I’m already feeling a bit dizzy. I know why — this often happens when this train of thought arrives — but I can handle it.

I think.

Deep breath.

This isn’t a story I’ve told before. My wife knows a lot of the details, my family and closest friends know some. But I’ve never sat down and written it all out, so I expect there’s some new information even for the people who know me best.

I’ve dropped a few hints, and shared some details. Here’s what I wrote for Webworm back in 2021, in a piece about leaving Evangelical Christianity that (until what you’re reading right now) was probably the most personal thing I’d ever written.

It happened to me. The cracks grew, then my faith — my worldview, my culture, my personality — shattered almost overnight into a billion irrecoverable shards. I couldn’t get any aspect of it back. It was gone. My entire life, I’d been talking to God, loving God, like he was a parent. Then, one day, he was worse than dead. He’d never really been there. I realised that who I’d been talking to was just… myself. There was no-one else. Just me, and the echoes in my head.

I would not wish this experience on my worst enemy. When I left the church I lost all but one of my close friends. I’d always been an anxious person and the gap in my life left by faith was eagerly filled by what, in hindsight, was fairly serious mental illness. I functioned, I found new friends, but my health suffered terribly for over a decade.

Here’s the other part of that story.

---

When I was a kid my sister and I were homeschooled by my mum for a couple of years. The horrible Christian school I’d attended had got too expensive, and probably also a bit too horrible. By way of example: the school used the A.C.E curriculum, which expected children to sit and work silently in tiny, 3-walled cubicles. You had to put up a little flag on your cubicle if you wanted to leave for any reason, and you had to wait for the attendant — teacher is too strong a word — to notice your flag and give you permission to leave. One day, I had to go to the toilet to pee, and my flag wasn’t noticed. I waved it frantically and yelled. No-one responded. So I broke the rules and ran to the bathroom, wetting my pants half-way there.

I was about six. I’ve never forgotten the awful shame of the bow-legged walk back to my desk —  only to get in trouble for leaving without asking.

So, homeschooling. Mum was determined to do a better job than that awful school had, and to her credit, she mostly did. I learned a lot more with her teaching me than I’d managed at school. But it was far from perfect. She got my sister and I another American booklet-based school curriculum called Abeka, and part of the course was called Health, Safety and Manners. This book featured a little dude in a problematic pith helmet called Safety Sam, a dog, whose name I’ve forgotten, and two little turds called the Manners Twins.

I instinctively disliked the Manners Twins, but I liked Safety Sam. He had a cool helmet, and a good dog, and he seemed to know his stuff. So when he told me, in comic strip form, that if you didn’t get a full 8 to 10 hours sleep or thereabouts every night you could die, I lost my tiny little mind.

I was a very literal-minded kid, and I took health stuff very seriously. There wasn’t much I didn’t find a way to worry about. I once read an account in Readers Digest about a middle-aged man who’d suffered a heart attack and freaked myself into thinking I had coronary disease. I told my parents about this, and I’m not sure how they kept a straight face.  We had a stethescope in the house for some reason and my dad took the opportunity to put it on and listen to my heart. I waited anxiously for the diagnosis. My dad’s face was grave.

“Son, I have very bad news for you.”

I almost died on the spot. If he’d still had the stethescope on he’d have heard my heart backflip and then race up to 250 bpm.

“You’re just fine,” he said, and laughed.

I didn’t think it was funny.

So, sleep problems. A mixture of Safety Sam’s well-meaning advice and worrying about other health problems — heart disease, brain tumours, whether or not I had accidentally cursed the Holy Spirit and was condemned to hell for all eternity — meant that I suffered horrible insomnia, from the age of about eight on to God knows when. I still got enough sleep, probably, but it took me forever to get to sleep, and consequently I developed an overwhelming obsession with getting to bed early.  We’d be at a family party, the other kids would be hyped to be up past their 8 o’clock bedtimes, and I’d be casting around looking for a place to nap, or begging my parents to take me home so I’d be able to get to sleep (and not die).

Once I grew into my teens I started to get over it. I found some friends that put up with my less-weird quirks and worked assidously to sand off some of the rougher edges. The sleep thing was one of them. Over time, I started to like staying up late,  rebelling against Safety Sam and his overzealous advice. After not waking up dead after several late nights in a row I discovered, as a lot of teens do, that I was a natural night owl. I’d regularly stay up and read past 2 AM. That created its own problems, like the fact that I could barely stay awake in school. I quite often fell asleep in morning classes and got mocked for it by students and teachers alike.

Once I started at Uni, it didn’t make any sense to break the pattern. There were parties to go to and even occasional study binges. I pulled most-nighters or all-nighters fairly often, fuelled by an absolutely spectacular caffeine habit.  I once stayed up all night working on a law assignment because I wanted to go snowboarding the next day. Halfway through, I got frustrated at my slow progress, so I forced myself to learn touch-typing as I went, reasoning that it wasn’t going to make me any slower. By the time dawn stirred itself, I had a completed assignment, a roaring headache, and the ability to touch-type. My friend and I went snowboarding as planned. I can’t remember the mark I got for the assignment, but it was good enough to pass.

Deep breath. You’re OK.

The funny thing with some traumas is that they might appear trivial or comical to outsiders while, inside yourself, they’re among the most consequential of the things that make you you. I don’t know how this one comes off, because like I said, I’ve never told it. And as always, I try to tell it funny, because what else can I do?

Any other way might feel too real, or hurt too much.

Working in bars was a natural progression in my second year of Uni. I was already an owl, and I needed money to live. It all made sense. I’d make room for the work at night and all the things I needed to get done during the day, helped by my faithful ally, caffeine. It had always worked before. Here is how I put it in a piece I wrote for a lifestyle magazine a few years ago:

Before quitting, I used coffee to not be tired during the day. Because I worked nights at a bar and had terrible insomnia, I was always tired, so I drank a lot. When coffee was unavailable I found other sources of caffeine. At the bar, V and Red Bull were always handy. I chugged them whenever I could. This, combined with seldom sleeping, a smoking habit and regular 5am drinking sessions conspired against me.

This is the bit I’ve never managed to tell before, but now I write it down, it’s coming out easy, because this story has been read by me to me in my mind a hundred thousand times.

I wasn’t quite well, you see. Something was up. In a far cry from my health-obsession days, I did my best to ignore it. The most obvious thing was a bad tooth. A piece of a molar had broken off and now there was a constant pain that I kept on top of by mainlining aspirin and chewing gum to cover up the horrible breath that I was acutely conscious of. But I couldn’t afford to get a root canal, so I worked most nights at the bar to save up. In addition to this, I was working on my Law exams — but I’d also decided to quit law and study journalism, and that required a fair bit of admin. And then there was volunteering for the student newspaper, and a friend and I were writing and preparing to shoot a short film, and I’m sure there was other stuff. I was a being productive, so damn Safety Sam and his bullshit! I didn’t have time to slack off!

