mentally-recited Litany Against Fear, which is exactly what it sounds like.

    I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

    Not only is it a neat bit of prose, it’s psychologically helpful – this is honestly a pretty good way to deal with anxiety for many: recognise the feeling, but don’t fight it, knowing that it will pass in time. I also like that it’s endlessly adaptable. Modern problems require modern solutions, so here is my version.

    “I must not scroll. Smartphones are the mind-killer. TikTok is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will put down my smartphone. I will permit it to pass into a different room. And when it is gone I will turn the inner eye to something else. When the phone has gone, only time will remain.”

    Todo

    If there is something you need to get done and you feel goofy resorting to the Litany Against Phones, here’s an alternative:

    Go back to the early 90s.

    1. Turn off your phone notifications except for calls and turn the ringer volume up
    2. Put your phone in a different room
    3. Plug it in. Tell yourself (about to show my age here) that it’s connected to the wall with a curly cord and you can’t disconnect it until you’ve done the thing you need to do.
    4. Do the thing. If the phone rings, and it probably won’t, you’ll hear it.

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    Thanks for hanging about. For better or worse, there’s more where this came from.

    — Josh

  • this is a test to see if my posse setup is working