Category: The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement

  • A return to form

    A return to form

    I am in my 40s, so it is time to talk about my neck, my back. Most specifically my back. Not the other things. IYKYK.

    I had an injection in my spine a couple of months back. Needles to say, I didn’t enjoy it. There was a local anaesthetic or I probably would have leapt clean through the CT scanner, trailing a hypodermic and a grimly-clinging doctor, but I could still feel the needle scraping along my hip-bone. Just because there’s no actual pain doesn’t mean there’s no sensation, and there is a lot of pressure when that big needle sinks in the eight or so centimetres it needs to go to curve around your spine and into the bit that has arthritis, apparently.

    I’ve never had consistent lower back pain until this year, when it got quite bad to the point that it was travelling down one or more of my legs. I visited an escalating chain of doctors until the specialist said I had arthritis in one of my vertebra. Fun! He said there are two ways you can get this sort of thing: by doing too much work or sitting on your butt too much. I am in the latter category; my career of chair-based keyboard-punching has set me up nicely for an arthritic arse. Potential treatments: nothing, a CT-guided injection in the spine which – with an uncomfortable degree of ambivalence, the doctor said “might help” – and surgery that he simultaneously said he was happy to do and did not recommend.

    I chose the middle path, and went with the injection.

    Did it work? Well, it definitely did something, and by that I mean “it gave me a one-week migraine.”

    I haven’t had a headache like that before and I hope not to have one again. I do get migraines sometimes but not like this: the only thing that could touch it was specialist migraine medications called triptans, and they just kind of gave it a gentle caress for an hour before ushering the headache back in. Other painkillers bounced off it like popcorn thrown at armour plate. Apparently this is common with needles in the vicinity of anything that has cerebrospinal fluid? No-one told me until afterwards.

    The back pain did eventually settle down, which was possibly the steroid injection doing its work, but the doctor had warned me that it’d be temporary, and last week it flared up again. I briefly considered hopping on the specialist carousel again, thought “bugger that” and visited an osteopath.

    The thing osteopaths would like you to know is that they are not chiropractors. This was enough for me; I despise chiropractors, and I decided against looking too hard into osteopathy lest I find something I didn’t like. There is lots of stuff that osteopaths (and physiotherapists for that matter) do that is… contested, I suppose, but at this point I was sore enough to leave my scepticism on the hook. I figured at the least I’d get a good back rub.

    I did. It was the best kind of back rub: the kind that good-hurts so much it felt almost religious. I also got some advice that seemed both wildly impossible but turned out to be great and that has actually fixed me up better than anything else.

    I mentioned to the osteo that I wanted to get my back sorted so I could start weightlifting again – I stopped the gym because the baby had me sleep deprived so much I worried I’d fall asleep on the bench-press – and she said “you need to stop bending over.”

    I said that wasn’t very likely because of all the kids lying around my place that seem to need picking up a lot of the time, and she explained that no, I need to stop bending over, and suddenly it made sense.

    I’d been picking things up the way most of us do it, which is bend at the waist, legs straight-ish. Sometimes I’d do a funky ballet-looking move where I’d bend over but stick out my left leg (I am not sure why. Balance?) The fact that my back screamed in pain when I bent from the waist or spent thirty minutes looming over my daughter’s crib and patting her back so she’d fall asleep hadn’t really been registering. I needed to bend over, so I did it.

    Except I didn’t, and neither do you.

    There’s another way to get things off the ground and it’s popping a squat. But, as the osteo explained, if you have bad form while squatting (and then loading up with a weight, like a bar or a squirming almost-two-year-old who is about to play a game of What If I Lunged Forward Really Hard, Like Fully Leapt Out Of Your Arms, Just To See What Happens?) and go down with your weight on your toes, your spine is still getting involved. The muscles around your spine aren’t particularly big, and loading a flexible structure where each component is the size of a curled finger and whose primary purpose is to house a bundle of extremely sensitive nerves with the full weight of your upper body is a bad idea.

    Instead, you can delegate the job to the largest muscle in your body; your gigantic, under-appreciated ass.

    Anyone who’s been given the unhelpful advice “lift with your legs, not your back!”1 – this is what I’m talking about. Except it’s more like lifting with your ass – your posterior chain, really. It’s how you lift at the gym, because it’s how you have to lift at the gym if you don’t want your fellow fitness enthusiasts to hear the faint pop and screams of agony that come from a vertebra imploding during an improperly-done squat.

    In gym-language, they call it “lifting with good form.”

    To lift with your ass: from a standing position, keeping your back straight, you begin by sticking out your ass in a comical fashion. This is called the hip-hinge. As your hips go back you sink groundwards, with your weight on your heels. Picking up the thing works in reverse fashion; weight a bit more on your heels – the instinct will be to go up on your toes, don’t – and use your tremendous ass to head back up.

    What’s weird about this is that if you’ve never done it or haven’t done it for a while you won’t know what muscles are working and it can feel very weird. This is because of a lack of proprioception, which I’ve written about before; it’s essentially the interior knowledge of what the different bits of your body are up to. Unfortunately nerves and muscles can be forgetful, and if you live in your head a lot and type for a living it’s only natural that your ass stops remembering where it is and that it’s intended to do more than sitting.

    I have been doing these very intentional lifts very assiduously for a few days now whenever I need to pick up toys or boxes or a rapidly moving toddler on one of her several thousand daily attempted trips down the Forbidden Hallway where the Interesting Electrical Switches are, and the improvement has been absurd. Something in me likes moving this way, in the same way that I liked weightlifting; instead of the snarl of agony I’d been ignoring when I bent from the waist, I get a “hey, that was interesting. Do it again.”