I’d taken up running during the night, because I was feeling crook and figured exercise might help. You see some deeply unnerving things, running at midnight. I once saw a teenage girl crying her heart out in the gutter, as the sound of screams and crashing came from the house she was facing.

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” I asked. She leaped in fright.

“No! No, it’s all right. I’m sorry. Go away, please,” she said, shaking.

After that I realised that running around neighbourhoods at midnight made me an unnerving thing. But that wasn’t the strangest thing I did. One night, I suddenly threw myself to the ground and started beating and clawing at it, howling into the dirt. I remember doing this quite clearly. Part of me was in agony, and another part — a rational, dispassionate bit — was unimpressed. “Pick yourself up. Pull yourself together. Come on. What if someone sees?”

I still don’t quite know why I did this. It’s still incredibly embarrasing to remember, let alone admit to. Perhaps it was a precursor of what was coming. Some deep part of my mind was trying to warn me. Compounding the health and sleep troubles was the fact that I was slowly breaking up with Jesus, on account of him being long-dead and me realising that basing a substantial portion of my life around an ancient Middle Eastern god didn’t make all that much sense. Maybe it was all making me go slightly mad. It makes sense, writing about it now.

Deep breath. You’re OK. This is just a memory, it can’t hurt you. (Well, it sort of can, but we’ll get to that.)

It happened the day before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve Eve, I liked to call it. I’d called my dad the previous night, December 22nd. I’d drive up to Kerikeri with my cousin on Christmas Eve proper, I said, but I wanted to work Christmas Eve Eve because I’d get double pay. Then I’d finally be able to get my tooth fixed, and maybe buy some presents for the family as well.

I woke up that morning at 7 am, having worked the previous night until about 5 am, smashing free V energy drinks the whole while. I hadn’t managed to sleep much, if at all, because I was nervous. In order to transfer from Law into Journalism I needed to go to an interview with two course tutors and explain why I’d be a good candidate, and the interview was early in the morning. At about 8 am, if I remember correctly.

I showered, shaved, cleaned my teeth (ow), drove to the interview. I didn’t have time for breakfast so I ate a Moro bar and slugged two coffees and chewed gum.

I have no memory of the interview besides sitting down and facing the two interviewers. I assume I did well, because they let me in to the course. I’d find that out later, after my hospital stay.

I went home. I felt terrible, so I had another coffee. I thought about sleeping, but my friend Jamie was coming over so we could work on our mockumentary movie script, which had the working title Kung Fu Survivor: Enter The Fu. So I watched Desperado, the Robert Rodriguez film starring Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek.

I don’t remember much of the film because my head was doing something odd. It was periodically buzzing, like my brain was receiving sudden snatches of activity broadcast from a beehive. In between whatever this was, it felt like it was full of cotton wool. It was as if sound and sight weren’t working right.

This wouldn’t do. Jamie was due over soon. I knew the fix; something I’d done several times before when I was really tired.

I put on the song Die, All Right! by The Hives and moshed like a motherfucker.1

When I say moshed, I really mean it. I thrashed my head around like a dog with a rat. Fuck my sleepy brain! It would wake up if it knew what was good for it.

Then, and I don’t know where this came from, I got the idea that Jamie wanted to meet me at the University library. I lived in a flat one block and one playing field away, so I decided to walk out to meet him there.

About halfway across the field I started to feel really strange. Colours worked differently. Trees loomed. The sky moved in a way that the sky shouldn’t and doesn’t move. The ground seemed to want to get to know me better.

I took a step. I stumbled. I was really dizzy.

I must be drunk. But that’s odd, because I’d only had a couple the previous night. This must be what LSD is like. I remember thinking that quite clearly.

I took another step. I tripped. I think.

I fixed my eyes on one of the playing field fenceposts about a hundred metres away. If I could reach that, I would sit down. I’d be okay. I took several steps towards it.

The world swam and spun

and

and

i am walking and i

where

I

how did i

i am not but i

a glimpse in a (mirror?) glass – window? i am

i am in dirt covered and with scratches and my face i am bleeding from my mouth and the blood has gone down my (split) lip and mixed with spit and foam and dribbled  all on my shirt and

i am not this, I am

. somewhere and

lurch and crash and stumble and horrified who was that

. people lift me and

are you okay? oh my god, are

walk in g h om  e

my Nokia phone chirps the text message tone

“Where are you? I’m at your place.”

i am in the field

…where is my hat?

texting “sorary I though hat you were at Uni Im combing back home now See you there”

“What the fuck happened to you?” Jamie asked me, as I lurched into the lounge room, probably. I don’t remember much of this bit, it’s mostly recollected from what Jamie told me later.

“I was drunk,” I said. “Must have passed out in the playing field.”

“You’re bleeding. You’ve got blood all down your shirt.”

“I was in a fight,” I said.

I should stress that I was not lying, not intentionally. My memory of the past few hours had been wiped and it wouldn’t come back for a while yet. In the meantime, my brain was frantically filling in the blanks with things it thought made sense.

But despite the effort I wasn’t making much sense at all, so a writing session was out. Instead, I changed my shirt and we got in Jamie’s car and headed to the Warehouse to get some supplies we needed for the film.

We walked around the Warehouse and I tried to make conversation. Slowly, I was realising something had gone hideously wrong. My lip hurt and my mouth was still full of blood. I felt sick. We got back in Jamie’s car. Memories started to come online, like the lights when you flip the breakers after an outage.

“I don’t think I was in a fight,” I said.

Jamie looked at me. “No shit.” The bar had me work as a bouncer on a quiet door sometimes when they were short-staffed, with a giant overcoat to hide my lanky frame, but I wasn’t the fighting type and Jamie knew it.

“I don’t think I was drunk,” I said. “Something happened. Something… happened. I think I need to see a doctor.”

He drove me without question to the nearest doctor’s surgery. It was going to be the emergency room, but we spotted a doctor’s on the way. They saw me immediately.

The doctor was brisk but kind. He listened to my halting story, now mostly complete with the actual events of the morning and some I wasn’t sure about, looked in my mouth, stitched up my lip, and asked questions.

“Do you take drugs? Specifically P, pure methamphetamine?”

“No, never.”

“Really? Please tell me if you do, there won’t be any legal trouble. Everything you tell me is confidential.”

