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.

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

“Elon Musk is kind of a hero of mine”

I wrote those words, with my own brain, controlling my own fingers. And when I wrote them, they were true.

In my defence: In days of yore, around a decade ago, it was hard to avoid the idea that Elon Musk was a kind of techno-savior. And I was quite taken up by it; perhaps not to the extent of thinking that Musk was the World’s Raddest Man, but I definitely thought that someone devoting their life to fixing climate change was worthy of a bit of hero-worship.

That particular set of words which I must reiterate I typed in communication to another human being were written as part of a pitch to an editor who – wisely – rejected my story idea. I did end up writing something similar for another publication and ended up test-driving a Tesla owned by some people who were quite lovely and ended up being fast friends, but I’m worried to look it up now. In fact, thanks to the dying internet, I can’t find it. Thank God; I wonder what I might have written about Elon in it.

Now, I think we know better. In fact, these days (in my honest opinion) Elon Musk is a narcissistic psychopathic megalomaniac who would make Ian Fleming blush with the sheer cartoonish scope of his villainy.

And yet.

He has amassed more money and power than, probably, any one person in the world. Possibly more than in the history of the world.

Let us look further, and I’m sorry but just bear with me a moment, at the current state of the United States.

There’ll be something new by the time I send this out but at the time of writing, the latest adventures of coterie of lunatics who run the USA include musing about invading Canada and Greenland (either of which would trigger NATO to attack one of NATO’s founding members, but never mind, you’re not here for the geopolitics) deporting people without trial to a slave prison in Central America, and coordinating an enthusiastic extrajudicial assassination of a Houthi leader, feat. civilian collateral damage, via a Signal group chat that included (inadvertently) a journalist.

These are not smart people.

And yet, they kind of indisputably run the United States and any number of tributary nations in a great undeclared empire, and hold the keys to an arsenal that could end the world in about half an hour.

What the hell is going on?

How is it that the richest and most powerful people on earth are also so indisputably stupid?

To find out, let’s turn back the clock a little. With the rise of this new devilry that isn’t quite the fascism of days gone but still walks and quacks like a goose-stepping, zeig-heiling duck, people are looking for parallels, and it’s from 1933 that we get this quote that you’ve probably heard some version of before:

The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

That quote is popularly attributed to the philosopher, mathematician, logician, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, and – unusually for famous quotes that get bandied around a lot – he actually said it. It comes from this short essay, dated 10 May 1933, and the full piece is a must-read – not just for what it says about then, but how it explains now.

You’ll probably have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think everyone on the Internet has, but what you may not know is that science suggests that overconfidence can be a beneficial evolutionary strategy – one that goes a long way to explain the ascent of our new idiot overlords. It’s counter-intuitive; you might expect that nature would select for caution over foolhardiness, but the theory seems sound. Authors Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler lay it all out in a striking letter published in Nature. “The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars,” they understate. There is also plenty of research showing that narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths tend to exhibit overconfidence, and – even without dipping into the way that what’s left of the free political press tends to lionise sociopathic tendencies and select for those politicians who show the least shame – I think that’s got most of the modern world neatly buttoned up.

The madmen who run the world have attained such great heights not because they are smart, but because they are stupid enough to be over-confident.

That’s the bad news. The good news is: You can do it too.

I’m not saying you should become a sociopath; quite the opposite. I’m saying that you’re already more qualified and less evil than the majority of the world’s current crop of most powerful people, so you can afford to be more confident.
And the best part? You can just do it. You don’t have to have any training. There aren’t any prerequisites. You don’t even need to think. Headbutting a concrete wall so you can achieve IQ parity with the Trump administration might help, but it’s optional. You can just go forth and… be confident.

As proof: I just made all that up! Confidently! Is there any evidence that, after a lifetime of not being confident, that you can just suddenly start? I have no idea! But I am saying and doing this quite confidently where normally I’d have all kinds of qualms about evidence and truth. So it must be true. QED.

However, you may not yet have full confidence in my newfound confidence, and that’s fine. For you, and for my former unconfident self, I will spit some straight facts. In fact, this will make me even more confident. Imagine, not just being confident but confidently correct!

