Category: The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement

I am writing this using voice transcription software because at the moment I’m slowly pacing about the house, carrying a two-week-ish old infant around the lounge room, because if I stop for more than about 30 seconds she’ll realize I’m not her mother and I’m of no use to her because I don’t have mammary glands and she’ll start crying so please bear with me – it might be a little bit disjointed.

In the previous newsletter I talked about my “dopamine detox” (a nonsense name for something you can’t actually do, and yet it was quite helpful) and about how it had enabled me to do a painting and… yeah.

This is the painting.

I even did a TikTok, which you should not watch if you are on your own dopamine detox or have a weak stomach:

For more information about why I would do such a thing I’m going to leave a Q&A that I did with David Farrier on a paid edition of his Webworm newsletter.

I think it’s fairly comprehensive and should answer any of the questions that you might have had and possibly even more.

Other questions are being answered at the TradeMe auction that I am currently running for this “artwork“.

I suppose the connection to self-improvement isn’t all that tenuous because without intentionally avoiding aimless scrolling for a couple of weeks I can honestly say that this painting wouldn’t exist.

Whether that is a net good or a net bad is kind of up for discussion but I think it’s probably a positive, because a big part of the reason I started this newsletter experiment was to see if I could find space in my life to get more art done. A lot of that space was to be carved out at the time that I spent aimlessly reading news websites and scrolling social media, and as unlikely as it may seem, this hideous painting feels like a very real triumph on my self-improvement journey.

So with that I will cut to the Q&A which – given our audience overlap you may have already read on Webworm – and I’ll ask gently that if you have any questions to ask me of this painting that you leave them up on the TradeMe auction as the Q&A is really where the actual art occurs, given the artistic value of the painting itself is… well, let’s say, questionable.

As always thanks for reading – do look forward to my next voice-recognition-penned diatribe whenever I can capture enough sleep to have the mental faculties to actually write one.

A Q&A with David Farrier & Joshua Drummond

Dear God, what is this abomination? Please explain what is going on in your mind – why are you doing this?

Man, I’m not entirely sure what it is or why I’m doing it. I guess there’s a bit of a backstory. Part of it is that most of what I paint is cute stuff, self-conscious kitsch, like birds wearing hats or landscapes from video games. 

A few years back I decided I wanted to see if I could learn to paint photo-realistically. It worked, kind of – I ended up spending a bit more than five years working sporadically on a painting of our cat that was meant to be a birthday present for my wife and I only finished shortly before she died. (The cat, not my wife.) 

After I finished the painting I decided I never wanted to do any genuinely photorealistic stuff ever again, as it’s too fiddly and time-consuming, but I was able to use the skills I’d picked up to do a decent painting of a Bored Ape as payment for a mate who’d helped me out with my parody NFT project, the Bird Hat Grift Club. 

I ended up taking a similar approach with this portrait of the Prime Minister – realistic enough, but not so you’d mistake it for an actual photo.

The other part of the story is that I’ve done this a couple of times before, that is, painted portraits of people I don’t have a high opinion of and sold them on TradeMe.

Dislike can take up a lot of mental space, and I’ve written quite prolifically of the agony of having no real ability to change what is quite clearly — as in scientifically, objectively — wrong with the world.

I guess painting is a way of processing this. 

The people I’ve painted so far have either been prominent mainly because they’re so objectionable (like Michael Laws) or have been gifted lead roles in making New Zealand a significantly worse place (like Christopher Luxon.)

And I guess I’m just kind of fascinated by politicians of all stripes; the way that they have to sacrifice their humanity to gain and maintain power. Especially with Luxon, you end up with this caricature who speaks entirely in trite slogans and gormless cliches and never seems to respond sincerely to questioning.

I find this so weird and objectionable — people always talk about how politicians should be “someone you’d like to have a beer with” but if someone showed up at my house talking in the fundamentally Martian patois that top politicians adopt I’d kick them out.

Another thing is that I don’t have a very high regard for my actual artistic skills, and I think contemporary art is mainly a grift that enables the ultra-rich to either appear learned and magnanimous or just indulge in money-laundering.

This limits my chances for a career in the contemporary art world. I’m fine with that, art is very much a part-time gig for me, but what I do consider myself good at is TradeMe auctions. The real art isn’t the painting, it’s the auction and the Q&A that arises. That’s where I have the most fun, anyway.

I guess the last part of the reason I did this is I just find it so completely absurd, to the point that I kept cracking up while working on some detail of the painting.

I’m very aware that it’s quite a strange thing to do.

And that might stem from the fact that I’m very sleep-deprived, as our daughter was born just a few weeks ago, and I’ve got my son crawling around on my lap as I write this.

It all adds up to create an interesting mental space.

What gear did you use? How did you paint this? How long did it take?

It’s acrylic paint on canvas. I used the biggest, cheapest canvas I had: it’s a metre tall. I’ve had it for over a decade. I don’t know where I got it, and I could never think of the right painting to put on it, and as I moved houses and such it just kind of came with me getting more and more decrepit.

It was covered in spiderwebs and cat hair and dead insects, so I decided it’d be the perfect substrate for a portrait of the Prime Minister. I used acrylic paint because I’m familiar with it, even though it’s probably not the ideal medium for a painting like this.

The best thing about acrylic is that it dries very quickly. The worst thing is that it dries very quickly, so you have to be sitting at the easel with a little spray mister thing to keep the surface moist if you want to blend paint on the canvas.

Occasionally, if you want to make a quick blend or correction, it makes sense to lick your finger and smudge the canvas, which is why the auction (truthfully) describes the painting as being 0.1 percent body fluids. It’s interesting to think there’s some of my actual DNA in it, and that some of the painting is probably in me.

I hope it’s not too toxic.

Oh and it took about a bit over a month to paint, maybe 30 hours total?

Maybe a weird question, but did you listen to any music or podcasts while painting it?

Yes. This is going to sound like the biggest suck-up ever but I did listen to Flightless Bird while I made it — the “Navy Dolphins” and “OnlyFans” episodes. I also listened to Behind the Bastards; I’m a big fan of that pod and they had a weirdly appropriate two-parter about the “evilest painter,” Thomas Kinkaide.

I also listened to an audiobook of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book I reviewed for The Spinoff. My friends and I exchanged a lot of rambling voice messages.

And there was a good mix of music. The soundtrack to the 2016 Doom game, a bunch of shoegaze instrumental rock like Mogwai and Maybeshewill and Godspeed You Black Emperor, a band called Berlinist, the album Typhoons by Royal Blood, some Radiohead and Low Roar, and in the end phases of the painting I got really into Incubus again for some reason.

I am looking at this painting and my brain does not want to process it. Please tell me, as the artist, what is going on here?

You know that internet gag where someone sees something awful that leads them to comment “what a terrible day to have eyes?”

That’s what I’m going for.

If your brain doesn’t want to process it then it’s working. I love that sort of thing. For an example, I really like Henrietta Harris’ work — she renders people (and cats!) in this rich illustrative style but with multiple eyes or noses or distortions in the picture that make it quite genuinely difficult to tell what’s going on and the overall effect is enjoyably disturbing.

For the Luxon portrait, I could tell it was doing what I wanted it to when I took a friend down to my basement studio without hinting at what I was working on and she screamed when she saw it.

It was very important that Luxon look as much like Luxon as possible, while his …environment looked as surreal and disturbing as possible.

Also I should clear something up.

A bunch of people who’ve seen the painting seem to think it’s a butthole. It’s not a butthole.

If your butt looks like that, seek help urgently. It’s just meant to represent flesh, something between elbow skin and a throat and an areola and a boil and varicose veins. Human skin is weirder the more you think about it, right? We’re just naked flesh covering pulsating veins topped with a knob of hair, if we’re lucky. (I’m not, and neither is Luxon.)

Originally, the painting was meant to be Luxon’s eyes and nose and mouth in the centre of the picture with the rest of his face stretched across the canvas a bit like the Last Human from Doctor Who, but I didn’t have the artistic skill to pull that off. Then I had the idea of making it look a bit like Jim Carrey emerging from the robot rhino in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, except with Luxon kind of joined to whatever he’s emerging from, like the uvula at the back of your throat.

And I wanted him to look very happy to be there, just thrilled off his nut, but also with a kind of grimacing grin like Hide The Pain Harold or the old Flight Centre captain a few seconds before the ad ended. Because I based the portrait on what I think was Luxon’s LinkedIn profile picture, it mostly works.

Do you want Luxon to see this, and if so what do you want him to take from it?

Sure. There’s a good chance he sees it, but if he’s anything like my previous subjects he’ll refuse to comment.