“Honestly, no. I smoke a bit of weed every now and then. I smoke cigarettes a bit. And I drink a lot of coffee. Pretty normal,” I said.

“How much coffee?”

“I dunno,” I said. “If you’re counting the energy drinks, probably about… 14 a day?”

“Hmm. That’s a lot. You should cut down.” A note. “Have you had a history of epilepsy?” he asked. No, I said.

“Well, I think you’ve had a grand mal seizure,” he said. “Except we call them tonic-clonic, these days.”

I felt my heart flip out and remembered that eldritch burst of colour and light or was it happening again right now? Is it happening again, right now? and I got dizzy again. I get dizzy again, as I write.

Deep breath.

“Doesn’t this mean that I have… a brain tumour, or something?” I asked.

“Not necessarily. It’s pretty unlikely, actually,” he said. “It’s more likely to be lifestyle factors, from what you’ve told me.”

Oh my God, I think, Safety Sam was right!

I breathed. “Alright. That’s good. I have to drive up to Northland, actually.”

“But I think we should send you to hospital anyway. Oh, and you can’t drive anymore.”

“I can’t drive tomorrow?”

“You can’t drive at all.”

I can’t remember if there was an ambulance ride to the hospital or if Jamie took me. I should ask him. Say thanks, in case I didn’t before.

Once admitted, I called my dad to say I wouldn’t be coming up tomorrow, like I’d planned. I didn’t know how to say it, so I tried to sound casual and chirpy.

“Why can’t you drive up? What’s wrong?”

I could hear the tension in his voice.

“I’m in, um, hospital. Uh, they think I had a seizure.”

I heard my father’s voice break over the phone.

“My son!” he cried. “Oh, my son, my son!”

“I’m okay! I’m okay, Dad. They just need me overnight for observation.” He cried. I think he said a prayer for me. I think he said he’d come pick me up. I wish I could remember.

The following morning, one of the neurologists came to see me with some interns following him around. Just like on Scrubs!  He asked if they could observe as part of their training and I said I didn’t mind. He asked me a few questions about how I was doing and then turned to the crew of junior doctors.

“Now, a case history. This young man’s story has similarities to that of a woman with no prior history of epilepsy who drove off the road at sunset, after suffering a tonic-clonic seizure. What might have triggered it?”

The students conferred. From my bed, I spoke up.

“It was a photosensitive seizure,” I said. “The sun was low, she was driving past trees, and they created a strobing effect.”

Silence. There might have been at least one low-hanging jaw.

“That’s exactly right,” the neurologist said. “Um, are you a medical student?”

“No,” I said. “I was studying law, but I’m going to do journalism.”

“I think you’ll be good at it,” he said.

I wish he’d been right.

Unfortunately, the next ten years or so of bizarre health problems were going to get in the way a bit.

I’m not sure how I got home from the hospital in Hamilton to Kerikeri. I think my dad drove most of the night to pick me up, but after the hospital, I don’t remember much. I don’t remember that Christmas or the days following at all, until a couple of weeks later where the memories get very, very vivid for less-than-ideal reasons.

Breathe. You wrote it down. You’re still here.

---

I don’t know how hard that is to believe, but it all really happened. Some bits are sketchy. I am not sure if the memory of me staring at my bloodied reflection is real, but I think it is. I definitely lost my hat. And I know that detail with the neurologist and his crew comes off exactly like one of those “and then everybody clapped!” fake stories made up for internet points, and I’m aware that I had some light brain damage at the time, but it did happen just how I’ve told it. And I’m glad it did, because it was reassurance I desperately needed that my brain still worked, that I was still me.

The reason I knew the answer, of course, was videogames. I’d seen the “PHOTOSENSITIVE EPILEPSY WARNING” displayed thousands of times when starting a console to play Halo or another game, and I’d often thought that the strobing from low sun coming through trees might set a sensitive driver off. In high school I’d even invented an (intentionally) stupid superhero called The Amazing Sockhead who used strobes to knock out baddies.

At this point you may be asking yourself “But what does this intensely personal story of a deep but very insignificant-in-the-scheme-of-things trauma have to do with self-improvement?” and the answer is, well, a lot.

I was trying to hustle, in my own ridiculous way, and I burned out so hard that my brain flickered like a guttering candle and — briefly — went out. And this tanked religion for me once and for all. Despite smartass hospital ward stories, I am no neurologist, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. To the best of my understanding, a tonic-clonic seizure is a little (and only if you are lucky) like turning a computer off then on again. For a moment, I was off, and the nothingness on the other side of consciousness that I experienced was the last straw for my tottering Christian faith. I went from believing at least loosely in a Heaven, to being convinced that there was a no-thing endlessness on the other side. I often wonder what might have happened had I had that seizure on my 400-odd-kilometre drive from Hamilton to Kerikeri, instead of in a playing field. I would probably be dead. It makes me feel that for a brief moment, I stood on the edge of a precipice and peered into the void.

I do not recommend it.

The seizure set off an extraordinary host of horrible health shit, including the return of my childhood sleep anxiety and insomnia, the eventual cure for which came from a self-help book! Yes, it does sometimes work. I’ll write about that next time. But if you’ve made it this far, I want to try to reassure you:

Unless you have a known, pre-existing epileptic condition, a night (or even quite a few nights) of poor quality sleep are unlikely to set off a seizure or anything remotely like one.

My experience was not just a night or two of bad sleep. It was years and years of bad sleep compounding with a genuinely excessive caffeine habit, poor-quality food, smoking, drinking, a terrible job, a terrible work environment, terrible stress and burnout, unhelped mental health issues, losing God as abruptly as a smartphone dropped from a rollercoaster, and like five actual minutes of frantic head-banging, and possibly more that I’ve forgotten to mention.

And, despite everything — despite the intense (mental) health stuff that followed and insomnia and becoming a parent with all the attendant sleep issues and much more besides — I have never had another seizure.

Spoiler warning for the next newsletter, I guess.

Breathe. It was nearly twenty years ago. You’re okay.

Hi,

I’m writing this in a haze of sleep deprivation, only slightly offset by a coffee so strong it’s probably illegal in multiple countries.

It began when my wife went out at 3 AM to direct a dawn performance of The Taming of the Shrew. (I’m all for the glorious traditions of amateur Shakespeare, but in my opinion the dawn performance can curl up in a ditch and die.) About ten minutes after she left, my toddler woke up yelling. The normal cuddles and pats wouldn’t settle him so I let him hop into the Big Bed for a snooze. He, for the first time ever, promptly fell out. More yelling, checking for blood and lumps and concussion — and once he eventually did fall asleep, the Sleep Conspiracy began.

