This evening I baked a cake for my son’s birthday celebration at his preschool tomorrow. In an attempt to be inclusive, I made it gluten, dairy, and egg-free. From the taste, this will work perfectly, because no-one will eat it, and so won’t have to worry about allergies.

Occasionally when I’m typing up a cute anecdote about my kids or writing about my art practice or my hope for the business or whatever I get struck by a very odd feeling and it’s happened again just now, when I happened to clock that it’s pouring with rain outside. This reminded me that the weather is a lot worse for most of the rest of the country (I live in a relatively sheltered bit of New Zealand, where the weather can best be described as “aggressively mediocre”) which reminded me, oh yes, climate change.

I find it absolutely surreal that we are just kind of watching the climate bomb go off. I am using the term “we” very loosely; most people would like to stop climate change, but are prevented from preventing it. But I’m not using the term “bomb” loosely. Climate change is heating the oceans, says the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, at a rate “equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years.” Skeptical Science has a running ticker you can embed on your website that has the total Hiroshima Bombsworth accumulated since 1998.

It’s 3.5 billion.

Nearly all the writing I do eventually trends around to this unbelievable, impossible folly. I cannot stop thinking about it. I wish I could; some people seem to manage just fine. Yes, there are causes for hope, no, I am not a “doomer,” but nor can I avoid noticing that each successive year sets a new greenhouse gas emission record (emissions must stop for warming to stop) and that right when the world desperately needs technology that works to mitigate the worst of climate change, tech leaders have started throwing trillions of dollars at energy-hungry “AI.”

It’s madness.

All I feel like I can do is write about it occasionally, like a pressure valve, and go on doing the things I know how to do to try and keep us afloat.

Man, it’s really coming down out there. I hope everyone is all right. I note that essentially none of New Zealand’s media mentioned the role of climate change in the massive storm hitting the country.

It’s a bit like talking about how terrible it is to have bullets flying around without mentioning the guns.

Or who’s firing them.

On a related note, that AI article I wrote should drop in a day or two.

Sorry for the depressing epistle. I’ll try to schedule some cheerfulness for tomorrow. Time to go upstairs and see if a new cake needs baking.

In last night’s D&D game there was a discussion about the things that live rent-free in your head: mainly advertising jingles. I recently bought a packet of the Warehouse’s Market Kitchen brand of puffed wheat cereal coated in honey, whose name I cannot recall right now because of the following:

Honey Puffs are made to stay fresh (stay fresh)
Stay good all the time
Keep looking for the funny honey bee
Honey Puffs are yours and mine
Thanks, Honey Puffs.

Of course, Honey Puffs no longer exist. They’re off the market as of May 2025; another cruel little nail in the coffin of millennial childhood. I checked the Sanitarium site and there’s no mention of the discontinuation, just a bit of marketing copy I could not resist sharing:

“Sanitarium Honey Puffs offers the combined attributes of taste and fun.”

No wonder they discontinued the cereal — you can’t expect anyone to buy if the marketing is that dismal. Luckily, the Market Kitchen alternative tastes identical and there’s more of it per packet. As the father of a four-year-old with a limited palette for breakfast offerings who, it turns out, really likes Honey Puffs, I appreciate what the Warehouse are doing on the food side of things.

I bring all this up because another thing that lives rent-free in my head are the closing lines of The Great Gatsby:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

When I am feeling tired or maudlin or just nostalgic for what — events are fast making clear — really was a better time, that line pops into my head. It grows more poignant with age.

And although the literal meaning of the phrase is quite different, in fact opposite, and I am hesitant to draw comparisons between very different cultures, something about Gatsby’s ending reminds me of the Māori concept of time.

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua:
“I walk backwards into the future
with my eyes fixed on my past”

In this view, the future cannot be known; only the past can. The past becomes distant, but the formative events rear like great monuments. Prior triumphs and failures, happiness and grief, gratitude and bitterness; all can be seen and felt with a clarity that is lacking when we focus only on the future.

I think the quote and the proverb resonate together because I like the ocean, and the Māori view of past and future reminds me of how we row boats, with our backs to the destination, watching our embarkation recede.

It has been a strange, anxious, exciting month, and I have been steady at the oars. I have felt enormous responsibility for my family, my little crew of four. As I begin to see the shape of the recent past, emotion rises to the surface. The month is not over yet, of course. The future is unknown. But sometimes we steal or are shown a glimpse, to see what lies before the horizon.

After several hours at a standing desk writing about 2500 words worth of notes, from talks and lessons I have given over many years (truly, nothing motivates the ADHD mind like a deadline) I gave what I hope is the first of many professional development sessions today, for a course aimed at teaching teachers how to draw. It was small and scrappy but immensely personally satisfying, and it seems my audience enjoyed it too. There is so much more work to be done on this, something I am intensely passionate about, but I have embarked.

It recedes behind me now, and so we beat on.