On the other hand, it’s 2024, shame is the new fame, he’s got a social media team, and there’s every chance he tries to make some kind of hay out of it. While I hate to break the character I’ve put together for the auction, I’d like to get ahead of any attempt to leverage this. What I want him to take from it, and what he absolutely will not, is: people see through you.

And he — and you — should be a bit horrified by this, actually. 

For me, what’s creepy about this painting isn’t Luxon’s sweaty, grinning face; it’s what’s implied to be behind it. Of course the painting is meant to be gross and funny but, if you’re looking, it’s also meant to be frightening, because it’s representative of the insane situation the country and the world are in.

Behind that grinning mask, that millimetre or less of paint, is a howling vortex of anthropogenic anti-reality bearing down on us to devour all possibility of a decent future. If you saw the mini-series Chernobyl, that show had the perfect metaphor: the gaping maw of an open reactor; the cost of lies.

We’ve put all this carbon in the atmosphere, incurring a debt to the laws of thermodynamics, and physics is coming to count the cost. And Luxon and his ilk are — somehow — pretending that we don’t need to do anything meaningful about this; instead we need to do all the things that led to the problem, like neoliberal economics and fossil fuel production, harder and faster and more cheerfully. I find that inhuman, and terrifying, and so should you. 

Ideally, Luxon would too. 

But he won’t. 

Just to be clear again, where is the money for this auction going?

It’s currently up for auction with half of the proceeds split between Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal, the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief.

As an evangelical Christian, I’m sure Luxon will be enthused about both those causes. The other half will be going to a cause I like to call “buying food for my children.”

Is there anything else you’d like to add? This is your time to shine.

I am very tired. Part of this is the new baby in the house and part of it is that I clearly have too many hobbies. You can purchase my artwork here.

I have two newsletters: one about self improvement, and one about media and politics that I find too depressing to update.

I write other stuff too. For a completely different product of dwelling on dislike: if you don’t enjoy the heel turn JK Rowling has taken, read my Harry Potter fanfic. What a great way to close out this Q&A!

Last week, and by last week I mean “two weeks ago,” I wrote about how I was mid-way through a dopamine detox, which is a terrible name for something that isn’t actually possible. What it actually entailed was avoiding social media and video games for a couple of weeks.

What I wasn’t expecting was for my life to change overnight.

The reason I wasn’t expecting my life to change overnight is because it’s a meaningless cliche. Your life is always changing, overnight or not. However, life does contain milestones, and a few remarkable things did happen. I’m sure some of those things had something to do with the dopamine detox, while others might have been mere happenstance or coincidence. Am I going to identify which is which? Like hell. Self-help never does that: in a given seminar, newsletter, online course, or book, all positive changes that occur to the reader or consumer are assumed to be a consequence of said seminar, newsletter, online course, or book. Dopamine detoxes are no different. Online, you can find no end of ads and testimonials where people who’ve subjected themselves to varying degrees of dopamine detox (everything from “avoiding video games” to “spending a month not socialising and avoiding bright lights at night lest it spike dopamine”) credit it with extraordinary life changes. If the ad below is anything to go by, I can now expect to get promoted at work, get rid of stress, become “the alpha man,” and transform “into energized, focused, and well-rested person,” as well as become “fully rebranded.” Exciting!

I believe, foolishly, that my readers are intelligent enough to discern which of my last several week’s experiences can be traced to my dopamine detox.

Here are a few of them.

1.) My memory improved?

A couple of days ago I had cause to spell out my surname on the phone which is always a giant pain. “D” sounds like “T” and “M” sounds like “N”, and I have the usual flat Kiwi accent making it all worse, which is how I have found myself opening fairly important letters and emails addressed to someone called “Joss Trumnod.” Many years ago I decided to fix this by learning the NATO phonetic alphabet, which I never did. Or, at least, I could never remember it properly. But this phone call was different: I ripped out Delta Romeo Uniform Mike Mike Oscar November Delta like it was nothing. Unfortunately the guy on the phone had never heard of the phonetic alphabet and seemed to think I’d had a stroke, but no matter. I’m now quite sure that dopamine fasting helps you remember how to talk like a fighter pilot engaging tangos in the skies over Eastern Europe. Someone should do a paper on this.

2.) My sleep got worse

Over the course of my dopamine detox I noticed that my sleep suddenly got worse. In fact, I can track it to an exact date: September 11 to 12, 2024. That night was utterly insomniac: I got literally no sleep at all. It was horrible. Might this have been a side-effect of all the increased dopamine swirling around my cortex? Perhaps! In a sleep study where participants were apparently given cocaine before having their brains scanned, it seemed that dopamine had something to do with sleep/wake regulation. “Indeed, increased potency and efficacy of cocaine was observed in relation to sleep relative to the wake state, a highly translatable finding…” the authors state. Who knew? Sadly, I had no cocaine, so my sleep deprivation must have been due to something else. I will continue the research.

3.) Parking got easier

According to Internet, having more dopamine to hand can make you more alert and improve your decision-making abilities. That’s certainly true for me, and there’s nothing more universally applicable than my specific lived experience. The other day, I was looking for a parking space, and one opened up right in front of me. To be fair, this sometimes happened before the dopamine fast started. I’ve been “manifesting” favours from an obliging universe, a la The Secret, for a long time now. (When it happens while my wife is in the car I look knowingly at her and waggle my fingers about my head while saying “maaaaanifessssstingggg” which never fails to be incredibly funny. Just ask her!) This time around, it’s different. The car parks I’m finding tend to be around the fronts of buildings like shopping centres and supermarkets. It’s very obliging of my increased dopaminergic capacity to do this, but I need to be careful – all this extra convenience means I’m walking a bit less, which might lower my dopamine levels. I’d hate for this to backfire on me.

4.) I’m getting up a lot earlier

Despite the occasional severe insomnia, I’m getting up much earlier in the morning. Most days this week I’ve been up at or before sunrise. Dopamine, as we’ve learned, plays a role in sleep/wake/cocaine cycles, and it’s been said that waking up early and watching the sun rise can help optimise levels of this neurotransmitter. Andrew Huberman, the superhuman scheduler of six simultaneous girlfriends, and an army of online acolytes who remix his content sure seem to think so. Perhaps it works in reverse also? If seeing the sun rise can help me have more dopamines, maybe having more dopamines increases my desire to see the sun rise! Either way, perhaps it’s helping me shake off a lifetime’s habit of night owlism.

5.) The highs are higher and the lows are lower

Dopamine plays a role in the regulation of emotion, and many influencers who I’m sure are just being modest about their neuroscience and psychiatry qualifications assert that being overstimulated is a primary cause of anhedonia. My experience is that over the last week or two I’ve felt both better and worse than at nearly any other time in the last three years. Does it stem from dopamine fasting? It’s hard to say. Actually, wait, no. It’s not at all hard to say “it’s the dopamine detox wot dun it” so I’m just going to do that. It might have been something else entirely, but who knows!

6.) I kicked my Instagram scrolling habit

Making a point of avoiding news and social media had one incredible side-effect: I stopped scrolling endlessly on news and social media. Wow! Tautologies are tautologies. This did give me quite a lot more time in my day – there’s little doubt about how much of your life your phone and its manipulative, attention-hogging-by-design apps are stealing – but this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I quite genuinely felt I had more mental space and clarity, and I’ve found it a lot easier to do life admin. In lieu of gaming I got a painting mostly done, about which more later. On the other hand, I found myself drawn to other phone-based time wasters, and just days ago (after the official end of the self-imposed rule against playing video games) I developed a fascination with being terrible at online chess. Just because you remove one nuisance from your life doesn’t guarantee that whatever replaces it won’t also be a giant pain, if you let it.

With all that said, I’m not kidding about how beneficial spending less time on social media has been. There are very few downsides. Important news still finds its way to me, and I’ve been posting about as much as I usually do, if not more. For the most part, no-one misses you when you avoid social media, and that’s a good thing. Not feeling beholden to the endless scroll means you can dip in to check your notifications in batches, reply to anything that seems worthy, and move on with your life. While I had a bad case of itchy fingers at first, I feel like scrolling is one habit that can stay kicked, with a little maintenance.

Beeper — All your chats in one app. Yes, really.

A single app to chat on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and 11 other chat networks. You can search, snooze, or archive messages. And with a unified inbox, you’ll never miss a message again.

7.) Oh yeah and this happened

The birth of my second child, two weeks ahead of schedule, might have caused some of the effects I mentioned. Insomnia, the sudden availability of accessible parking spaces, spelling names over the phone, waking up earlier, mood swings… they all seem related. Or maybe it was the dopamine fasting. Who can really tell? Life is weird and wonderful, and it’s never more so than when someone new starts it. Having a child really is the One Weird Trick to Reboot Your Habits, assuming you’re a moderately decent person, because many things that are merely virtuous aspirations if you don’t have kids suddenly become necessities. Waking up before sunrise to change your newborn daughter’s nappy (she will poo in the new one within seconds) may not be the traditional way to optimise dopamine or whatever the latest marketing jargon is, but I have no doubt that having children has improved my self.