I think everyone who’s been alive long enough, not just parents of toddlers, have experienced nights that conspired against sleep. You’re almost nodding off when a mosquito makes an appearance. You hunt it down and swat it (or, if you’re a boomer, kill it with two full cans of fly spray) and just as you’re nodding off some unwelcome train of thought chugs into your head. I can’t remember the specific one that bothered me last night, so let’s pretend (very realistically) that I’m worried about what will happen if I spend a year writing this bloody newsletter without anything to show for it.

Once that thought left the station, after about an hour, the minor auditory hallucinations began, with my stupefied brain deciding that the white noise from my fan was actually my son crying.

I turned off the fan, and finally began to drift off.

Then my son did actually start crying.

After he was sorted out again, the local spur-winged plover coven decided now was a perfect time to start role-playing someone’s brutal murder.

I like birds, but not at 5:30 AM.

It’s now 2:30 PM, I am viciously tired, the kind of tired that makes you feel like the air is oil and your head is full of spiders, so tired that I think I’ll take a nap now and try this writing caper again when I’m

(Newsletter writing resumes, one day later.)

I didn’t actually manage to take a nap, because the toddler didn’t either and he kept me up by singing adorable, infuriating songs to himself for an hour and a half. Luckily, in the evening, I had the opportunity for an early night.

I didn’t take it.

In this, today is like the vast majority of the last 7,304 days, during which I have sworn to myself that I will, at long last, get to bed early. Or, at least, at a reasonable hour.

I almost never do. There are a variety of obstacles in my pursuit of an early night. Sometimes, I am up late studying, or writing, or painting, or reading — either an edifying novel, or thought-provoking, award-winning work of non-fiction.

But mostly it’s this fucking guy.

I am a videogame tragic. I’ve loved games since I was a kid, and adulthood has given me enough disposable income to buy every game console on the market, coupled with enough disposable time to play almost no games at all. These days, if I am playing something, it’s usually Halo.1

Happily, modern games log how long you play spy on you, so I was able to find out exactly how long I’ve spent playing the latest incarnation of the Halo franchise, Halo Infinite.

Since it was released in December 2021, I’ve played for 509 hours and 58 minutes. 21 straight days.2

And that’s not including the time I’ve spent playing the other Halo games, or the time I’ve spent playing videogames in general. A lot of those hours were stolen from what otherwise might be sleepytime, and the more I find out about sleep, the more I realise I might have been doing myself some serious damage.

(Newsletter writing resumes yet more days later)

As you can probably tell, I’ve had a bit of a troubled history with sleep. Before I took up my current hobby, which I believe is known as sleep procrastination, a very small yet very loud baby liked to to keep me awake. Before that, it was maybe a dozen years of garden-variety insomnia. Before that, it was working in bars.

I’m going to try and unpick this history over a few disparate newsletters, otherwise this is going to be ten thousand words long, but for now, just know that I decided to research the topic of sleep in the most ironic way possible: by reading about it late at night. Usually after playing Halo. For reading material, I picked Why We Sleep.

This is not your standard self-help book, or even pop-science book, because it’s one of those rare tomes that’s written by an expert and contains actual actionable advice. Author Matthew Walker is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. So I figure he probably knows what he’s talking about. Let’s see what he has to say about my sleep habits.

Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.

Oh hell. This is from the first bloody page. And on top of lack of sleep apparently making me depressed, now I have a new thing I’m not doing properly to feel depressed about. Luckily, my watch spies on me logs how much sleep, so I’ve got a good record of how successfully I’m failing. Let’s just see how I’ve been doing lately.

Well, at least I can get a nice early night tonight oh shit how the fuck is it ten thirty already oh god fucking damn it why does this always happen. I haven’t even been playing Halo. Fuck’s sake.

---

Right, so that was a bit of a departure from my normal way of doing things, but the only way I’m going to keep up any kind of regular publishing is if I make these newsletters a bit shorter, and actually schedule in time to write them during the week. I am sorry if that’s painfully obvious to everyone, but it wasn’t to me. I’ve never been a good judge of how long something is going to take. I know it’s deathly boring to read about how someone is trying ever so hard to keep to a schedule, but it really is one of the things I’m most challenged by, so… enjoy, hopefully?

On that note, here’s how I’m going to make sure I actually do end up publishing newsletters on a strict weekly cadence: Substack has a scheduling feature. So I’ve done this:

In the reasonably likely event that you get an email that looks like that, you’ll know I forgot about my automated accountability mechanism. This will, hopefully, be embarrassing enough that I don’t do it again. But, all going well,  you’ll get an email from me again a bit sooner than a week from now.

Oh and also that goddamn deer painting is finished. This is what it looked like before I varnished it.

Getting art out of my head and on to a canvas (or paper or whatever) was always one of the biggest goals of this self-improvement project. It’s happening, so something is working.3

So, just before I head off to sleep (hopefully) — how do you sleep? Are you any good at it? Does the Sleep Conspiracy come for you too? Or do you just have kids? Let me know in the comments.

Time to wind it up. Hm. Seeing as it’s too late for an early night maybe I’ll just slip in a quick round of Halo before bed…

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hi,

It’s been a while between posts! The good news is that my tardiness is because I got a new job, and it’s been keeping me really busy. The bad news I’d hinted darkly about in previous newsletters was, of course, that I had lost my old job. I am not alone in this. The tech industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the last few months. The news just broke that media darling Xero is set to shed 800 jobs, with the promise of more job losses to come.

This, like all layoffs, is horrible. It will devastate lives and cause enormous trauma. Naturally, this has caused Xero’s share price to skyrocket.

On that note, hearing from readers has been a huge help to me while I’ve been going through my own kind of crappy time. One of my favourite stories was from someone who’d found themselves working for a “body influencer” in the long-ago time of 2018. I asked them for permission to print it, and they agreed. Here it is, in all its influencey glory.

---

“I used to work for an influencer,” the email began.

I was fascinated. The writer had seen the post on Webworm about my Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement project, and wanted to dish on what they’d seen behind the scenes. They requested to remain mostly anonymous, which I’m fine with, so we’ll call them Diane. And we’ll name the well-known influencer Sarah Lynn, for not-getting-sued reasons. I’ve lightly edited Diane’s words for brevity and clarity.

”Sarah Lynn has begun a new wellness pivot in the last few years, but she was originally part of the influencer era that came off Kayla Itsines’ Bikini Body Guide (BBG), the trend of getting as slim as possible — sorry, as healthy as possible,” Diane writes.