I just Googled “can you just decide to be confidetn”, so confidently that I hit “enter” without even correcting the typo. The evidence I find is patchy, seemingly because confidence is a somewhat subjective state. Efforts to quantify the effect of acting confidently on things like hormone levels have run headlong into the reproducibility crisis, but there does still seem to be an observable effect arising from simply acting – i.e. pretending to be – more confident, and this can lead to a greater perception of confidence among audiences, which makes you more confident, and so on. In short: if you make it, it might just be because you faked it. The current state of the science aside, I feel confident that this is one of those areas in which received wisdom will turn out to be correct, like when your nana’s nonsense about getting your nose out of a book and playing outside lest you become short-sighted turned out to be entirely true.

Besides, you can’t argue with results. Musk, Trump, Zuckerberg et al must be some of the most insecure, brittle, unmanned people ever to walk the Earth, and yet they are quite unquestionably confident. Given this, I am convinced that I will never write anything more true than the following sentence: you, reader, are brighter and better than these boors and billionaire. Your only curse is being smart enough to think you know your limits. Well, fuck that. Go on, make that call. Upload that video. Start that business. Speak at a public meeting. Run for the local council. Hell, become a member of Parliament or Congress. Don’t let confidence, or the positions of power afforded by confidence, become a trait associated only with the worst of us.

Take it back.

Go on.

I have full confidence in you.

I was in bed, scrolling through Bluesky, when I saw it. An activist and journalist I follow broke the story, moments after it happened. I told my wife.

“Are you sure? It’d be on the news sites.”

“Yeah, probably not. Then again – I’ve followed her for ages, she reported on Charlotteville, and I’ve never seen her joke about this sort of thing.”

A few minutes later it was on the news sites, too. All of them.

My immediate reaction was revulsion. Not so much at the news as the Takes which I knew were coming, as sure as night follows day. After Christchurch, everyone became a gun violence and counter-terrorism expert; after Whakaari, a surprisingly high percentage of the population turned out to be volcanologists; and during Covid, everyone online suddenly displayed hitherto unsuspected depths of epidemiological knowledge. The same segments of the population, I knew, would turn out to hold unrivalled expertise in the field of this latest Event. The media would play their part, reporting on events as they unfolded without the benefit of accuracy or context: the news version of a race to the comments in order to post “first.”

It gave me the ick enough that I put my phone in another room and spent some time installing a new stereo head deck in the car. The original, which displayed most features in 漢字 and placed the car in the middle of the ocean as revenge for having the temerity to drive outside of the geographical confines of Japan, had been some time dying. First it lost the ability to play or eject CDs, then the reversing camera stopped working. Eventually, its last remaining function – to play, without warning, from the previous owner’s vast library of Japanese country music – disappeared as mysteriously as the music sometimes arrived. We drove around with a portable speaker filling in for the sound system for, oh, about three years. It did the job but it sounded muddy and was annoyingly unwieldy to deal with.

The new head deck enabled me at last to listen to the radio – should I want to. I found I didn’t. When I did, little shots of adrenaline would make their way around my system and give me the jitters. It wasn’t good to drive to. Audiobooks and music were better.

I realised that putting my phone elsewhere and just getting stuck into a project for a while had given me a lot more mental clarity than I was used to having.

And then, as is customary, I forgot about that helpful epiphany and slowly began re-absorbing everything I saw on social media and news feeds, like a sponge soaking in the jet from a fire-hose. I wrote most the above as a draft newsletter and forgot about that too.

That Event was back on July 13, 2024. Now, a related Event is rearing its hideous head and I’m here to tell you: you don’t have to tune in.

Turn off, tune out

One of my more inconvenient scruples with this newsletter is that I try to only tell you about self-improvement things if I’ve tried them and found them to work (or, as is more usually the case, the opposite.)

This is one that works. I know because I’ve done it before and have resumed it for a while now: I don’t look at social media or news until my knock-off time, at 5:30 pm. At earliest.

I’m not worried about missing anything. I learned when I did my “dopamine detox” that if I really need to know something, someone will tell me. And a quick check-in tells me pretty much everything I need to know. I don’t have to scroll for hours.

It took me a while to get here, but it’s stuck pretty well for around a week. I plan to keep it up because it gives me something precious: time, and sanity. Every time I have managed to take serious time off the socials I’ve just kind of started getting stuff done by default. Useful things, not artifacts of toxic productivity. Long-broken car stereos get fixed. Shelves get built. Things get tidier. More work – often much more work – gets done. Newsletters get writ. My self gets improved.