Thanks for the kind emails and comments about the last newsletter. For anyone who found it a bit much, I don’t blame you! I also find it pretty full-on to dig up life traumas large and small and put them on public display. But if I don’t write these things, I feel like I can’t write anything at all: it all starts to feel somehow false. Either way, I’m back this week with what you probably signed up for: subjecting myself to a goofy self-improvement trend to see what happens.

It’s time for a dopamine detox.

Let’s get the entirely appropriate cynicism out of the way first. “Dopamine detox” is possibly the worst possible name for something you’d willingly do to yourself. It’s terrible on many levels, not least of which is that dopamine isn’t a toxin and it’s not something you can choose to go without. It’s like talking about having an air detox, or being addicted to water – a contradiction in terms, one of those category errors so egregious you can think of them as “not even wrong.”

Out of morbid curiosity, I asked our friendly neighbourhood neuroscientist Lee Reid what would happen if you could fast from dopamine. It wouldn’t be fun. If all the dopamine somehow abruptly left your brain, “I think you would just die,” he says, thoughtfully. “Or you’d go into catatonia.” If you gradually tapered off dopamine to nothing, it would still be horrible: you’d slowly lose the ability to move properly, or at all; you would lose your sense of smell, you’d go into painful spasms, and there’s plenty more. It turns out that the effects of a lack of dopamine on the human body are best illustrated by either advanced Parkinson’s disease or the film (based on the book by neurologist Oliver Sacks) Awakenings.

Of course, no one really intends to reduce dopamine levels, or at least I hope they don’t. What’s actually being peddled is the very ancient practice of asceticism, abstinence from worldly pleasures. The tradition is long, and full of monks. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Stoicism: practically all major religions and schools of philosophical thought have at some point identified that trying to perpetuate pleasure makes life less fun. And they’re right! It’s one of those rare topics where religion, philosophy and science seem in perfect agreement. The silly “dopamine detox” name is acting as a pop-science catch-all. Like a billion other wellness fads, it sounds just science-y enough to make people feel like they’re in on something, despite the ludicrous complexity of the human brain and the fact that the multivariate role of neurotransmitters is nowhere near fully understood. Dopamine detoxing is branding, and it runs the full spectrum of legitimacy. For some, it’s a great way to sell books, or as a hook for therapy: for a growing army of product-peddlers and influencers, it’s grist for the grift mill. In a (highly ironic) race for likes and subscribes, influencers and advertisers are trying to one-up each others’ prescribed asceticism, and freely adding in toxic nonsense from the testosterone-maximising manosphere or whatever other insecurity they’re playing up. This ad I got served up on Instagram a while back is a really good example of the state of things:

With that said, just because this innocent neurotransmitter has been fixated on by an army of influencers doesn’t mean that compulsive pleasure-seeking via our devices – aka scrolling – isn’t a problem. At least, it is for me, and as my newsletter is supposed to be about trying out various self-improvement trends and/or grifts and reporting back, I thought I should give it a shot.

I know what my low-key hedonism-procrastination cocktail looks like, and it’s the same as everyone else: video games and aimless internet news consumption plus social media scrolling. I’ve written plenty about both, and the absurd time-sink that they represent. If I’m being honest, I’ve known quite well that I need to either quit or markedly reduce my use since I began writing this – and if I’m being still more honest, well before that. I don’t care all that much about the supposed lifestyle benefits of dopamine detox. I want what I always have: to stop wasting so much time on the internet and do things I care about instead.

The self-imposed rules of my dopamine detox are pretty simple: I don’t play video games or go on social media for two weeks. That’s it. Computers are still fine, else I couldn’t do my job (or write this.) Instant messaging is still fine, as is reading books on my phone or listening to podcasts. Posting is encouraged, as the whole point is to make stuff, and hopefully it’ll be less reacting to things I’ve seen online and more posting projects I’m working on or just stuff I’m enjoying. In fact, because I am a giant nerd, I’m trialling out a microblogging service that syndicates posts to Bluesky and Mastodon. You can read it here.

Josh Drummond

Josh Drummond

When possible, I like to try doing things before telling you about them, and I’ve been at this detox for a little over a week now. As usual, there have been no miracles: just a bit more stuff getting done. It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted. I’ll report back more fully in another seven days. If I start posting regularly, you can be pretty sure that it’s worked beyond my wildest dreams.

Links & stuff

Now that I’ve talked about how I’m avoiding news and social media and insinuated that you might want to do the same, here’s some news and social media.

I like bike

My friend Robbie wrote a fantastic guest post a while back about grappling with masculinity and now he’s embarked on the incredibly self-improving venture of being the first trans person to cycle around the entire land surface of the world. He is, without exception, the most metal guy I’ve ever met. Kindly like and subscribe to all his stuff.

7,500km across North America

One quarter of a Guinness World Record later, it’s day 86, and I’m in Europe without my bike.

Danger is my middle nameRobbie Danger

Gotta go fast

I really liked this YouTube video when I watched it a few weeks back. Clickbait thumbnail aside, it’s the antithesis of today’s hyper-fast retention-editing-driven YouTube culture. It’s just a guy talking through the pros and cons of creating “content” while playing Sonic the Hedgehog 1. I loved it, not least because watching was completely optional. It could have been a podcast.

If I was ever to start making videos again – have I mentioned I had a YouTube channel? I can’t remember – this would be how I’d like to do it. Speaking of the many, many YouTube videos with completely optional visuals, here is an app to turn any YouTube video (or videos) into a podcast.

Listen and publish YouTube shows as podcasts

Listenbox provides an easy way to play YouTube in the background using any podcast app

Listenbox

Cat update

Remember the tiny kitten I rescued from the side of the road that was so comprehensively black we named him Pango? This was him then:

And this is what he looks like now. It’s like someone used a Moonstone on him.

It was too late to change the name so we didn’t. The vet says he’s part Maine Coon, which is where the ear tufts and colouring comes from. Apparently, this coat is called Black Smoke, so the name still fits. Also, he was kind of bitey because he didn’t know how to cat properly, so we got him a friend to see if it settled him down. Luckily, it did. This is Ned Flanders.

Like and subscribe

I know, it’s like rain on your wedding day. But if this newsletter can be one of those things that enhances your life rather than leaving you feeling depleted, it’s working. If you find it helpful, or unhelpful yet funny, please share it around. Or don’t! It can also be something you keep secret and safe, like the One Ring except it’s just an email.

I have incorrectly decided that reading and replying to comments doesn’t count as part of my dopamine detox so hopefully I will see you there.

I’ve been away plying my trade and visiting long-lost kin among the endless howling voids of Australia’s Gold Coast, and have only just returned to civilisation. Now, I collect my scattered wits, trying and failing to wrestle some cogent sentences out of the black matter of my brain. Luckily, my old mate JJW is here. The JJW stands for Jackson, James, Wood. He’s a good sort, Wood. After 11 years of sobriety in a society that looks aghast at mere moderation, he has some reckons, and he asked if I’d like to publish his latest as a guest piece.

Of course, I did. Take it away, JJ(W).

It’s been a hot minute since I last wrote about alcohol. Surprisingly, the thought of problem solving with booze hasn’t come up in the rolodex my lizard-brain inner-monologue flips through when trying to prompt a response from sober JJW. Spoilers: alcohol is not good at solving problems.

Even when the thought does pop up, I have 11½ years of sobriety to ponder on and help me navigate some of the truly terrible spanners the universe has thrown into my life over recent years.

Because of this long running streak of sobriety — surpassing philately as the longest thing I have ever stuck with — people often ask me something like: got any tips on cutting back the booze / how do I stop drinking alcohol?

Spoilers: alcohol is not a good way to solve problems.

Most recently, a friend — who we’ll call Shitkicker McGee — reached out seeking advice:

Can you offer any guidance on how to reduce/stop drinking? It’s something I would like to do, but I’m not quite sure where to start. I would really appreciate any thoughts that you can share!

Because I am currently in a very productive mood where writing is helping me get into states of flow and process aforementioned spanners, I thought I would tap out my reckons for Shitkicker and share them with you all in the hope it helps you reconsider your relationship with alcohol and/or support you in your sober journey.

To get into the mindset, I went back and read some of the things I wrote in very early sobriety. You can go read them here on The Wireless and Ours and listen to a segment on RNZ where I talked about alcohol and other drugs.