“Sarah Lynn launched off the exposure she got from this to get into the trend of ‘big butt, tiny everything else’. Side note: writing this down feels like I am speaking another language — but at the time it all felt very normal!”

The Bikini Body Guide! My wife and I had this book, briefly. She’d bought it because it had nice food photos, and she’d hoped for some good smoothie recipes, but when we looked through it in detail the food was expensive and unappealing. I’m pretty sure the book has since made the trip to the op shop. Diane continues:

“Sarah Lynn launched a bunch of workout guides, originally called Dat Bod by Sarah Lynn1, then renamed to Dat Ass with Sarah Lynn2, all focused on building a big butt. It was the ‘in’ thing. Eating disorder heaven if I’m honest, but that’s a topic for another day. Essentially she did this rinse and repeat content like other influencers for a few years and got about a million followers on IG. Not to discredit her work ethic but in her own words ‘my body was my business card’. And a lot of impressionable women with low self esteem wanted to look and live like her.”

While there’s plenty to say about how men are bombarded with unhealthy body aspirations, there’s no doubt in my mind that things are worse for women.  For those that feel their body doesn’t measure up, “body influencers” can have a powerful, well, influence.

“This is pretty much where I come in,” Diane says. “Sarah Lynn had her fitness empire, and was launching a clothing and swimwear brand, and was about to launch an app for her fitness guides. I was a working as a graphic designer, and like a lot of graphic designers nowadays I had social media and marketing experience, I had also been a long long term follower (and, like, mega fan — it was embarrassing.)  Sarah Lynn knew about my work, so she hired me to help with some graphics and managing her socials when it came to moderating comments, checking orders etc.”

Diane says that, in hindsight, the relationship between her and Sarah Lynn was — if not exploitative — certainly a bit one-sided. “Looking back, I was clearly simply the cheap/cost saving option instead of hiring a capable agency to manage all this. I was only 20 and very fresh out of Uni,” she explains.

Once Diane was let behind the scenes, things got wild. It turns out that a sizeable proportion of your favourite fitness influencers are keeping some unsavoury secrets. For starters, because a lot of them weren’t actually trained fitness professionals, they simply hired someone else to make their workouts for them.

“This is when the curtain of the industry was pulled away,” Diane says. “I found out a lot of influencers in the space were surprisingly dishonest when it came to the lifestyle they promoted (and profited from). For one, all the workouts Sarah Lynn was making for her app were actually being made by another personal trainer we’ll call ‘Mr Peanutbutter.’ Sarah Lynn just modified/approved the workouts. There was science and a lot of knowledge behind the workouts but it felt weird knowing that Mr Peanutbutter was writing programs for a lot of influencers who would add their branding and sell as their own knowledge.”

Of course, it gets a bit darker than white-labelling someone else’s fitness program to pretend you have exercise expertise that actually belongs to someone else. It turns out that the fastest way to a BikiniBod™️ might not actually be snacking on salads and doing affirmations. It’s more likely to be starvation and steroids.

“Mr Peanutbutter was the one that accidentally let slip that a few of his clients (aka the influencers) were on steroids, some because they competed in bikini comps and some just because they weren’t getting the results they wanted with their own workout guides!” Diane writes. “The biggest shock for me was finding that one of the users was his own girlfriend, Secretariat, who was and is still THE Aussie fitness influencer next to Kayla Itsines. Mr Peanutbutter let slip — thinking back on it, maybe it was just common knowledge for the meeting attendees — that because she had a brand deal coming up for a skincare company and the steroids were giving her acne, she needed to pause on the ‘roids during that brand deal. Just imagine 20 year old me sitting on this zoom call like 😳.”

This is somehow shocking and yet not surprising at all. Steroids are the dirty open secret of the fitness and wellness influencing world. Take, for example, Liver King, who was a male body influencer who amassed millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok over the last year. I say “was” because he recently self-cancelled with the wildly unsurprising revelation that he used steroids.

Like many influencers who target young men, Liver King (real name Brian Johnson) urged a return to a more “ancestral” lifestyle, suggesting that men had become “lost, weak, and submissive.” He uploaded videos of himself — often accompanied by his two teenage sons Rad and Stryker3 — eating giant slabs of raw liver and other organs, which he credited for his burly physique.

It was a lie. Brian was (of course!) jacked up to the fucking nines on ‘roids. His apology video, a seemingly necessary step in the journey of any modern influencer, is the last thing he uploaded to YouTube, and it’s well worth watching, ideally on 2x speed for maximum comedy value.

“Yes. Yes I’ve done steroids, and yes I am on steroids, monitored and managed by  a trained hormone clinician (sic),” Liver King says, with the only surprise in his statement being that whoever gave him his drugs had any training at all.

Back to Diane, with her story of bikini body influencers who were also, slightly less obviously, on steroids.

“Shortly afterwards, Sarah Lynn and her brand moved to an anti-diet perspective that caused a LOT of drama. I was overwhelmed by it and dipped out — hashtag #selfcare, lol. Sarah Lynn is now semi-retired from the influencer world and is mostly just talking about meditation and reconnecting with her own spirituality. It was a whirlwind year but what I got out of it is that everything about health and wellness is fake, so just take what you enjoy!”

---

And that’s it. I’m really grateful to Diane for sending her story. I’m not sure that everything about every wellness or fitness influencer is fake — but I’m sure that a hell of a lot of it is, and that the space would benefit from a lot more accreditation, training, and skepticism. And I doubt that any of those things are coming any time soon, so all we can do is exactly what Diane suggests.

If you’ve found some value in this story, please share it. The Cynic’s Guide to Self Improvement is free4, paid subscriptions are entirely optional, and the best way to know that people are finding it useful is to see it getting shared around. Also, if you’ve got a story like this, or there’s anything else you’d like me to write about, feel free to email me: notaguru@cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. This post is public so feel free to share it.

So yeah. Back in the moment: if you’re affected by the tech industry’s job-killing spree, I am so sorry. You don’t deserve this. I’m gutted that I don’t have anything more helpful to say, and I hope you find something new soon. If the posts I see on my LinkedIn feed are anything to go by, lot of people caught up in this stuff are finding solace in various forms of self-improvement. All I can say, having gone through this several times now, is don’t risk burning out. You’ve just gone through a shitty experience, so take good care of yourself.

Walking is probably good.

During the thankfully brief downtime I had, I did some painting — as you’ll know if you read my Substack chat or the previous post. Here’s how the thing is looking. Not gonna lie, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not too far off being done! But looking at it now, I can see a few things that are a bit wonky… hmm. Better nip down to the garage and suss it out.

So, for those of you who are following along with the self-improvement stuff — how are you doing? Let me know in the comments.