It’s all very well for you to say “walk away,” Mr Privilege, but we owe it to those less fortunate to bear witness to their suffering.

Yes! It is important to face the truth that our sociopathic rulers create endless horrors, and to listen to those affected. Not being subjected to horrors is indeed privilege, not to mention the myriad other advantages I get by default, thanks to being a white man in a society created for white men. My aim is to use what I have, to help where I can. Being welded to my phone, gawping at the horrors, isn’t helping anyone.

Caveats

This isn’t being written to make anyone feel guilty. There’s enough of that out there without me adding to it. As often, this is (selfishly) written as the results of an experiment with a sample size of one: me. As always, your mileage can and will vary. Consider the following:

“I’m a creator. My income depends on me posting my work on social media, and engaging so people will see it.”

Then carry on, comrade, and post up a storm. We could all use more art in our feeds. Posting isn’t my gripe; neither is engaging. My problem is with scrolling. Maybe I’ll make it up into a design, riffing on something highly culturally current like Game of Thrones. A Kraken like the sigil of House Greyjoy, tentacles wrapped around a human brain, imposing text declaring: We Do Not Scroll.

“I’m a journalist. My job is to take samples from the firehose, so I can tell others what’s important.”

You’re doing God’s work and we thank you for it. Of course, the best journalism is usually engaging sources and trawling through documents and asking questions no-one else is, not duelling brainworms on Twitter, but you knew that anyway. We need people who make sense of madness, and I’ll still be reading your stuff. You couldn’t stop me if you tried.

“I’m a member of the X #resistance. My job is to find the worst things said by the worst people on earth and make sure as many people see them as possible.”

Please stop. If all you’re doing is trawling for Bad Shit and signal-boosting it then you’re not aiding; you’re abetting. The below post sums it up well, and suggests an alternative.

reminder: this is the point of the barrage of batshit appointmentsif you are a tiny bit freaked out by each of them it will add up to “too freaked out to do anything about anything”pick ONE thing at a time to be upset about, decide what action to take on it, then follow through, repeat

[image or embed]

— Yell In a War (@jelenawoehr.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 4:20 PM

(I found that while taking a quick Bluesky break while writing this article. I am aware of the irony.)

Authoritarians and social media oligarchs have something in common: they want you scrolling. They want you anxious. They want you despairing. They want you paralysed. They want you inactive, while thinking you’re doing activism, endlessly thumbing your distraction rectangle in between ads, and it’s this behaviour that I believe is a problem, if not The Problem. I am sure there are people for whom lengthy doom-scrolling sparks action, or who genuinely enjoy swimming in the sea of insanity. If you are one of them, good for you. Really. Sadly, I am not. I do better – almost absurdly better – and I do much more when I am not jacked to my eyeballs on digital jenkem. You might too.

So if there is something happening today – and whenever you read this, it will be today, and there will be something horrible happening – and you felt like you needed permission to log off or do something else for a while: this is it.

The other day, while playing the famously egalitarian game of “golf” with one of my CEO buddies, we had a completely normal conversation, as humans often do. This being That Time Of Year, the topic of New Year’s resolutions came up. I was all ready with an almost titularly cynical spiel about how everyone thinks NY resolutions never work when my friend said something jaw-dropping (doctors hate him.)

The previous year, he’d made a resolution to learn conversational Chinese… and he’d actually done it.

To be fair, I did not immediately fact-check him on this, as my level of conversational Chinese is zero. He could have said 我不会说中文 and I’d have believed him. I did quiz him a little more about his method, though, as keeping a New Year’s resolution is something I’ve long resolved to eventually do.

It was pretty simple, he said: he had a group chat with some mates. They told each other their (achievable) resolution at the start of the year and checked in on each other throughout.

And they pretty much all achieved it.

That is probably all the information you need to replicate his success for yourself but feel free to keep reading! I suppose I was meant to leave the big secret until the end of the article but I’m just not very good at that kind of bait-posting. Or perhaps there’s more to it. Surely, success can’t be that simple? To find out, I decided to interview him, Diary of a CEO-style, to extract his secrets and sell them to the world like a human Juicero machine.

Interview with a “CEO”

You’re Jamie Moore, world-famous CEO of enigmatic golf company Q. I doubt there’s anything about you that anyone doesn’t know, but just in case something’s slipped through the cracks, tell us a little about yourself.

Sure. For 15ish years I ran website design companies but then in the Covid times I switched career to start a golf product company with my father.