I stand by everything I wrote/said back then. My only thought, with 10 years hindsight, is I should have given the people who got married a heads up about using the dude from their wedding as an example. Sorry team, it was a lovely wedding, and although I haven’t seen you in years, I still think you’re both aces.

(No sorries to the fuckwit who accosted me about not drinking and then passed out in the shower though. Fuck you.)

One passage from this piece stuck with me:

I’m not quite sure why I need to have a drink in my hand to make others feel comfortable. But I am comfortable with taking the time to explain why.

So in that spirit, here are

JJW’s top ten tips for turning tenacious tipples to teetotaling tranquillity

1. Sobriety ain’t for everyone

Stopping alcohol is hard. In the west, we live in an ‘alcogenic society’. Booze is everywhere. It is brewed into our shared culture, from birth to death we celebrate and commiserate with alcohol. We medicate and mediate with it, it’s glorified and demonised. And, because of capitalism, there are very few places / times when alcohol isn’t on sale or straight up being offered to you. So being realistic about your own ability to stop is first and foremost.

For me, it was a simple decision. Alcohol made it easy for my brain to be like: hey, throw that spanner into this good thing, really wedge the fucker in there. But many people who I chat with try sobriety, and discover they don’t have a problem like I did. Which is great for them. They were just going through a tough patch, but the breather from booze helped them reevaluate and reconsider.

2. Make a commitment to yourself / loved ones / close friends

Peer pressure can be good. Making a commitment to yourself is a great place to start. But I don’t think I could have sustained sobriety for so long without the love and support of my family and friends. When I first told people I had stopped drinking, they were like: finally, lol. Thanks team.

But seriously, from that day forward they supported me to make and maintain this very positive decision — remembering and nurturing sobriety and generally being kinder mental health wise. You can’t lose because if people react with anything other than support I would suggest they might not be that good of a friend.

3. Remember: one drink isn’t the end of the world

As per above, there ain’t no getting away from alcohol. So if you do happen to find yourself halfway through a boozy beverage, don’t sweat it. Just like having one Tim Tam doesn’t mean you have to consume the whole packet, one drink is unlikely to harm you too much. It’s excess which is the problem.

The trick is to be mindful and kind to yourself. Which is fucking hard, especially if you’re experiencing a patch of bad mental health. But if you do happen to have a realisation earlier in the evening — before things get out of hand — you do have some agency to switch to the waters, leave the party, or whatever it is you need to do to look after yourself.

Also, if it does turn into a bender: FUCK IT. Start again tomorrow.

4. Be upfront with people that you’re not drinking and be honest with them if they ask why

There is no point making excuses or trying to hide it. You miss the opportunity to have a conversation and reinforce why you’re not drinking and/or may never drink again. Obviously this is situation specific, I don’t tend to unload on waiters in busy restaurants by yelling: WHY ARE YOU OFFERING A PERSON IN RECOVERY A GOD DAMN DRINK, YOU SICK FUCK. I just say no thank you, and move on. As per point 2 above, if someone doesn’t support you, fuck ‘em. Go straight to point 5, do not pass go, and …

5. Don’t be afraid to be rude

I am empowering you to stand up for yourself and be strong in the face of people who don’t support you. I give you permission to treat anyone who actively encourages you to drink with extreme hostility. Life’s too short to fuck around with knob heads like ol’ mate who ended up in the shower covered in his own vomit. Perhaps their brains are so addled by alcohol they cannot conceive of a world where people don’t rely on it.

As much as I complain about people who do not get it, most people do. Coming from New Zealand, and living in Australia, the chances are everyone you know has a story of a friend or relative whose life has gone awry because of alcohol.

6. Find decent alcohol-free drinks

Things have gotten better in the sober-safe beverage market in the ten years since I wrote the piece in The Wireless. There are so many great alcohol-free beers and wines available now! You don’t have to just drink coke, orange juice and/or water. There are great kombuchas, shrubs, seltzers, and other low sugar soft drinks too. At my sister-in-law’s wedding they specifically bought a case of non-alcoholic bubbly, and people just started drinking it because it was delicious. At my brother-in-law’s wedding earlier this year they had two alcohol-free beers available and heaps of people were smashing them. Happy days!

7. Get out of your head (in a good way)

One of the biggest things I have learnt over the past wee while, and this applies to all things in life, is pretty much no one cares about anything not directly affecting them. Ergo, hardly anyone will notice you’re not drinking and even fewer will actually care. It’s very self indulgent to assume people are so fixated about you they pay attention to what you’re drinking. Get over yourself, Shitkicker!

Also don’t get out of your head in a different way. Changing from alcohol to cannabis — or anything else — probably ain’t going to make you happier either. As an aside, I’ve also noticed many people in recovery rely on sugar. The plus side of sugar is you’re not likely to piss yourself while dancing on a table at your work Christmas party. Sugar is still pretty unhealthy though, so proceed with caution.

8. There is no tip 8

But here is a picture of a Kōkako eating a pūriri flower.

9. Track the data

I have a sober days counting app on my phone. As of today it’s at 4232. That’s a whole heap of days. Whenever lizard-brain says “mmmmm you could have a bottle of champs, yeah boiiiii” I flick it open and check my run streak. Pretty good incentive to stay on the wagon.

I also regularly use an app called How We Feel which is made by psychologists to help people identify and keep track of, you guessed it, how they feel. Bonus is it helps your mental health in general. No lizard brain, I don’t want to snatch that nice police officer’s pistol. Not today. I will, however, open up How We Feel and log I am feeling jittery.

Speaking of logging. Log your exercise in whatever fitness app you use. Log the books you’ve read wherever you do that these days (don’t use GoodReads). Or the movies you’ve watched in Letterboxd. Chat about your latest stamp finds with other philatelists on Canadian Stamp News.

Keep a diary. I now write a diary every day. I record my general mood for the day and specifically three good things / something I am grateful for. I take a moment to reflect, gain perspective, and breathe through the big feels. And fuck, it helps.

By not having hangovers and getting decent sleep, it is surprising how much extra time you can carve out in your life. These are all amazing wonderful things. Make sure you remind yourself about them because our brains are wired to look for negativity. Celebrate cool shit and, if you’re feeling like you might have a bender, go remind yourself hey: life is actually kinda okay sometimes.

10. Get help (if you need it)

Remember, these are just the opinions of some dude who yells his unhinged thoughts into the ether of The Internet. It’s definitely not medical advice, and if you’re seriously struggling (with drinking, mental health, addiction, or similar) there are heaps of services available, online, in-person, professional, or group.

I’ve been seeing the same psychologist for +7 years now and we’ve hit a good rhythm. I take my meds. I do exercise. I let them help me reframe my thinking, and use all the psychological tools available. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is something you can kinda just do on your own once you understand the basics. I don’t think I really understood CBT — despite seeing psychologists on/off since I was 17 — until Blindboy explained it in his podcast. I can’t remember the exact episodes, but it was quite early on. He puts it in easily understandable words while embracing you in the warmth of his podcast hug.

I don’t go to 12 Step meetings anymore, but they were (vaguely) helpful in early recovery/sobriety for something to do which wasn’t drinking. Plus, 12 Step forces you to make amends to people who you might’ve hurt while drinking/drugging. So, if I didn’t do it at the time when I was working the steps, please accept this heartfelt blanket apology for being a see you next tuesday. Twelve Step isn’t particularly evidence based, and can be incredibly toxic, and (as per point 1) sobriety ain’t for everyone. Hence why I don’t particularly recommend it, but there is no harm trying it if you go into it knowing it’s not a panacea.

What I would recommend are the loads of services/groups out there which can, and will, help. My favourite NZ-based one is Living Sober. Whatever you choose, just make sure it is evidence-based.

You really can’t go past self care, being kind to yourself, exercise, being part of a community (I’ve selfishly built my own here, in this newsletter, and here in the real world), talk therapy, and eating healthy. Boring, yes. Effective, totally.

Thanks, Shitkicker for the prompt. I hope this helps. Always here to talk if you need it and that extends to anyone out there who is reading this. Hit me up by replying to this email and/or smashing this button.

Some final thoughts

Does all this make me a wowser? Probably. By any and all measures alcohol creates significantly more harm than benefits. Should we ban it? No. But we really need to change the playing field in terms of following public health advice around what evidence-based changes can be made to reduce and prevent harm.

We also need to better fund treatment and addiction services to help people. Drinking (or drugging) is not really the problem — plenty of people hold down jobs while getting on the beers (and/or nose beers). The anti-social aspect of addiction is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our societies. Fix economic inequality, build strong communities, get people active, smash capitalism, yadda yadda yadda. You know how it goes. But for now, perhaps start by switching out your next beer for a non-alcoholic one.

Cheers to you!

Stay safe, stay sane

<3

JJW

Josh here again.