I’m up to five consecutive pullups now. I’ll be Liver King-sized in no time, I’m sure.

Look out for upcoming posts, in which we will discuss sleep, and masturbation. (Not at the same time, and probably not in the same post.)

Yours in cynicism,

Josh

Last time I wrote about what I’d consider success to look like for this self-improvement malarkey. One measure was posting once a week; the other was getting art done.

So it was shocking to realise that I’d blown right past my weekly posting deadline — where the hell did all that time just go? — and that I hadn’t got much art done at all since my post went up.

I was deeply annoyed at myself. What was the point of gathering several dozen people around to watch me fall at the first hurdle? Of course, I had excuses. I always have excuses! The secret, shitty, generally no-good thing I alluded to having happened last time I updated continued to happen for a solid week and it sucked up both my time and my energy.1 Then there was the mental load of watching much, much more terrible things happen to the poor people who were impacted when Cyclone Gabrielle smashed into New Zealand.2 On top of that were my house jobs and my dad jobs and the house jobs my dad and I did when he stayed for a few days, and on top of that, my actual job jobs.

It was a lot. It is a lot. I needed to get some art done, not just for the newsletter or my poor, patient clients, but for my own mental health. So, instead of using ChatGPT to churn out a newsletter3 — a constant, terrible temptation — I made a dubious decision.

“Fuck it, why not,” I wrote, on Substack’s odd little feature that allows writers to chat with their subscribers. “So here’s a weird idea: I’m going to post a pic when I actually sit down and do some art then turn off notifications and smash out some painting while listening to a podcast and then once I’ve got an hour or two done I’ll come back to this line I’ve chucked out and see if I’ve got any bites. This isn’t a technique I’ve read about or something, it’s just a way to keep myself accountable to actually putting my fucking phone down for once.”

And you know what? I actually did it. I put my phone down – far enough away that I couldn’t easily reach it or think about it — and I did a painting for about an hour and a half. Once I’d started it was easy to keep going, as is so often (infuriatingly) the case. I wondered if anyone at all would see or reply to my chat and when I came back I was amazed to see tens of replies. People liked it, and they liked the idea of connecting to help each other get shit done.

It was then that I realised that, although I hadn’t thought of it at the time, I absolutely was doing a self-improvement technique I’d read about.

I’d been body-doubling.

(Way to gaslight your readers, bro.)

Body doubling isn’t a new idea, but it is a new term. The idea is simple: you reach out to someone and you do work together. Obviously, study groups and writing circles (check out my friend Jackson’s great idea for a writing group!) and the like have been around for centuries if not longer, but recently, people with ADHD have embraced the concept and taken it online. There are body doubling Slack groups and Discord chats and TikTok livestreams and even Twitch streamers who will broadcast their day job to you so you can join in. Of course, because we very much live in a Society and the grim-dark future is now, you can even pay a monthly subscription to join a permanent Zoom call where people just kind of work at each other.

Ok seriously body doubling helps SO much. We have our own body doubling community on Discord through Patreon (Patreon.com/HowToADHD) but if you need something more structured, including specific sessions dedicated to working out, cleaning, etc this is great!!! $20/mo.

— Jessica McCabe (@HowtoADHD) 6:09 PM ∙ Jul 8, 2021

I am extremely dubious at the prospect of coughing up $20 a month for what sounds like the worst possible version of Netflix, which only has one show called The Office, except the office is an actual office. Luckily, free options are abundant. You can literally just call a friend on the phone, or use the software of your choice. If this concept is new to you, but sounds like it might be useful, I encourage you to give it a go. While body doubling may sound profoundly awkward — “Hey, want to jump on a call so we can not talk with each other?” — it turns out it works really well, for a lot of people, and thanks to you, I can safely say it works really well for me. I’ll be doing it again.

So there you go, one self-improvement in the bank. As always, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary.) Do you do stuff like this? Does it work for you? What weird methods do you employ to deal either with unpleasant tasks, or pleasant ones that your brain inexplicably baulks at? Let me know in the comments – I love hearing what you have to say and I read all of ‘em. We have the beginnings of a really thoughtful, keen community here and that is a Good Vibe. Who knows, if people are keen maybe we could even get a regular Cynic’s Guide To Self Improvement Body Doubling Session (that acronyms to CGTSIBDS, so let’s think of a different name) going on.

Oh, and you may have noticed that this email is shorter than my usual lengthy exercises in reader patience. What do you think? Shorter emails more often, with a big one from time to time, or long periods of silence in between book-length self-help manifestos? I’m leaning towards bite-sized, but as always, I’m keen to hear what you reckon.

Speaking of comments…

There was some absolutely incredible discussion in the comments of the Webworm newsletter that kicked this whole thing off. I wanted to take some time to detail some of the excellent insights and ideas people had so that’ll be the next post, I think. In the meantime, I just want to reiterate that my intention is to keep this newsletter free. Paid subscriptions are both helpful and appreciated, but for now, the best thing you can do for the Cynic’s Guide is to share it around. If there’s someone who you think might find it valuable, hit the “Share” button down there. Or, you know, embrace your inner Boomer and just forward them the email.

Yesterday was a bit shit, to be honest.

It started with bad news, not the sort that’s really bad, but the kind that can still send you hurtling over the handlebars of life. Worse, it’s not something I can talk about, except for dropping dark hints that there’s something I can’t talk about.

Then I cooked up what should have been a delicious dinner from scratch only to realise — at the nearly done, time-to-taste-test stage — that the meat was bad, even though it had yet to pass its use-by date. All the veg tainted by association, all that time wasted.

I handled the first bad bit of the day like a champ, but the meal being ruined just about ruined me too. It’s funny how that works. You use up all your staunch and one relatively little thing sets you off.

After I finished retching over the sink, I decided, no, I’m not going to let this day be a total wash. The day was a bit shit, so maybe it’ll help to get shit done. Keep rollin, rollin, rollin, rollin.

Before I go on I just want to say thanks to David Farrier — and to you. After I talked about this project in David’s Webworm newsletter a truly surprising number of you  subscribed. It’s really remarkable to see, and I’m grateful to either your vote of confidence in this ridiculous project or your morbid curiosity, whichever it was that prompted you to jump on board. And lots of you had exciting, insightful, profound, or hilarious comments about the state of self-improvement. Enough to fill another newsletter with, which might be the next one, actually. But for now, here’s today’s.

The mug’s game of measuring self-improvement

One of the problems with self-improvement is it’s often so hard to tell when one’s self actually improves.