It was around 9 AM this morning when I realised I hadn’t sent out an email yesterday.

It wasn’t laziness or tiredness or illness; I just forgot. Straight forgot. Which is odd; getting this email out is very important to me, and I was absolutely determined not to miss a single one.

I was annoyed at myself for a bit, but on reflection I think I’ve figured out why I did it.

Our habits are often functions of our environment. If we’re in the same place we will tend to do (roughly) the same things. And, as it turns out, I was not at home. I was in a hotel with the family, out of town for an event. The event took place at night and required me to be on for several hours, making copious physical and mental notes, and when I got back I was both very tired and my head was full of the event and the story I’m supposed to write about it. It chased any thoughts of the newsletter clean away; I didn’t even think of my daily email obligation while dropping off to sleep — usually primetime for stray “oh God I was meant to do this” thoughts — and it didn’t occur to me until later the following morning.

This effect works in other ways. For instance, this is why taking a walk can help you stop feeling stuck, why you sometimes feel fresher after tidying a workspace, and why you can get a whole host of stuff done in a cafe or a hotel lobby when it seemed utterly impossible at your usual place of work. A change can be as good as a rest. Or it can just make you forget about obligations altogether.

It’s also a useful reminder that all-or-nothing is not always a useful frame of mind. Would I prefer not to have forgotten about something I place a lot of importance and pride in? Of course. Is 23 days out of 24 a rather larger number than 0 days out of 24? Somewhat needless to say, yes. I have been a perfectionist since age 4, when putting a line of place on a colouring-in made me feel like the whole piece was ruined, and I can still feel that anguished child’s scream[^1] echoing through my whole being when I mess something — anything — up. But then I think of my little boy, who has picked up some of his dad’s perfectionist tendencies, and how much I want him to be okay with making mistakes, not least because trying and failing is a lot better than not trying so to avoid failure. I think I’m helping him be better with it, and that is helping me.

Also I had drunk several drinks, for which I am paying a small but noticeable price today. Hangovers after 40, man. Oof.

[^1]: I am told this is not an exaggeration. I took colouring in seriously.

My nights have started getting late again. In my defence, the daughter wakes up at 11 pm sharp every night; her body clock seems infallible. (It used to be 10, but then we were hit by the curse of daylight savings. She, being one, sensibly ignored it.) So it hardly seems worth going to bed before then when we’re only going to get woken up anyway.

I spent the day with the family, taking our son to the miniature trains (autism and trains; they’re like peas and carrots), visiting the plant nursery, getting some new berry bushes, weeding, planting, planning. It’s been wonderful. What’s been less good is that I’ve finished the first draft of the AI article and I can honestly say I hate it. Not for the normal reasons I might dislike my writing, I think the prose is more or less OK, but because it is such a catastrophically depressing topic. An internet full of slop is among the least upsetting things about AI; the path that the tech-overlord lunatics has us on ends in giga-ecocide and I wish I was exaggerating. (And not because of some fabled AI superintelligence either. Superintelligence is bunk.)

This is such a difficult tension to work with; on one hand I am trying to live a good life, beset by First World luxury and my beautiful family, trying to start a business and spread a little joy with my silly paintings. On the other hand, climate change — the field I’d most like to work in, because it’s important, but my life’s trajectory has so far sent me otherwise — is bearing down on us; a slow inexorable bomb with the power of hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons. It is a bomb we have the power to stop, or at least prevent from detonating catastrophically, and civilisation’s leadership has so far decided on “no.” It would impact share prices, you see.

Again, I wish I was kidding.

So I’m doing the only thing I can, writing what I know, which isn’t much. But it’s something. And at some stage soon I hope to do a new video essay combining the article I’ve just written with the sharp juxtaposition of a beautiful painting time-lapse, because that’s the world as it is and perhaps always has been. The beauty and the horror, the two sides of the same coin.

There’s something I’ve heard that I can’t fully attribute, probably because it’s common sense, or perhaps just sense. I’ve variously heard it from friends and relatives and a therapist and social media memes, and it goes along the lines of: sometimes, when you become a parent, you end up parenting yourself.

So often, this is the case; especially when the things you find yourself frustrated with your child over are the things you find frustrating in yourself, or when one of the ways in which they are starkly different to you throws your similarities or difficulties into sharp relief.

Our son is autistic, and for him this means he has what is sometimes called a “spiky development profile.” In practice it means he can go a very long time avoiding or not doing something before very suddenly starting to do it.

Today we took him, together with his sister, for his first swim in a while. This was a challenge because he has never vibed with the water — in sharp contrast to his little sister, who has loved it pretty much from the first — and he struggles. We persist with the swimming not just for water safety reasons but because he wants to enjoy the water and says as much; he just hasn’t found the key to unlock it yet.

He spent a lot of his time in the pool yelling and clinging, and Louise talked him through it. “You can do hard things,” she said (both children are Saint Ms Rachel fans). “You can do hard things.”