Imagine, for a moment, your most incorrigible, pernicious habit. Imagine that it has a powerful psychological and physiological hold on you. Imagine that it is tacitly or overtly encouraged by practically all of society; an endless sea you have no choice but to swim in.

Imagine stopping.

Imagine staying stopped, for any length of time. A month. A year. 10 years. More.

And yet, you remain sober.

That’s what many recovered and recovering alcoholics manage, and they have all my admiration. Everyone has something – often small, sometimes not – that they’d like to stop or start doing consistently. Those who achieve sobriety after alcoholism have achieved this, over much higher stakes than many of us will ever face. Nothing impresses me more.

Well done, JJW old mate. I’m proud to be your friend.

I thought it’d be fun and perhaps even convenient to record some of the posts here as a kind of mini-podcast. So here is the first episode – a recording of last week’s post, Map of the Problematic. (I’ve also added this audio to the original post.)

Map of the Problematic – The Cynics Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast

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It seems to be a rule in the writing business that the stuff you like the most is what audiences like the least. I really enjoyed Map of the Problematic, but a somewhat surprising number of subscribers didn’t! While it’s easy to assume that the unsubscribers were just those readers who are also into Andrew Huberman, I doubt that’s the case. I think it’s a bit of newsletter fatigue. God knows there are a lot of these things, with seemingly every made-redundant journalist starting one. I just want to reiterate that while a paid subscription is lovely and helps keep me in coffee, I want this newsletter to stay aggressively free. If a paid subscription causes you any kind of financial hardship, just stop paying (or, preferably, pay someone whose newsletter pays the bills, like Emily Writes. I love her Meditations posts).

Meditations to get you through the week

Who needs a rest? And it’s only Monday! How about some meditations to get you through the week? I hope at least one of these brings you a bit of joy and a bit of calm. You are a half blind seal bathing on the beach along the Whangaparāoa peninsula. You are large and round and perfect. Growing crowds watch you in awe. You listen as they coo and gasp in wonder at your fat belly. It is full of fish or whatever seals eat. You are happy. Your only job is to lie on this beach and bring joy to onlookers who will hold the memory of you through generations. In years to come, they will walk one day with a friend or a grandchild and point to the spot where you once bathed and say “I saw a fur seal here once”. And they will smile as they remember. And this is your sweet and lovely legacy.

Emily Writes WeeklyEmily Writes

The best way to pay me is to DM someone who has buyers remorse over purchasing a second-hand copy of 12 Rules for Life and getting them to subscribe, for free, to this newsletter.

So here are some links to some stuff I found improved my self this week:

Steal some writing time back

Nadine Ann Hura is always worth reading, and she’s got a rather lovely observation on stealing time to write – in poem form!

Steal back your life
Time to write is always stolen
So get used to thieving
I think of all the words I’ve ever written furtively, fearfully, faithfully
Hiding notes inside the spines of books penned by others
Never daring to describe myself as a writer
despite writing being the only thing I have ever done with any consistency
and not once because someone gave me the time
I am a thief, not a writer.

I relate, heavily. Go subscribe (for free) to read the rest. Newsletter fatigue notwithstanding, you won’t regret having Nadine’s writing in your inbox.

Time to Write is Always Stolen

So get used to thieving

Nadine Anne HuraN A Hura

Bro, read this essay on bro culture, it’s sick bro

After reading Map of the Problematic, a bunch of people recommended this essay by Patrick Wyman. I’d already seen it, but it was well worth the re-read.

But this kind of Bro Culture is also intimately connected to the emergence of a new kind of American ethnonationalism, rooted in its peculiar conception of masculinity, its collection of lifestyle products, its worship of guns, and its aversion to self-reflection. Maybe you can just have the big dudes lifting stones without the drive to pardon Navy SEALs convicted of horrific war crimes; but then again, maybe the algorithms make them impossible to separate.

Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity

This is a foundational text of American Bro Culture: two large men shooting the shit about lifting weights, working in references from everything to guns to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to football in the process. The subject of the day is the squat, and whether one of the two participants – Echo – neglects this essential lift.

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, by Patrick WymanPatrick Wyman

Life Coaching is (very often) a scam

Caveats: I think that some kinds of coaching – ADHD coaching, business coaching, sports coaching, even life coaching, whatever that is – are not scams, or at least, they don’t have to be. I’ve got an article coming up on coaching stuff, but in the meantime, use this NYT gift link to gape in horror at how thoroughly some people have been fleeced by the deeply unethical aspect of an unregulated industry:

After completing the program, Ms. Mullett was certified by the school and hoped to start coaching. But although she had initially been told that her certification would give her “everything I needed to make my first $100,000,” Ms. Mullett found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. The solution that she was offered? To spend more money on being coached.

Is Reddit OK?

A social experiment: Go to one of the self-improvement subreddits, like r/selfimprovement, sort the posts by controversial, and witness the absolute state of it.

There’s been a huge increase in GPT spam to Reddit lately and the self-improvement subreddits have been hit hard. They’re full of posts that are just some spammer’s poorly-written AI summary of a self-help book studded with affiliate links, and are somehow escaping moderator attention. But sometimes you get something so impossibly odd that only a human could have written it.

I just thought this was funny

I don’t mean to dunk on this newsletter – I’m sure it’s good, and paid subscriptions help enable writers to do fun activities like “eat,” but I thought this was amusingly emblematic of the great Paywalling of Everything:

More Birmo wisdom

If there comes a day when John Birmingham stops churning out quotable articles that boldly identify the self-improvement elephant in the room especially as it relates to writers, I’ll stop plugging him in my own newsletter – but today is not that day.

The Blergh, whatever you want to call it, arises from a loss of meaning, a loss of any connection to what’s grounded and firm. For us, specifically, I think it’s triggered by the rootless, untethered feeling of floating around on an endless sea of digital shit. And you what isn’t gonna help with that? Some glowing, beady-eyed, ratbastard influencer yammering at you to get one per cent better every day.

Failure is the point.

We get sold a lot of shit in this crazy, go-go world of ours. Climate change is no biggie. Delicious carob animal snacks with half the calories but all the flavour. “People are looking at your LinkedIn profile, John!” But of all this dubious content, perhaps the most pernicious is the idea that we need to be one percent better every day.

Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

Pilgrim’s progress

Let’s take a break from pull-up updates. Look, self-improvement is all about doing things yourself, right? So what could be more self-improvementing than self-surgery?

Here’s the story. I think I mentioned a while back that I’d picked up a splinter while gardening. “Splinter” doesn’t perhaps do it justice. It was a big bit of sharp stick that shot deep into the ball of my thumb, and when I pulled it out, it dropped off a friend. This splinter stayed in my thumb for two months, long after the entry wound had completely healed over. I had two ultrasounds to image the thing – one from a startlingly inept technician who tried doggedly to scan the wrong bit of my thumb and then snarled at me for daring to whistle in an attempt to take my mind off the whole ordeal – and I finally got surgery exactly one month ago today.

Unfortunately, the surgeon missed the splinter. She had promised that if they couldn’t get it out on the first attempt the only recourse was to (I’m using her term) flay my thumb wide open. I didn’t feel like going through this, and I’d figured out I could kind of push the splinter towards the end of my thumb, as it seemed to have made a kind of tunnel for itself – like a water-slide, but with pus. So I sterilized one of my craft scalpels, made a small cut, and slowly pulled it out with tweezers. It’s now a great life regret that I didn’t take a video of the process, but I did get this pic.

The splinter was pretty pristine given how long it had lived in my thumb. If anyone is looking for a variety of wood that can survive being carried around in their bodies for several months, I recommend whatever my hedges are made of. The moral of the story is obviously that if I ever need any kind of surgery in the future, I’m going to do it myself, and you should too.

Pango

You asked, the Cynic’s Guide to Kitten Pictures delivered. Here he is looking alternately fiendish and adorable while trying not to fall asleep.

Expect regular Pango updates in future, and possibly podcasts of select posts too!

Dopamine, now in song form

Also, let me know what you thought of the Cynic’s Guide podcast! You may now type any words you choose in the comments.

While I’m working on a bigger piece, I figured I’d write up some self-improvement links I thought were worth collecting. I haven’t done this before so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Do you like this sort of thing? Do you want to submit a link for a future newsletter? Let me know in the comments.

But you should probably read the newsletter first.

Blue zones might not be real

Heard of “blue zones?” You probably have: there are many articles, multiple books, TV docos, and a Netflix show. The idea is simple: that in areas where people mostly eat simple, reasonably nutritious food, walk around, and have a good sense of community, longevity follows. Good ol’ small-town country livin’, in other words. Now a (preprint) scientific paper throws the whole premise in doubt. It’s one of those excellent scientific reports that’s summed up neatly in the headline: “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud.” Yup: Blue Zones look to be either people forgetting how old they are, or “forgetting” how old they are.