Here’s a conjecture for you, one I’ve seen pretty often in self-improvement literature: We all have a mental and physical baseline — a mean to which we all tend to regress. Call it a comfort zone, if you like. If we strike out of our comfort zone once or twice, the baseline remains the same. Most of the time, it stays static, but it can move in response to consistent stimuli. If we’re improving, the baseline is shifting up.

I’ll word this purely in fitness terms so it makes sense and has a bit more science behind it. If you’ve got a smartwatch, you’ll be aware of your resting heart-rate. That’s your baseline, and, I assume, a decent indicator of your comfort zone. Of course, your heart rate goes up and down throughout the day. Do something a bit strenuous —  climb some stairs quickly, or get a panic-inducing email — and it’ll go up. Rest, and it’ll go back to baseline.

But if you take up running, or swimming, or pretty much any sport that requires sustained effort, this baseline resting heart rate will decrease. As you get fitter, your heart gets more efficient.

This is a good thing but like most stuff in life it’s subject to the law of diminishing returns. You eventually hit a point where your heart rate probably can’t get any slower, and almost definitely shouldn’t, or else you’re getting into territory most commonly occupied by lizards or dead people, who (famously) have a resting heart rate of zero.

(For what it’s worth, according to my smartwatch, my average resting heart rate over the last month is 52 beats per minute. According to the hopefully-reliable first Google search result for “healthy heart rate for men by age”, this places me in the “athlete” range. As this post will make clear, I’m not very athletic, which makes me think that either my smartwatch is broken or I’m ill.)

All that said: a reduction in resting heart rate is, for most people, a good thing. It shows that your baseline has shifted. That you’re improving.

Unfortunately, for many things in self-improvement, it’s hard to establish this baseline. What’s more, your baseline also lives in your brain, mainfesting as whatever you’re used to. This can mean that while you may be improving, according to an objective measure — like heart rate — you don’t feel like you’ve improved, because as you improve, your baseline moves with you. And if you don’t feel like you’ve improved, is there a point?

I guess what I’m saying is no matter how much improvement I do, either by my own or other people’s measurement, it often feels like I… haven’t accomplished anything at all.

In my more cogent moments I know that this is one of those sly tricks many people’s brains must indulge in. And when I see very clearly, or I force myself to, like I’m doing now, I can see just how far things really have shifted. In the last few years, picking more or less at random, some accomplishments include:

• Getting promoted a few times
• Paying off my student debt
• Running a half-marathon
• Walking up some steep things and then coming back down
• Going back to university and studying in my spare time
• Saving more money than I’d ever managed to save in my life, only to spend it on…
• Buying a house (which is no small achievement in New Zealand, home of some of the world’s most rampant house price inflation around the time I bought)
• Oh and my wife and I had a really neat kid who’s now two years old, and if creating and keeping a human being alive and well doesn’t count as a step out of a comfort zone, I don’t know what does

Looking at that list, I do feel the glimmers of a warm glow of accomplishment in which I might bask, if I was that way inclined. But while certain baselines improved (career, financial) a few things slipped, including:

• Apart from spending far too much time on an NFT scheme I created as a joke, I almost stopped making art
• My fitness went from half-marathon-running level to very sedentary surprisingly quickly, and I put on a fair bit of baby weight
• My list of things to accomplish grows longer and seemingly less accomplished by the day, and this really eats at me.

I’m not any less keen to improve than I was when I first thought of this project, many years ago. There’s still so much I want to do. And I’d really like to be a lot fitter than I am right now, if only so I’m got a better chance of living longer and being a good dad to my boy.

So let’s assess where I am right now. What’s my baseline?

Fitter, happier, more pullups

I popped out to some monkey bars the other night and I was able to do one pullup from a dead hang. I might have been able to do more but I felt like if I tried something in my back might go pop. So that’s where I’m at.

I’m told that being able to do a pullup at all is a pretty good indicator of physical fitness, in the scheme of things, but I’d like to be able to do a lot more. In 2015, when I was under-employed and undergoing my first sustained self-improvement binge, I was able to do 30 pullups in a single exercise session. Three sets of ten. Not bad.

So I reckon that’d be a nice place to get back to. And, because I want to break new ground, not just go over what I did in the past, I’d like to get to a place where I can do one muscle-up.

Muscle-ups are famously hard. So if I can do one, I’ll know for sure I’ve improved well beyond my old, best baseline. They’re so difficult that a lot else will have had to have fallen into place for me to achieve one. If I can it’ll mean I’ve adopted a consistent and effective fitness regimen. (Please note that I wrote this, without irony, while eating the pizza we ordered to replace our ruined healthy meal). But my real priority is…

Make art

The real success metric of this project is: am I doing art?

I’ve had some art success in the past. I was selling prints, my YouTube art channel was slowly picking up a a few subs, I’d even gone a bit viral on Reddit from time to time. For whatever reason, this success induced avoidance. Of course, having a new baby around is a great reason to spend less time at an easel, but once things eased up with the infant and I started getting more than five hours sleep in a night I still didn’t make a return to art. Instead, I thought of reasons not to. This was a lot of work — as any hardcore procrastinator knows, avoiding things is incredibly taxing — and this was made worse by the fact that several lovely people who paid me for commissions were left wondering politely where the hell their promised painting was.

My theory, which may be entirely wrong, is that actually doing art will take up less mental energy and time than avoiding it. If I manage it, you’ll hear about it, shortly after my commission clients do.

Write stuff

The last measurement method will be: am I writing stuff?
I’m not sure this newsletter should count. I’d rather my improvement be measured in things that are not writing about self-improvement, which just seems a bit too onanistic. But I have another newsletter, where I write about media stuff, and there are plenty of other half-baked writings I’d like to finish cooking. Article pitches, other non-fiction pieces, even some fiction.

Welcome to the jungle

Oh and I just remembered the yard. Currently a lot of the yard looks like this:

I’d like it to look more like a garden and less like a backdrop for an heart-rending scene from The Last Of Us. So there you go, a special bonus goal.

The measure of what gets managed

So… I guess, since I’m doing this project in public, I’ll set up some SMART (Specific, Masochistic, Ambitious, Ridiculous, Terror-inducing) goals, and you can follow along with me as I achieve them, or not.  I guess a public spreadsheet with a daily word and pullup counter will do the job. It’ll be like the running gag in Bridget Jones’ Diary where she writes down her calorie count daily, which in hindsight, was obviously a symptom of an eating disorder. Hmm.

So that’s something to look forward to: a spreadsheet with numbers in it. I bet you’re glad you signed up! If you feel like inflicting this happiness on others, you know what to do.