    So I will. And hopefully a return to the gym is on the horizon.

    Want to try the hip-hinge, aka lifting with your ass? Here is a video, which is also a free and extremely good fitness regime if you feel like following along.

    Casey Johnston, the Swole Woman, already wrote about this, because of course she did. I recommend reading her, as always.

    Where have I been, by the way? Busy! I’m working on a project that’s taken up pretty much every spare bit of mental energy that’s not reserved for client work. If it works out – and my mental Magic 8 Ball is set to Signs Point To Yes, I won’t say any more than that – I will be well beyond stoked and you’ll be hearing from me a lot more often. Which would be nice! I like writing things for you guys. On that note, please leave a comment. I like those even more. Talk about your neck and your back if you like. Not the other ones.

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    Subscribe for $5 a month, or subscribe for $50 a year.

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

    1. An earlier version of this post had this bit backwards. “Lifting with your back, not your legs” is what I was doing and it’s wrong, in case the rest of the post didn’t make that clear. ↩︎
  • In which I apply for a job

    In which I apply for a job

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

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

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

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

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

    Gidday!

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

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

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

    It seems like fate.

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

    You guys! I am so here for this!

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That does raise another important point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Growth.

    Must.

    End.

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

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

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

    “But this ship can’t sink!”

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

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

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

    They do not care about your library.

    But there’s some good news.

    It’s you!

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

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

    I eagerly await your offer of employment.

    Sincerely,

    Joshua Drummond

    P.S. My CV is attached

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

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

    Add a comment

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

    About / Resume

    If you’d rather just cut out the middleman and send me money directly, hell yeah. Here’s one way.

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    $5 monthly subscription
    $50 yearly subscription

    Here’s another way:

    One-Time
    Monthly
    Yearly

    Make a one-time donation

    Make a monthly donation

    Make a yearly donation

    Choose an amount

    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00
    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00
    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00

    Or enter a custom amount

    NZ$

    Your contribution is appreciated.

    Your contribution is appreciated.

    Your contribution is appreciated.

    DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

    (If these sums seem uncomfortably small to you just hit me up and I’ll give you my bank details.)

  • Knowing isn’t half the battle

    Knowing isn’t half the battle

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

    I don’t think it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It’s from GI Joe.

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

    The more you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    $5 monthly subscription
    $50 yearly subscription

    Or you could just do the koha thing

    One-Time
    Monthly
    Yearly

    Make a one-time donation

    Make a monthly donation

    Make a yearly donation

    Choose an amount

    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00
    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00
    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00

    Or enter a custom amount

    NZ$

    Your contribution is appreciated.

    Your contribution is appreciated.

    Your contribution is appreciated.

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

    Most people are good sorts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    About / Resume

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

    Here’s how to support this newsletter!

    Subscribe to free posts:

    Become a Premium Newsletter Subscriber using the Big Blue Button below and get paid-only updates in your email + access to high-res digital downloads of all my artwork + other cool stuff!

    Click to become a premium subscriber!

    Give a koha/one off donation using the below form.

    Make a one-time donation

    Choose an amount

    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00

    Or enter a custom amount

    NZ$

    Your koha is very appreciated.

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

    Hip hip hooray, the world didn’t end today

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

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

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

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

    Weird about water

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

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

    I am hydrophobic.

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

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

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

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

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

    Add a comment

    Here’s how to support this newsletter!

    Subscribe to free posts:

    Become a Premium Newsletter Subscriber using the Big Blue Button below and get paid-only updates in your email + access to high-res digital downloads of all my artwork + other cool stuff!

    Click to become a premium subscriber!

    Give a koha/one off donation using the below form.

    Make a one-time donation

    Choose an amount

    NZ$5.00
    NZ$15.00
    NZ$100.00

    Or enter a custom amount

    NZ$

    Your koha is very appreciated.

    Donate
  • The Third Way

    The Third Way

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

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

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

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

    You do a stupid third thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Funny how that works out.

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    $5 monthly subscription
    $50 yearly subscription
  • We have to go back

    We have to go back

    And we’re back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    img_9651

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

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    $5 monthly subscription
    $50 yearly subscription
  • All the ways we accidentally procrastinate

    All the ways we accidentally procrastinate

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

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

    Waiting until the perfect time

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

    Waiting for the perfect conditions

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

    Small things get in the way

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

    Being distracted by finishing a task

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

    Picking a task from things I see

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

    Sudden overwhelming interest in previously uninteresting topic

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

    Actually it’s called bitumen

    (four hours later)

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

    Just abruptly walking away from my desk for no reason

    I wrote this down because I just did it.

    Being mean to myself

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

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

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

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

    A little logic (puzzle)

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

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

    Which would you pick?

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

    My love of comments verges on the unnatural

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    Subscribe for $5 a month, or subscribe for $50 a year.

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

  • You and your monkey mind

    You and your monkey mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ape clipart, vintage barbary macaque

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Macaques monkey clipart, vintage animal

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

    The best self-help book I’ve read

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

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

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

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

    Time Management for Anarchists

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

    These are good quotes:

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

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

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

    Precisely.

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

    Now, leave a comment!

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

    Add a comment

    Like & Subscribe

    If you want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. (Once you are done considering, please take out a paid subscription.)

    Subscribe for $5 a month, or subscribe for $50 a year.

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

    1. For irony’s sake, I almost made this the title of the post ↩︎