Our daughter was getting cold and clingy so I took her to get changed. While I did that the volume from the pool area seemed to turn down. Eventually it stopped. Had they got out?

No, he’d just found his key. Something flipped, something connected, and suddenly he was ecstatic to be in the water and climbing along the side and being brave. When he came back to the car he was buzzing. “I loved it! It was the best! I love swimming. Can we go again soon?”

And in witnessing it all I was reminded how much it is that life’s triumphs almost always come from facing the things we are frightened by, even when — sometimes especially when — those fears do not entirely make sense, and when they originate in things we would so very much like to do.

This newsletter and my video series is an experiment in facing down rejection sensitivity and over-thinking, and it is working, but even as it rides buoyant other things bob beneath the surface. Some things that very much need doing, often things that I have avoided because of semi-rational fears about being rejected, have fallen off in the course of this start-a-business experiment, and if I don’t pick them up they will never get done and I will never know what might have been.

So much of my self-improvement stuff has been about this; the longing for certain things to go from inscrutable eldritch horrors to easy. And some hard things have become easier; other things turned out to be unnecessary, but some things remain that are simply hard and may always be so. But they only reap any reward if they are done, and the only way they get less hard is in the doing.

“You can do hard things.”

Ms Rachel really is always right.

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If I find myself getting particularly snappish or shrewish or off-centre it’s almost always one of three things:

1. Not enough sleep
2. Forgot to eat
3. Haven’t been exercising

And to this list I am tempted to add a fourth item; Haven’t been touching enough grass. And perhaps a fifth: Haven’t seen friends enough.

Well, today I managed to fix all five. Charlotte finally gave us a sleep worthy of the name, and then I went for a hike with some mates.

I am deeply suspicious of the traditional introvert/extrovert continuum; while I know there are people who trend more in one direction or another, we all want to see some people sometimes and other people no times, and there’s a lot of in-between. So I put the increasingly scary lawns to one side and all the work stuff I might conceivably do on a Sunday and walked up a bush-clad hill and down again with a couple of good friends.

I’ve had plenty of hikes where deep and meaningfuls are exchanged but this was not one of those occasions. From the moment we arrived in the carpark we were each a more or less continuous fountain of bullshit. Unmitigated, unadulterated shit-talking; there were bants and witticisms and non-sequiturs and Your Mum jokes. It was all the stuff that you can’t really exercise around the family unless you are a particular kind of dad (bad). No-one hiked near us; people got wind of the sheer malarkey in the air and stayed well clear. It was a mediocre day for it; low cloud put an end to majestic views, and we got drizzled on. None of us cared.

Coming back in the car I felt cleansed, despite being liberally smeared with trail-clay. Sometimes you just need to get some shit out of your system, and sometimes you just need to see your mates, and sometimes it’s both. Yes, this meant the lawns didn’t get mowed. Well… too bad, lawns. You’ll wait another day.

Of course once the kids were in bed I was straight back to work. The business isn’t going to start itself, as much as I might wish it would. And now I’ve done what work I could in the little evening interregnum and now I suppose I might actually try for another early-ish night myself, kick off some kind of virtuous cycle.

And if you too have felt a bit scratchy lately I really can recommend an honest grass-touching session, combined with a bit of hearty intra-friend bullshitting as needed. It’s good for what ails you.

I spent the latterly chunk of today despairing of getting nothing done, on account mostly of our youngest’s new habit of being an angel during daylight hours and a shrieking, sleepless imp by night. I’d call it teething, but that would require her to be producing teeth; at the moment she is keeping all but two of them safely — and, one presumes, painfully — in her gums.

The problem with being zombified with lack of sleep (at one point today I put Ms Rachel on to babysit the kids and lay down on the floor for a bit) is that you are still running over your undone to-do list in your head, and being in your head with regard to tasks that you know you have to do is, I find, the least helpful way to get things done. The longer you’re in your head the less chance you have of getting the thing done at all, until the anxiety crests a breaking point and you either do it in a panic or autoclave whatever project is causing you mental anguish.

Because I’m not sure how coherent that was, I made a graph.

The problem is that being very very tired and avoiding work because you are worried about it occupy similar mental spaces (I assume, non-neuroscientifically, that both are redolent of a lack of easy dopamine) and both produce the same kind of craving for both distraction and ice-cream. Which is to say, you feel lazy, even when it’s not your fault.

It hits me like this: I have a business I am starting, and it requires time and completed tasks, several of which would have been rather useful to have done six weeks ago, and here I am burning nearly an entire day on almost cleaning the kitchen.

I said as much to My Wife and she said “Some days just don’t work.” And she’s right. So we took the kids out and got takeaways for tea and we are now calling an early night, ideally to rack up as much sleep as possible before getting back on the wheel in the morning.

Thank you, as always, for reading.