Caution is warranted. It’s a preprint, for one thing, and for another it would be a mistake to throw out the “eating well, enjoying community, and taking active transport” baby with the “extraordinary claims of longevity require extraordinary proof” bathwater. But if Occam’s Razor holds, as it so often does, it looks like we’ll be able to replace the blue zone concept with a bunch of actual old frauds.

Love languages definitely aren’t real

As reported by New Zealand Geographic, my favourite magazine and one to which I wholly recommend subscribing, love languages are bunk. First described in 1992 by Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, the “five love languages” are familiar to self-help aficionados and anyone who’s ever fallen foul of a certain kind of social media algorithm: physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, and receiving gifts. So far, so good: that’s a list of things that nearly everyone likes. But it gets more complicated! Everybody supposedly has a primary and a secondary love language, and to love your partner efficiently, you must learn to speak their love language.

Not so, Impett et al argue, in an paper that manages to be delightfully tactful while destroying love languages with facts and logic:

Despite the popularity of Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, there is a paucity of empirical work on love languages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s three central assumptions that (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language

This is bound to annoy people whose love language is being annoyed when their favourite bit of bunkum gets munted by science. “But my love language is gifts, and I know it, because I really like getting gifts.” OK! I don’t really think it matters that much if people are using “love languages” as a shorthand or excuse for doing nice things for each other, just as I’m not overly fussed by people who take astrology slightly seriously. There’s plenty of potential harm for people who go too hard on it – for instance, anyone who says they’d “never date a Virgo” is dismissing one twelfth of the human population for no good reason, and anyone who takes love languages too seriously is potentially depriving themselves of, well, love. But using it to get more pressies or hugs? Sure, why not. Go for your life. The authors seem to get it:

We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships: Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.

Lovely. Go read the whole paper, it’s very accessible to laypeople and (to me and possibly no-one else) very funny in the its methodical, wholesale destruction of love languages.

Holy scientific method, Batman

New research just dropped about how science can inspire spiritual feelings and it’s about goddamn time.

This… suggests that spirituality of science reflects a unique attitude toward science that is not captured by belief or interest in science, but which is characterized by its unique associations with awe and spirituality.

Sure, it’s just a survey, but I like that someone out there is looking at this stuff, as I’ve been fascinated by the idea of scientific spirituality since I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Pale Blue Dot. This, in particular, resonated:

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual… A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

That does sound nice! But don’t think about it too hard, or you might find yourself beset (as I am) by a blizzard of cognitive dissonance where I imagine scientists presenting a paper in an attempt to inspire a congregation to feel the numinous as a janky band plays milquetoast rock and people sing whilst clapping out of time or waving their arms vaguely. To make it worse, I have rewritten my favourite Pentecostal worship song, Our God Is An Awesome God, which – I can’t stress enough – is real. (Please click that link, if only for the ~2 minute drum intro.)
Josh’s version:

Auroras: a phenomenon
They cause oxygen
To emit red photons
Oh, forbidden transition!

I’m sorry about all that. Let’s forget science for a bit, and draw from the reliable well of hokum and witchcraft:

How to use chickens to cure cat allergies

DID YOU KNOW: if you have cat allergies, a cure is simple! First, acquire some chickens. Encourage your cat to make friends of the chickens, or at the very least, make sure their boundaries overlap significantly. Care well for the chickens and give them a comfortable home, so they produce eggs. Then, feed some of the eggs to your cat. Bam, your cat allergy is gone!

Nonsense, right? Well, what if I told you that it’s all true?

It is. There’s a protein in cat saliva called “Fel d1” that’s responsible for most feline allergies. Because cats groom themselves with their tongues, the protein gets everywhere the cat goes, and that’s why your allergic brother starts sneezing the moment he enters your house. Chickens will produce antibodies to allergens they encounter in their environment, and these antibodies are passed into the yolks of their eggs, for the good of their young. So if you make sure your cat and chickens share an environment, and feed these yolks to your cat, the chicken antibody will nix the cat allergen. This incredible paper has the details. I’ve been meaning to get chickens, and I think this clinches it. (On the other hand, bird flu.)

Birmingham

I’ve been a big fan of the Brisbane-based writer John Birmingham for a very long time, ever since I discovered his work via (this is telling on myself a lot) the long-defunct Australian “lad’s mag” Ralph. He’s probably best known as the author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, which has long resonated with me, as someone who had his share of horrific flatmates and revolting flats.

He’s still writing – he turns out enjoyably sweary, explosion-heavy sci-fi, and, like me, punishes himself by writing two newsletters despite being in the grip of the dead hand of procrastination. For Alien Side Boob, the best-named newsletter on Substack, he’s written two bangers. The first is on modern loneliness; he suggests that the title should have been “It’s The Phones, Stupid.”

As I grow older, I find that I have to put more effort into reaching out. Because, of course, I do. The things that make friendship and connection so easy when we’re young, time and proximity, work against us as the years pile on. With children and careers, time becomes short. The friends we held close in our teens and twenties might well scatter to the far side of the world in their thirties and beyond. It seems as if we’ll never have that easy confluence of time and presence until, of course… we do. Because the seasons of work and parenthood also pass.

Modern Loneliness

I drove up the freeway to Ipswich early on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago. It must have been after the worst of COVID had receded, but it can’t have been too long after that weird, liminal disruption to all of our lives. The clock was running. I do remember that. I was making the hour or so round trip to pick up an old friend we were hosting for Easter lunch. I remember what we had. A slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with all of the trimmings, and chocolate, of course. Way too much chocolate. It was a very old-fashioned meal, top-shelf stodge, really. But this was an old-fashioned friendship, one that reached back over 50 years to the very first day of primary school.

Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

It’s a timely read. I was in the grip of the usual low-grade Sadness that makes worthwhile work so hard and solipsistic scrolling so easy when I found the impetus to keep tapping away at this newsletter, and Birmingham’s most recent piece played a big part in that.

Focusing on goals, like winning a race or a game—or writing a book, or losing weight, or fixing the sliding door to the guest room that the stupid dog knocked off the runners during a thunderstorm a couple of years ago and which has been hanging there mocking you and your lack of home handyman skills ever since—focusing on those end goals is only likely to remind you that you haven’t fixed the fucking door and you don’t even know how to start and you are a worthless excuse for a man so why even bother.

Focussing on process, though? That’s the money shot.

For me, these days, that means two things. Writing stuff and staying well.

The process is “simple but hard,” which – in my growing experience of self-help stuff – bodes well.

I turn up at my desk every day at about the same time. I make a list of three things I have to work on, but I understand I may not get to the third, and that’s fine. I quickly check in with a writing buddy on the other side of the world, a guy who’s usually just sitting down to his evening writing session as I begin my day. We tell each other what we’re writing. Then, I meditate for ten minutes. When that is done, I turn on my timer, set it to fifty minutes, and start to write. When the timer goes off, I tick a box on my three-item to-do list. I set another timer. Ten minutes. I do some stretches. I might lift some weights or hit the punching bag. The timer goes off, and it’s back to the desk for another fifty.

I liked it so much that I’m copying it. A big chunk of this newsletter was written by the fairly simple expedient of setting a timer for 50 minutes and not doing anything else until it went “ding.” Of course, I’ve tried this sort of thing before, and it works, but I’ve often fallen off it because something fools me into thinking that I’ll find some other method that doesn’t require that first, gut-wrenching lurch into action. Accepting that sudden twist of fear has been the only thing that ever gets me doing anything worthwhile. It’s simple, but hard – and worth it.

The full newsletter is here and well worth reading. Content warning: it contains mentions of weight loss, but mostly in a “forgetting about weight and focusing on getting strong” way that I think is a net positive.

Trusting the process

I wrote my first book, you know, that share house one, in five weeks, fuelled by four thousand dollars worth of hot chips, whisky and amphetamines. I had a goal. Get that sucker done before my 30th birthday. And one day before I fell backasswards out of my twenties I dropped the floppy disc with the finished manuscript on my publisher, Michael Duffy.

Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

The products and services that support this newsletter

Hey! You know how I think that self-improvement content should be free, and so I make my newsletter aggressively free? Unfortunately I keep suffering from this nagging need to feed my family and pay the mortgage, and to that end I think I should probably try to make my tiny art-merchandise business something more than an annual tax liability. To that end, here is a tea-towel, designed by me, and printed right here in New Zealand. Do buy it.

A towel for teas, feat. Birds in Hats

Do you have teas that need towelling? Are you after a piece of display art that folds away neatly in a drawer? Or do you merely wish that more tiny hats came with accompanying birds? Manifest those desires simultaneously in your own home by simply buying these tea-towels I made that are currently sitting in a box and not towelling anything.

