Gidday Cynics,

Important news: There is a new video game out called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it is the best video game I’ve played in years, possibly ever, and it is ruining my life.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you play as a lad called Link who dives out of the sky to save a princess1 after acquiring incredible powers that allow you to create great and terrible machines and attach mushrooms to your sword and (most importantly) swim through ceilings. This makes much more sense when you play it.2

In real life, I play as a very-late-30s man with a demanding day job, a young child, a mortgage to pay, and an inexplicable newsletter about my self-help obsession. I have no incredible powers, getting a mushroom stuck to my chopping knife has no enjoyable gameplay implications, and all my attempts to swim through ceilings have ended in failure.

In this, I am far from alone. I am the target market. Nintendo knows this, and cruelly made their Tears of the Kingdom ad about specifically me.3

The combination of a demanding day job and a demanding game painted a picture that — from a very slight distance — looks uncomfortably like a cocaine addict in the midst of a relapse. After a hard day’s laptop-screen-jockeying (in between, of course, scrolling sessions on my little screen) I would curl up on the couch to binge-play the latest adventure of Link on the big screen (which is powered by a medium-sized, portable screen).

Other commitments, like fitness, or this newsletter, or my great nemesis The Lawns fell by the wayside.

Reddit is full of people like me. It understands.

I felt guilty. I dealt with this the only way I know how, by over-committing. My clever friends with excellent Substack newsletters were obvious targets. I have a guest article due for Webworm, because I pitched a guest article for Webworm. Meanwhile, Emily Writes about how she bought her children a “Game Boy thing” (a PlayStation 4.) She’s one of many parents who are, sensibly, flummoxed by gaming and its weird allure for children — and adults.  “How would you like a guest article on this?” I texted.

She would, it turns out. Shit. What to do? Better play some more Zelda.

Nostalgia is a drug. You can’t go home again, but that won’t stop you trying. And for as long as I can remember, videogames have been a home. My formative experience with the Legend of Zelda is at a friend’s house, in 1999, with the groundbreaking 3D adventure game Ocarina of Time. We’re on the Water Temple; the most difficult of this unforgiving game’s dungeons. After a maze of watery corridors, we open a door, and are greeted with a vista: an endless plain, covered in shallow water, the horizon shrouded in mist. In front of us is a leafless sapling — like That Wanaka Tree, but before it was even a seed.

It stopped us cold. Two sneering teenage kids, rendered speechless.

My mate was the first to get his breath back.

“That is art,” he said.

Over the next few years, my brothers and I would play through Ocarina of Time and its sequels together. I missed them terribly when I went to university, and I needed to escape the baleful gaze of my horrible Christian Vegan flatmates, so I bought myself a GameCube and played through The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I managed to acquire a bad flu at the same time, so my memories of the game involve rivers of snot staunched by handkerchiefs that might as well have been sandpaper. I played it on a 12 inch CRT television, wrapped in blankets and pajamase and drinking cup after cup of the only thing I can stomach: herbal licorice tea. To this day, a sip of licorice tea will yank me back in time to a place that doesn’t exist: The Wind Waker’s gorgeous cartoon-style climate-changed world.

And why wouldn’t we play games? Humans are innately game-playing creatures; play is largely how we learn, and video games shape and mold that intrinsic drive into something extraordinarily powerful. As that Tears of the Kingdom advertisement cleverly shows, videogames give you something that modern life doesn’t: a sense of agency. In a game, every decision you make seems to matter, even if you’re following a pre-ordained narrative. Life will happily tick on with or without you, and the unjust machines of the world will not be unmade by your furious online raging, but in a videogame only you can save the world. People want to matter. Games let them.

Back in the present, Tears of the Kingdom has a mechanic where you can rewind pretty much any moving object through time. Look out! Enemies have set an enormous spiked boulder rolling at you, Indiana Jones style. Not a problem! Rewind it through time and use it to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the Bokoblins.

What would I do if I could rewind all my misspent time? The bingeing tendency isn’t a new thing. I have always been like this. Games are a dopamine hook through the jaw, and I struggle to ignore the bait. I’m going to bed late and waking up tired. Worse than tired; fatigued. I’m spending hours and hours at my keyboard smashing out content for the new website and I just need a break but the break I crave most is the total release from care that only Class A substances and an infuriatingly good video game can provide. The mute frenemies in my subconscious give me their burnout warnings. A brain-buzz here; a muscle twitch there. Gravity seems stronger than normal.

A trip to the big city provides a few hours to catch up on my non-work writing.  Instead of doing that, I plummet into the hotel bed and into a stupor. When I wake, I start writing this.

What I’ve woken up to is less an epiphany and more delayed-onset common sense. So far, my self-improvement experiment has been additive. I’ve been increasing the number of new balls to juggle, new plates to spin, all while running out of the spoons I mix metaphors with.

It’s not sustainable. For this experiment to add up to anything, other things will have to be subtracted.

What to start with?

I’ve got Lee Reid staying for a few days and I’d intended to have a sit-down discussion with him about the neurological basis of videogame’s allure, but we only got as far as agreeing that a day playing videogames is pretty much the same (in brain terms) as a day’s hard work before fiddling with Tears of the Kingdom’s hilarious build mechanic until 11 at night.

Awake this morning, bleary-eyed, making a beeline for the kettle to make coffee, thinking: I really have to get a newsletter out, it’s been well over a week. And: it’s time I started taking this self-improvement jag more seriously. Writing newsletters at it won’t increase the number of pullups I can do.

