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A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world
of self-improvement.
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Life, the Universe, and
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I had a birthday the other week. The numbers are starting to run together but this one is special because it’s 42. If you know, you know. (I suspect quite a few of you do; even the title of this newsletter is a riff on what you know it is). As befits the number, it […]
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The Cynic’s Guide to Sobriety
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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…
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Introducing the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast
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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…
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Map of the Problematic
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Map of the Problematic – The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast 0:00 /1246.02068 1× A while back I set up a podcast to listen to while I mowed the lawns. It was ostensibly about weightlifting, by an…
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Making The Link
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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…
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Going To Pot
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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…
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The Bitter-Pill Truth About Making Your Bed
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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…
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He’s checking in
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Time for a low-pressure check-in newsletter. How are you doing? Good? Don’t worry, I’ll have found a way to make you feel bad by the end of this. Yeet Your Phone: The Yeetening In phone-yeeting news, I…
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Hey Arnold: a review of Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
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There can’t be many people in the world more genuinely impressive than Arnold Schwarzenegger. His life trajectory is the stuff of (living) legend: born into obscurity and relative poverty in Austria, he became the world’s greatest bodybuilder,…
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Two steps forward, one step back
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As many people do, I had high hopes for the start of the year. I was on top of the yard work, I’d just finished listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s audiobook, I had a painting just about finished,…
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The Stories Men Tell Themselves
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A while ago I asked my friend Robbie if he’d be interested in writing a guest piece for the Cynic’s Guide, for a few reasons. One is that he’s a fantastic writer, and another is that he’s…