Yes, I have teas that need towelling.

That’s it for today. I have high hopes that my new “do work instead of fucking around” method produces measurable results. I suppose we’ll find out together! To that end, here’s that large blue comment button again.

Because you have been patient, and you’re worth it, here is Pango the kitten.

It’s not about marijuana, sorry. I’ll save that for another time.

It’s about the garden.

See, we have these potted plants on the deck. There’s herbs, some plants some friends gave us, a plant with a horrifically problematic name now known as a Thai lime, a non-Thai lime, a yellow flower whose name perpetually escapes me, and some pots of dirt.

(The dirt contains bulbs, which may or may not flower at some point in the future.)

Gerberas! That’s the name of the flower. When we got them, they looked lovely. We took good care of them, and the rest of the plants, and they rewarded us with many healthy flowers. For about two weeks. Then we started to forget to water them. Abruptly noticing the yellowing, drooping leaves and dying flowers, I’d drench the plant. This made things worse. Meanwhile, the plants kindly gifted by our friends live on the deck in the same temporary pots they arrived in. I’ve been meaning to put them in the garden for six months. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been possible because for the last 18 months or so the garden has been an impenetrable jungle. I’m barely exaggerating: I recently bought a machete to help deal with it.

In my defence, the yard is both large and challenging. When we bought the house it had a well-kept vegetable garden, several fruit trees, and an expanse of hedges that wouldn’t look out of place in the gardens of Versailles. The former owners liked hedges so much that some of the large camellia hedges have smaller hedges, under which are lesser hedges made of a kind of hedge-grass. Under these, I suspect, will be moss hedges, and so on.

Within a few months of moving in, the lawns approximated meadows, the vegetable garden was overrun, the fruit trees – perhaps aware of their fate – appeared to be trying desperately to leave the premises, and the hedges were performing the topiary equivalent of free-form jazz. The seedlings and bulbs and Little Gardens we planted got eaten by the weeds and an alarmingly large army of slugs and snails that, it turned out, lived in the hedges. I went out once after dark to pick some mint and found them crawling over the walls and plants. There were, once more without exaggerating, thousands of them. When my family visited from Australia and tried to make progress through a former gate, inhibited by a hedge comprised entirely of Triffids, I made embarrassed apologies for the state of the place. “Oh, no, it’s nice!” said my sister-in-law. “It’s like The Secret Garden.”

As the yard grew wilder, so did any hope of improving it. The base state was so unkempt that I felt like I couldn’t tackle any one aspect of it, and so it fell further and further behind where I wanted it to be.

Despite this, I’ve finally made some progress in the yard. It started by spending a few minutes of my breaks poking at the worst weed infestations, and escalated to swapping some of my Scrolling Time to spending early mornings outside, swatting at plants and digging things. In the same spirit of pointing out obvious things that motivates this newsletter and all of the self-help genre: it’s nice to get outside during the day, even if it’s raining.

Things reached a new level when I realised I owned the house and could kill any hedge I wanted. I’ve been at it for a month or two now, even hiring a mulching machine that allowed me to feed the hedges to the rest of the garden. The ones that didn’t mulch I set on fire. When my dad came to stay a couple of weeks ago we blitzed the whole place with loppers, chainsaws and trimmers, letting the surviving hedges off with a warning.

Sure, the garden had gone to pot, and it was a lot to deal with, but – once I found the right approach – all that was fixable. Now that the garden fundamentals are in place and I’ve finally caught up with all the overgrowth, it feels like we might have space for some of the other things we’ve been wanting to plant.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

It’s been a while since I last emailed and I am increasingly conscious of the gap. When I did a reader poll some time ago, people told me to take my time with newsletters, and I do, but consistency remains the elusive goal. It’s tricky to judge how much of my personal life to bring into what is mostly a personal development + comedy newsletter but it’s inevitably a lot. The fact is, our little family had more bereavement – my wife Louise’s much-loved nana Ella passed away, and a week later so did our much-adored tabby cat, Darcy. We like to think he went to keep her company.

In events’ wake, we decided not to have any pets for a while.

Last Monday, we were dropping Leo off at preschool when I spotted a tiny black shadow on the tight shoulder of the road. I pulled over and went back to check what it was, almost getting smoked by a car in the process.

I found this.

Of course, we’d decided not to have any more pets. Our resolve to stay the course lasted about two days. He’s since had a vet check-up (all’s well) and his name is Pango. As I write, my lap looks like this:

The cat distribution mechanism, something I was previously unaware of, has done its work. The cosmic ballet goes on. Oh! And speaking of the cosmic ballet:

When I heard about a solar storm predicted to cause aurora visible throughout the whole of New Zealand I steeled myself for disappointment. Surely it’d fizzle out, like the other times I’d chased aurora. But no. Somehow, we got Aurora Australis, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country. My brother-in-law and I drove out to his parents’ farm with my ancient, entry-level DSLR, and I took pictures I’ve been obsessing over ever since. Despite attempts, it’s impossible to do the aurora justice. While the colours are less intense than they appear in photos, no picture (or prose) can convey their sheer scale and majesty. The Lights are like a fracture in the sky, and it is easy to see why people have long attributed them to gods.

If you’re looking for a self-improvement moral, I suppose it’s that nature is healing – whether it comes in the form of gardens, or cats, or vast swathes of radioactive debris flung across space by a pitiless star. From my own experience, I can think of nothing better to lift your spirits than witnessing a once-in-a-century cosmic event. Do try it.

Steel yourselves. I don’t know how one steels themselves – perhaps it is by taking an enormous amount of iron, grabbing a few charcoal bricks, and climbing into a blast furnace – but do what you need to prepare. This one is a big deal.

Throughout this newsletter, I have championed brevity, mainly in the works of others. This is ironic, because my own posts are often thousands of words long. And yet, I long still for the succinct. I crave it. I want a life-changing piece of advice to be one sentence. A life sentence, if you will.

Shower thought: a life sentence could be as short as one day. Hmm. Isn’t that profound? Such profundity, in your inbox, for free. I’d subscribe to me.

But I, as always, digress.

Here’s the point: I followed one of those pieces of self-help advice that everyone advises and no-one (except me) follows.

I made my bed, every single day, for one whole year.

Really.

And here are the staggering, jaw-dropping, doctors-hate-him results.

I hope you’re ready for this.

Every single day that I made my bed, my bed was made.

Let that sink in. I, single-handedly, or double-handedly if I’m being honest, overcame the forces of Chaos and Entropy and forced my own Order on an uncaring universe. I am the carpenter God of my own tiny world. I am the Maker of Beds.

I bet you want to know how I did it.

Method

Here is the Drummond Protocol for Bed-Making, as articulated on my four-hour daily science podcast, the B-Lab (podcast forthcoming, title TBC, sponsored by Mathletic Greens, the only supplement proven* to support your mathematical skill).

Step 1: Be alive.

Step 2: (Optional) Sleep in bed. You don’t actually need to sleep in a bed yourself. You can make someone else’s bed if you like. I suggest visiting a friend, or breaking in to a neighbour’s house. Surprise!

Step 3: Make the bed.

If you want to know more specifically how to make a bed, visualisation might be helpful. Perhaps you could do it as part of your daily meditation. Simply picture a bed, a made bed, as you might have seen in movies or catalogues advertising desirable goods and services. Then stop meditating and make the bed.

You can also manifest a made bed. Start by feeling that the Universe loves you and wants the best for you. (It doesn’t.) Imagine your made bed. Envisage it in rich detail. The satisfyingly smooth covers, the perfectly fluffed pillows. A duvet shook free of dust mites and cat hair. Let the image play in your mind, and then feel the universe make it real. Ideally, as a time-saving measure, you can do all this manifesting at the exact same time you actually make your bed. Isn’t the Universe amazing?

Results of daily bed-making (amazing)

What else happened? What superpowers resulted? What other beneficial habits did I take up as a direct result of my sheet-tugging and duvet-smoothening? How did my finances improve? Did my deadlift go up? What about the positive effects on my marriage and general well-being?

Steel yourself. No, wait, you already did that. Tungsten yourself. Prepare for jaw-dropping. I suggest either a cushion on the floor or a tiny crash helmet you wear on your chin.

What happened was:

Nothing.

In short: I made my bed every day and nothing happened.

That’s the article, but you can keep reading if you want.