We make an all-in-one adjustable golf club that can be used for every shot – putting, drives, chipping, bunkers etc. It’s fairly early days, but we’ve had some good traction selling them in 55 countries around the world (mainly the US)

Right. Obviously, we are both old, and my memory is failing. Refresh it by reminding me how we know each other?

We attempted law school together and each wisely decided to bail out. Definitely no ragrats here.

While at uni, we bonded over a range of things including the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution, playing pool and hosting a radio show.

Fascinating! Now, Tell me about that New Year’s Resolution accountability scheme you talked about when we played such extraordinary golf on that luxury course the other day.

What a place. Tahuna Golf Course. Home of the legendary 4th hole that is nowhere near the 3rd hole.

Yes, I’m part of a group of friends that for the past 3 years have set New Years resolutions each year… and actually check in on their progress throughout the year!

What did you, personally, achieve (or aim to achieve)?

A couple of my favourites:

• Learned to swim (200m of good freestyle, complete with tumble-turns)
• Learn to like Marmite and Vegemite (one of next year’s goals – backstory: these were my swearing punishment foods growing up so this will take some undoing!)

What were your resolutions for 2024, which is somehow almost over, and how did it go?

• Complete a triathlon (was progressing well, but had some back issues that meant the running was no bueno and had to abort).
• Speak Mandarin Chinese (hard to quantify – which in hindsight was a weakness – but I’d give myself a pass. I’d say I’m now OK at basic conversations on select topics)
• Make a pasta, preserve and pastry from scratch (achieved the first two but not the third)

While not the most stellar success rate this year, the thing that makes it feel like it was a success was the regular discussion and reflection throughout the year.

​What are some of the cool things other people have done?

• Eat at 5 ethnic restaurants you’ve never tried before.
• Run a marathon
• Host a murder mystery night
• Create an original 3-track EP
• Shoot a movie with your family as actors
• Stay a night in a DOC hut
• Create a family photo album

Why do you think doing resolutions this way works?

It’s a good question actually – since I had set goals like this in the past but never lasted beyond Jan.

I think it’s the combination of a few things:

• A ringleader to initiate it
• A group chat where the ringleader asks for updates every month
• The group already knows each other well
• The defined structure: 2x self-imposed goals, 1x goal

But on reflection, the most important factor of all is setting goals that are specific and things you genuinely wish you could achieve.

​Do I have your irrevocable, legally-binding, un-indemnifying permission to ahem utilise this NYE resolution accountability scheme of yours for the betterment of Cynic’s Guide subscribers?

You do.

​What’s your secret?

I quite like the song Lose You To Love Me by Selena Gomez.

(To success, obviously.)

Oh, disregard last answer.
I guess it would be embracing the slow power of compounding returns – when it comes to learning, growing a business, self improvement etc.

​In the unlikely event that there is someone among my subscriber base that does not know about your world-beating, adjustable (and now ultra-portable) Q golf club, please outline the details and any purchasable special offers in the following blank space.

begin pitch
We’ve just started preorders for a second generation of the Q club.
This has an 8-in-1 adjustable club head – and a two-part shaft that means it can fit in a small suitcase.
It’s all about giving golfers a simple and lightweight experience on the course – but also when travelling for golf.
If subscribers are interested, they can learn more at https://q.golf
end pitch

Josh again. So yeah, I think that’s pretty cool! (The New Year’s Resolution thing, although the golf club is also neat.)

In fact, I thought it so cool that Cynic’s Guide readers might like to join in. I’d been wanting to set up a subscriber chat on an app like Discord for a while, and this is the perfect excuse. Plus, I’m interested to see what resolutions people come up with, especially in the bit where they get to pick ideas for other people. I’ve embedded a sign-up form below, but if you can’t see it for some reason, here’s a direct link: New Year’s Resolution Tracking 2025.

The form asks for your email so I can prevent spammers and invite you to the group chat, but seeing as you’re probably reading this newsletter in your email that probably won’t be a problem. As for the resolutions, I’ll start: Mine for this year are:

1. To do a muscle-up (Rating: very hard, and you may recognise this as a previous goal from this newsletter, which I obviously did not achieve. But this year will be my year!)
2. To play the drum part in Toxicity by System of a Down to a reasonable degree of proficiency (Rating: possibly harder. I don’t actually know – drummers, feel free to laugh at me. It’s a fantastic song though, and great for hangovers.)