Feel free to jump in the comments and let me know if you’ve ever measured a goal  like this, either privately, or in public, work or home or whatever. Or have you ever succeeded at something only to have your baseline shift, leaving you feeling like you’ve still fallen short? Or perhaps you’re more of a “warm glow of satisfaction” type. I’m keen to understand what has and hasn’t worked for other people, and if you’ve had some success, why not celebrate it?

I’m pretty sure most of self-improvement is a scam, but that hasn’t stopped me so far.

I’m a sucker for self-improvement, born again every minute. Or at least every ninety days or so, which seems to be the average interval between my purchases of new self-help books. When it comes to self-improvement stereotypes, I’m about as cookie-cutter as they come. I am the target market. I’m in my thirties, but I’m nearer 40 than I am 30. I’m male. I’m white. I’ve got a desk job. I’m married. We have a kid. We even have our own home, smashed avocado and frivolous holidays be damned.

No matter how you look at it, I’m the beneficiary of extraordinary privilege. And in a lot of ways I’m extremely happy.

But in a lot of other ways I’m extremely not.

I procrastinate endlessly. I’m unfit. I’m forgetful. I’m lazy. I’m inconsiderate. I lack self-control and self-discipline. And, most maddeningly, I can’t seem to finish most things I start.

I’ve got a raging cacophony in my head that constantly shouts at me about my flaws, and I’ve become obsessed with the idea of fixing them. I buy self-help book after self-help book, and while they occasionally help, more often I find author’s voices joining my mind’s clangor choir of mental chiding.

I want to be fit.

I want to do things I care about.

I want to be able to work on things consistently instead of flaming out.

And, the big one.

I want to feel less shitty about myself.

After a good couple of decades worth of devouring self-help stuff it’s become a guilty pleasure, like cake at midnight. Much like late-night snacking, I don’t know it’s helped much, there’s a distinct possibility it might have harmed, and it’s not something I feel comfortable talking about.

About the last thing I can think of to do is to take the notion of self-improvement and do journalism to it. I’ve always made sense of the world through words, and perhaps writing all this down, and doing it with some degree of consistency, will help quiet the mixed messages and metaphors left over from all my previous, largely failed attempts to achieve self-improvement.

My view of self-improvement oscillates from glassy-eyed optimism and hope to cynicism and disgust. I’ve found myself wondering if anyone ever really improves themselves, ever. Complicating this is that the field of self-improvement seems awash with grifters whose success all seems to revolve around having written a self-help book, or having launched a self-help course (for just six easy payments).

For these guys (and they are nearly always guys, in the male sense, which I’m sure isn’t a coincidence) having self-belief that borders on the delusional seems to be an asset, rather than a liability. I simply cannot grok this. I’d rather achieve something and then talk about it. “Fake it ’til you make it” seems like such a circular ethos; a power-drill from a grifter’s toolkit.

And that’s just the grifters. I haven’t even touched on the really dark side. All manner of toxic ideologies and extremist cliques seem to use self improvement as a Trojan horse. White supremacist groups offer hikes in the mountains and comradeship. Incels have the blackpill; a dark mirror of self-improvement paired with communities built around mutual alienation. From cults of personality to actual cults, from ancient religions to modern manifestations, self-improvement is a foot in a door with a hidden catch. We can make you a better person, and all it’ll cost you is…

All of the above is why I think there might be some value in pursuing a self-improvement project publicly, but there’s another reason that’s a bit more important to me. I’m not doing this because I want to get famous or rich. I’m not a guru. I don’t want anyone to think I’m trying to be one, and in the event of actually succeeding in this self-improvement project (for a given value of success) I don’t want to become one. The idea gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. The only reason this is called a “guide” to self improvement is because I was stuck for a name for the blog and I like Douglas Adams. But I still want people to see this, because when I’ve talked about my struggles – with anxiety, depression, with the tension between wanting to improve as a person and not knowing how to go about it or feeling routinely bad about it – it’s resonated with people. Some strangers, some people I know well and care about.

The chances of reaching a big audience are pretty scant, but I reckon it’s worth doing if only to help those people out a bit.

So here are my ground rules – the principles I want to operate this project on.

It’s free.

I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad when I was a kid. I remember all the advice about investing in property and stocks and passive-income assets. And I remember well the sense of betrayal when I realised that the author had taken very little of his own advice and instead become rich by selling products that tell you how to become rich.

To me, that’s a grift. I don’t want to be a grifter.

I have no objection to people making money off their interests (in fact, being able to get better at my job and turn my passion for art into a proper business is a big part of the impetus behind this project) but the idea of getting rich by telling people how to get rich really sticks in my craw. It’s gross. And the idea of getting rich by hawking self-improvement seems even worse. It means everything you create is contaminated with a sales pitch; just six easy payments. I’m so fucking sick of it. If you really have cracked some aspect of life’s code then bundling it up behind a paywall seems fundamentally unfair, as those who might be in the most need of it will probably be least able to afford it.

But I can afford it, for now, so here’s the deal: I’ll pay for the courses and buy the books so you don’t have to. If there are any golden eggs of wisdom, I’ll fry ’em up here. I’ll even recommend them. But there won’t be any Amazon affiliate links, no six-step course. I’m going to make it as free as I know how. That’s the intention. If you feel that what I have to say has value, and you want to support it, that’s great – please feel free to subscribe. But you shouldn’t have to.

If I’m improving, there’ll be proof in something besides me writing about self-improvement

I’ve listed the things I want to improve at (fitter, happier, more productive, ha) and I’ll be happy to track how I’m going with those things, how/if my general mental health improves, and so on. But the main reason for turning myself into a self-improvement guinea pig and trying to find gold amongst the grift is I want to do more art. More writing, sure, but not just self-improvement writing. I like painting, and I’d like to get better at that as well. Maybe, if it’s at all possible, realise that long-held ambition and turn art into a business. I’m pretty sure I can think of some other measurements of success too. If any of it works, you’ll hear about it.

So that’s what this thing is. A dive into the history and practice of self-improvement coupled with some self-experimentation. And plenty of confusion about where to put hyphens. (Is it self improvement, or self-improvement?) That’s probably enough for a first post. Stick around for the next one, in which we’ll dive into the history of self-improvement, and rediscover exercise. Hopefully.

This is The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement.

I don’t know why this post is here, how long it’s been here, or how it got published. I think it was some kind of glitch in the Substack setup process. I notice that, for some reason, people are hitting the Like button, so I thought it’d be funnier to edit it into something resembling an actual post than to just abashedly delete it.

So: hello! Thanks for visiting. More posts, some with actual content, are coming soon — just like in the headline.