I hope you enjoyed that. I did. Blowing the sentence “I made my bed for a year and nothing happened” out to 500-ish bloviated words is an enjoyable creative writing exercise; a must-do for any budding self-help author. I suppose it’s unfair to say that nothing happened. I liked having a made bed every day, or rather, every night, when I climbed into it. It’s nice for things to be tidy. And there was the usual mild satisfaction of doing something I hadn’t previously done on any kind of regular basis. But there was no epiphany, no greater purpose, no flow-on effect that I could notice. (Unlike taking cold showers, of which I’m still a daily fan.) And, believe me, with the bed-making I was trying to notice an effect. I didn’t want to be doing something every day for a year for no reason. It was very motivated reasoning! To make sure it was a fairish test, albeit a test with a sample size of one, I made a point of not making the bed for several weeks after my year was up and didn’t notice the slightest difference. I wish I could say that this was the Atomic Habit that I built an entire network of other beneficial habits on but it just… wasn’t. It was fine, I suppose, but it also didn’t matter.

It might be different for you. Maybe making your bed will set you up for life. Maybe it’ll drag you out of a funk. Maybe it will depress you. Maybe you’ll find a long-lost five dollar note in the sheets. I have no idea. You may as well try it; I definitely don’t think it’ll hurt. As far as risk calculus goes I think making your bed is up there with “going outside” and “drinking water;” it’s not advice that needs to be studded with caveats.

But there is another story here: a case-study in how the news media launders and makes up the kind of bullshit that’s designed to sell self-help books.

And, as it turns out, beds.

Make (Up) Your Bed (Bullshit)

There is no shortage of self-help stuff that tells you to make your bed. Many people’s minds probably turn to Jordan Peterson, whose book 12 Rules for Life I am, out of a sense of obligation to readers, reading. Aside: this book is hilarious. Here is a real excerpt.

Chaos, by contrast, is where – or when – something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trival form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering.

I swear I didn’t make that up. The whole book is written that way and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Wodehouse and Bryson have nothing on Peterson. Humour aside, Peterson is associated with bed-making, thanks to the chapter in 12 Rules for Life entitled “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.”

We’ll make space for Peterson and this… interesting sentiment in another newsletter, but for now it’ll suffice that he’s sort of associated with making beds, or at least getting your room tidied up. Here’s a video of him expounding on bed-making, set to an inspiring free-music soundtrack, that I promise will not enlighten you at all:

If you want to save yourself five minutes, the auto-generated transcript gives you all the flavour you’re going to need, as his entire talk on bed-making is essentially one enormous run-on sentence.

…and so you want to clean up your room well okay how do you do that exactly well a room is a room is a place to sleep and so if you set your room up properly then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep and how you should sleep and then you figure out when you should wake up and then you figure out, well, what clothes you should wear because they have to be arranged properly in your dresser and then you have to have some place to put your clothes if you’re going to have some clothes…

So let’s leave Peterson for a bit. He doesn’t really dwell on bed-making all that much; for him it is just part of the setting-your-house-in-perfect-order continuum. The main Make Your Bed guy is one Admiral William H. McRaven.

McRaven’s book on bed-making is called, as you might expect, “Make Your Bed.” It spawned a daily journal, also entitled “Make Your Bed,” and God knows how many knockoffs on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, which are also mostly called “Make Your Bed.” I accidentally downloaded one called Make Your Bed: The Keys to Achieving Anything You Dream by John Dmitry Bordelon: do not make the same mistake. The McRaven original is exactly the the kind of self-help I always look for: distillable down from tens of thousands of words to a single sentence, which – blessedly – negates the need to buy the book. At least it’s shorter than most self-help, which is because it’s based on an even shorter commencement speech McRaven gave at the University of Texas that went viral. The rave music video based on the inspirational speech is shorter still.

Lots of people did buy the book, though. Make Your Bed is, astonishingly, a number 1 New York Times bestseller. I’ll never not be amazed that the most simplistic, obvious self-help stuff is what sells best.

I bought it too, of course, because it’s kind of my job.

And it’s fine, I guess? McRaven seems to be one of the less objectionable officers in the spectrum of those who serve the American Imperium, and his book does exactly what it says on the tin. Sure, it’s problematic in the way much self-help is – it glorifies martial ways of living, as taught by men who make a virtue of acquiring PTSD by blowing up anyone who hampers US access to oil fields – but ultimately it’s really just a lengthy, mostly harmless paraphrase of a Bible verse, Luke 16:10: “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities.” There is nothing particularly wrong with it, apart from the writing. Look, it’s self-help; if you’re after prose styling you’ll read Proust or something. But there is no excuse for this, apart from comedy:

For the first few months, we slept on Army cots. Nevertheless, I would wake every morning, roll up my sleeping bag, place the pillow at the head of the cot, and get ready for the day. In December 2003, U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein. He was held in confinement during which time we kept him in a small room. He also slept on an army cot, but with the luxury of sheets and a blanket. Once a day I would visit Saddam to ensure my soldiers were properly caring for him. I noticed, with some sense of amusement, that Saddam did not make his bed. The covers were always crumpled at the foot of his cot and he rarely seemed inclined to straighten them.

There you have it. Be like McRaven, who always made his bed. Don’t be like Saddam Hussein, who was a military dictator, invaded Kuwait, gassed Kurds, and didn’t make his bed. Perhaps there’s a greater moral that if you are ever in military prison, you should always make your bed to impress your supervising guard, before you are hanged.

What the book doesn’t do is connect bed-making with any kind of evidence that it helps people. The benefits are, evidently, self-evident. This sent me on a search for something a bit more empirical.

Much like bed-making itself, I didn’t find anything particularly helpful.

There was plenty in the media about the benefits of bed-making. “People who spend a couple extra minutes smoothing the comforter back and rearranging pillows actually led more productive lives,” trumpets CNBC, under the clickbait headline “Completing this task first thing in the morning takes seconds—and it can make you more productive all day.”

Fascinating! What’s the source of this life-changing empirical data?

“…according to a new survey from Best Mattress Brand.”

Ah.

Now, let’s not be too cynical. Best Mattress Brand may not have the impact factor of the more prestigious sociology journals, but that doesn’t mean their methodology was unsound. Let’s have a look at their disclaimer.

These data are intended to be used for entertainment only. These data rely on self-reporting, and no statistical testing has been performed on the findings.

Okay, credit to you, Best Mattress Brand, for at least disclosing your methodology, but unfortunately it amounts to “our research is useless.” Or perhaps that’s unfair. I’m sure it’s useful for farming search-engine hits and milking affiliate links, which appear to be the reason Best Mattress Brand exists. What’s not useful is the way it’s muddied the bed-making discourse, with dozens of news sites citing Best Mattress Brand’s spurious research and results.

What else is out there?

Patient, a UK-based health advice site that sets itself apart with the claim that “all content is checked by health professionals,” cites a mixed bag of research. A tidy environment can improve or retain brain function – in the elderly. They also reference a study claiming that having a “tidy living space can increase your generosity.” Both these studies bode well for the elderly miser demographic, but the rest of us might be left wanting. Then they assert that “bed-makers have more sex.” Spicy! This seems like a tangible benefit. Let’s see what it links to.

Thanks, Patient. Your source for “bed-makers have more sex” is a site called “Mattress Nerd.” It is, of course, another SEO and affiliate link farm, that occasionally does real-ish surveys as an excuse to sell stuff.

The more I dug, the more garbage I found. An article at the Zanesville Times Recorder – a top Google result – linked to a 2012 article from Psychology Today, which you might think was credible. It’s not. “Make Your Bed, Change Your Life?” wonders the headline, before parading statistics from survey conducted by a website rejoicing in the name Hunch.com, which (inevitably) no longer exists. But wait, there’s always more. “Why Making Your Bed Every Day Isn’t Just Being OCD” says an organisation called Amerisleep, offending OCD sufferers everywhere. Its source, as far as I can tell, is a paper entitled “Save $450 On Any Mattress Plus Free Shipping.”

I could have kept going forever. I’m not going to. The media endorsement of the benefits of bed-making rests almost entirely on anecdotal evidence from admirable admirals and “for entertainment purposes only”-tier reports from link farms. I’m sure I could pick through Google Scholar for actual papers that link the benefits of bed-making to self-reported energy levels or something, but I suspect that (if they exist) they amount to the same thing: your mileage may vary. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, it probably doesn’t matter.

What to make of it all? Feel free to give bed-making a go, if you don’t do it already. Or, if you already make your bed regularly, you could try stopping! Chances are that neither will hurt, and who knows, it might be the world-changing, Saddam Hussein-beating life hack you’ve always wanted. But nothing I could find backed up the claim that making one’s bed is a necessary first step in becoming a virtuoso of virtue. Claiming a causal connection between bed-making and success seems a long bow drawn much too far. Start making your bed and you’ll still be you, muddling on in a confusing, complicated world – except at the end of the day, your bed will be made.

_*Lies.