You don’t, of course, have to do the NY resolution thing! It is completely optional, and if it all seems a bit too non-cynical for you, that’s fine. This might help on that front: if you want to give it a crack but worry that you might find it all a bit much and drop out, no-one else will actually care.

But I’ll venture that people will care if you do achieve your resolution, and that might make it worth trying after all.

It was only a few short months ago, not long after the birth of our second child, that I had the vain – and, in hindsight, very funny – hope that I could continue writing this newsletter during her early infancy.

As it turned out, I could not.

Or perhaps I could have. I dunno. Other writers seem to manage! What I do know is that while I’ve had a whirlwind and often quite wonderful few months taking care of a beautiful new baby, I’ve also never felt more behind on, well, everything.

I might have felt this way when our previous child was this age. Unfortunately, I can’t remember, because sleep deprivation.

(I’d also meant to keep a journal during this time so I’d actually have some memories of it, but my curious aversion to journal-keeping keeps getting in the way.) Anyway, in all honesty, November would have been a hellmonth even if we didn’t have a new arrival. We had family over to stay, which isn’t something we could enjoy when the first kid was born because of that whole global pandemic malarkey. That wasn’t the hellish bit; it was lovely to have them over. The problem was that we began the month by contracting Covid, all together, as a family. Hm. It’s almost like the pandemic isn’t quite over, isn’t it? Someone should look into that.

It was nasty. I feel like I’d have managed the virus better if I’d been able to nurse the thumping headache and weird fatigue by staying in bed and drinking chicken soup, rather than looking after ill children. No sooner were we testing negative than the first tranche of family came to stay, which was (as mentioned) wonderful and life-affirming but didn’t afford any time for recuperation. And once they’d flown the coop I came down with the most vicious, uncompromising strep throat thing I’ve had in living memory. I ran fevers, and a mild inability to climb stairs faster than several minutes at a time, for two days before a dose of antibiotics killed whatever was trying to kill me.

As of the last week or so I’m much better, and the baby (who for the purposes of this newsletter I will name Pandora) is sleeping better. I think one may be linked to the other in some way. That sense of behind-ness, though – it’s never been worse. My work suffered, especially given I’d only just come off paternity leave when I got sick, and I’d just picked up fresh responsibilities in my job. The yard was overwhelmed by waist high grass, the garden got taken over by a Triffid-like mint infestation, the other undone tasks became even undone-er. It did not spark joy. In fact, I kept hearing this unhappy little ditty play in my head:

After some weeks of frantic effort coupled with the rest of the country slowing down somewhat for Christmas, it’s all starting to relent slightly. I feel like I’ve just caught a breath after being held down by crashing waves.

(In what is probably not a coincidence, my wife started reading How To Keep House While Drowning on audiobook around a week ago. A few people here have recommended it so I’m going to pick it up too, and listen to it while I wear the infant around the house like an inconveniently heavy, uncomfortably warm, and incomprehensibly precious jacket. )

With the recap recapped, I want to talk about something that helped pull me out of this especially funky funk.

It is, of course, a self-help book.

I’ve shouted out John Birmhingham, author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, a few times in the Cynic’s Guide. He’s long been a favourite writer of mine, since I discovered his oeuvre leafing guiltily through the problematic Ralph magazines I bought in my late teens. I may have purchased them for the pictures, but I did end up reading the articles! Of late, Birmo has written frankly of his own battles with procrastination viz online time-wasting. After this touched a chord with readers of his newsletter, he decided to write an honest-to-god self-help book, which he made free to subscribers for a couple of days as both a kind gift and a clever way to juice Amazon reviews.

And the book, which rejoices in the search-engine-optimised title of “THE COMPLETE BUT LITTLE BOOK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION: A SELF-HELP GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE OF YOUR BS“?

It is fucking great.

Available now at your favorite digital store!

THE COMPLETE BUT LITTLE BOOK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION: A SELF-HELP GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE OF YOUR BS. by John Birmingham

Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!AUTHORS

JB has managed to do what no-other self-help author ever has, in my quite extensive experience: keep it short. The book is a blessed 51 pages long, and it is relatable. If the following passage doesn’t resonate with you, you are reading the wrong newsletter:

You have a problem, but it’s not laziness. [Procrastination] is a human problem. It messes with people no matter their gender, their class, their culture, whatever. We procrastinate about household chores. We put off important personal decisions. We leave our taxes too late. We sit, staring at the blank page, the empty screen, our stomachs churning, our spirits low.

