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A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world
of self-improvement.
Apropos of something
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I was in bed, scrolling through Bluesky, when I saw it. An activist and journalist I follow broke the story, moments after it happened. I told my wife. “Are you sure? It’d be on the news sites.” “Yeah, probably not. Then again – I’ve followed her for ages, she reported on Charlotteville, and I’ve never […]
Substackers against Nazis
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There’s a good chance you’ve seen the following letter a lot lately: I’ve been meaning to send it out for a while now. I’m sending it to recipients of both The Bad Newsletter and here on the…
Shut Up To Succeed
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There’s this skit at the opening of the Tenacious D song “Kielbasa” that starts with KG saying “Dude, we gotta fucken write something,” and because I got into the D at an impressionable age and the lyrics…
Yeet your phone
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A few weeks back, I noticed my iPhone screen-time averages were starting get a bit silly. Like a lot of smartphone users, my device is set up to passively scold me for how long I use it,…
Heavy lifting
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Every other day, I leave the box I live in, get into a box with wheels, and travel to another box, where the heavy things are. Once there, I pick up the heavy things and put them…
The #1 thing most adults wish they could get better at
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Gidday Cynics, This newsletter has been a long time coming. This is strange, because it’s one of the very few areas in self-improvement where I already understand the topic, I’m reasonably proficient at it, and I even…
Interlude
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A quick one, this week, because, well… Our cat Bianca died a few days ago. It was sudden. We’d hoped to have a couple more weeks, but she became unable to eat, and keeping her longer wouldn’t…
A NU START
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When you’ve been painting for a stretch of time, something odd can happen. Lift your attention from the canvas, and the world appears as if made of paint, impossibly bright and detailed. Nip out to get some…
Continue
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The last two weeks have been hard. When I try to write it up, as I have many times now, I’m hit with a wave of weariness. Inside and out, everything seems drained of colour and vitality.…
I quit
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Gidday Cynics, Quitting is not my strong suit. It’s hard to think of something I’m worse at: apart from simultaneously quitting smoking, coffee and religion1 nearly twenty years ago, I don’t like to give up on things.…
I found the Überman
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Gidday Cynics, Remember “life-hacks?” Today, life-hacking is a cutesy phrase that means anything from “make your bed after showering” to “rip the the transformer out of your microwave and use it to burn patterns in wood and/or…