It also hits you – or at least me – right in the fear feels. Procrastinate as we might, there’s an ultimate deadline there’s no getting away from, and after my recent bout of illness this one rang a knell:

I didn’t grow out of it. If you’re reading this, chances are, neither did you. Lying in that bed, a bunch of tubes punched through my ribcage, I suffered the horrifying realisation that comes to all procrastinators in the end. It really was the end. I’d left it too late. There’d be no wriggling out of this.

Drawing on contemporary psychology and techniques like cognitive behavioural therapy, and working with rather than against the fact that his target audience is incredibly likely to put his book down due to a sudden urge to browse the Wikipedia entry on alpacas, Birmingham goes straight for the jugular of procrastination. What is most off-putting about putting things off is that you know it’s illogical and that it will come back to bite you, and the reason for that — Birmingham writes, with plenty of science to back him up – is that procrastination is the all-but-inevitable outcome of emotional dysregulation.

It’s about discomfort.

Imagine I have a big project due in a week. I know I should start, but instead, I find myself cleaning the house, checking emails, or plating up my fourth rewatch of Justified. What the fuck, JB? When I thought about my daunting task, my brain did not get that immediate dopamine kick. In fact, thinking about all that hard work possibly even turned off my dopamine tap and crashed me into a trough—making me feel even less motivated. To escape this uncomfortable feeling, my treacherous brain starts seeking out something, anything, to provide a quick dopamine fix. And here comes my old friend the donut, the doomscroll, the infinite void of streaming TV. Anything feels better than sitting in the discomfort of the work.

The only drawback – and this is not Birmingham’s fault, it’s your neurobiology’s – is that working with the discomfort that gives rise to procrastination is obviously uncomfortable. He offers an admittedly cornball acronym, as is traditional in CBT, to help remember the required steps before tackling a given incidence of procrastination. I am reproducing it here not to try and dick over JB’s book sales but because writing things down is about the only way I remember them.

RULER: Recognise, Understand, Label, Express, Respond.

The way I’ve put this into practice, when facing a potentially delay-able task like “my excellent and usefully bill-paying job” or “writing a catastrophically late newsletter for inexplicably patient subscribers” is to open up a blank, plain-text document and dump whatever mess of emotions I am experiencing in there.

This is all kinds of yuck. Seeing what you’re feeling on the page – often, in my case, self-loathing and shame and anxiety expressed in what can be quite worrying terms – is confronting. The good news is that writing these things down before starting a job feels a bit like procrastination, which is a helpful little hack. And then once I’m done recognising, understanding, labelling, and expressing, I delete the document and it all goes away. Then I respond, by actually doing whatever task my emotional maelstrom was sucking me away from.

It is of course not necessary to do this exercise via the written word: you can do it all in your head. Or perhaps, if you work alone or don’t mind looking like you’re rehearsing a role in Glengarry Glen Ross, you could say it aloud. As with any other self-improvement exercise – say it with me, I’ve written it enough times here – YMMV. Your Mileage May Vary. I suppose I should add the caveat that because everyone is different this method may not work for you at all, but I suspect that it might, and I am very happy because at this point in time it does work for me.

Despite only being 51 pages long, this isn’t all that’s in the book. TCBLBAPASHGTBFOYBS is a dense little nugget, the neutron star of self-help texts. There are plenty more tips and tricks that are only to be deployed once you’ve accepted the inconvenient truth that fixing procrastination very likely requires addressing some emotional dysfunction. But it’s eminently doable, and it’s helped me enormously.

It might do the same for you. It’s worth a punt: the book costs less than the coffee you were probably planning on buying. And if you’re (somehow, in this economy) feeling flush, why not kick in here too? I want my writing here to be free forever, but your contributions really do help keep the server lights on.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope to be back sooner than a three-month unplanned hiatus: the New Year is upon us, and it’s like catnip to the self-improvement-obsessed. I have something coming up to mark the occasion that I think you’ll like. In the meantime, feel free to say gidday in the comments, it’s been a hot minute but I’d love to hear from you.

To close, here are are some wise words from my four-year-old who got interested in the laptop while I was writing this.

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So there you are. Stop, go. And a very Merry Christmas to you all.