Something has to give, or all the ambitions and ideas I have will wither and die on the vine. But what should I subtract? I just can’t think of what to leave behind.

It really is such a good game, you guys.

Gidday Cynics,

We’re a few months in to this project now and I’ve noticed something interesting: the most engaged subscribers here aren’t men.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But it’s definitely not what I expected. I figured a newsletter that tackles big themes like “increased productivity” and “how many pull-ups I can do” would attract mostly dudes. It makes me interested to see how people receive this week’s topic — something that’s been bugging me for ages now.

Fellas, are you OK?

Please note: the following contains discussion of self-harm and suicide.

In many ways this question is already answered. Men, collectively, are not OK. It’s been a while since I browsed the statistics, so I’ve been able to react with fresh horror: By a staggering proportion, men commit most crime, including the worst crimes such as violent sexual assaults and murder. Here are the New Zealand police proceedings demographic data, neatly stripped of their unfathomable human tragedy and rendered into graphs:

Men also kill themselves at an awful rate: in New Zealand, the suicide rate for men is around four times that of women — a statistic that seems to hold true for other countries. I know there are caveats to consider here, but the sheer discrepancy is shocking.

Because it’s well-known that men are not OK, and because the causes and circumstances of this malaise are complex, men’s wellness has long been easy fodder for grifters. The current cure, touted by a seemingly endless parade of (usually) male griftfluencers, is that men have become soft and simply need to, uh, man up.

As far as science can tell, this isn’t true. The shittier traits associated with masculinity — often called “toxic masculinity” — aren’t good for men’s mental health, according to a comprehensive meta-analysis published in 2016. As the Smithsonian Magazine reports:

“Sexism isn’t just a social injustice,” says Y. Joel Wong, a psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington and the study’s lead author. “It may even be potentially problematic for mental health”—men’s mental health, that is.

But facts have never got in the way of this terrible story, and the people telling it are making out like bandits.

Tucker Carlson is famous for a lot of things, most recently for being sacked by Fox News. But before that, there was… whatever this is:

Tucker’s special The End of Men, feat. testicle tanning, men milking cows, shirtless dudes wrasslin’ each other, and all sorts of other weird shit is classic Fox infotainment; baiting both concerned conservatives and easily-enraged liberals with equal aplomb. As usual, there’s a core of truth to this bullshit pearl; testosterone levels in men are dropping over time, at a population level, and no-one knows exactly why.1 There are also plenty of people for whom careful monitoring of testosterone is part of necessary health or gender-affirming care. My intention is not to have a go at them, but to point out that the solutions articulated by right-wing media personalities and manosphere grifluencers are intended to stoke anxiety in people whose testosterone is probably perfectly fine.2 But wait, there’s more. Parker Molloy, author of the excellent Substack newsletter This Present Age, has an explainer at Rolling Stone:

As ridiculous and easily mocked as these videos are, they represent an ascendant ideology on the right and an extension of Carlson’s long-standing belief that there is a war on masculinity that threatens to destroy society itself. This theme of social collapse is a mainstay of Carlson’s Fox News show, with immigration, LGBTQ rights, and the battles against racism and sexism are all framed as threats that must be beaten back to maintain Carlson’s preferred patriarchal social order. In short, the video’s not actually about the benefits of sunshine on one’s scrotum at all.

More recently, in February of 2023, Vogue magazine put singer Rhianna on the cover, together with her husband A$AP Rocky and nine-month-old son.

Naturally, completely normal men immediately drew diagrams all over it.

This “green line” stuff, which was briefly the subject of a Tik-Tok trend too painful to discuss at length (but which is easily Googleable if you want to induce a headache) was the creation of an incel-adjacent manosphere Twitter guy with 175,000 followers. Clicking on a few links or suggested follows — thank you, socially destructive algorithms —  quickly turns into a bottomless shitmine. Here’s just one of the nuggets from near the top that shows exactly where these people’s minds are at:

And here’s what gets me about this stuff, all these keyboard worriers publicly bemoaning the state of men: it’s not very manly, is it?

Obviously, I don’t think caring about the state of the world makes you unmanly or in any other way unworthy. If I did, I’d have to stop writing. But this overwhelming preoccupation with a lack of masculinity, particularly among the Profoundly Online Dudes that are the vanguard of our endless cultural wars, just seems to me to be kind of weak. Think of the state of the discourse around “alphas” and “betas,” which started as a misunderstanding of how wolves work3 and has since been carefully nurtured by incels and other manosphere denizens. And as long as we’re appealing to the animal kingdom for examples of how people should behave, which these people always do, let’s use it to dismiss the notion that strength and nurturing fatherhood are mutually exclusive. Silverback gorillas are quite capable of lazily separating a human’s arms from its body but they play with and cuddle their babies all the time.4

The content peddled by these belligerent yet fretful male influencers is, at best, total pseudoscience, but the fact remains but a sizeable proportion of the male population seems to both care about this stuff and take it seriously. To which I say: why? If alphas and betas existed (they don’t) the only people who’d devote any time to worrying about being alpha would be betas. And, weirdly, that’s exactly what a lot of these guys do.

I’ll change the tone of my address a bit here: if you, or anyone you know, is caught up in this stuff I think there’s a relatively easy out — or, if you want to put it that way, a shortcut to alpha-dom.

Stop caring about it.

Seriously. Stop giving a shit about whether you’re manly enough, because fretting about being manly is not manly. By way of proof, I’ve got exactly what every griftfluencer telling you to care about the state of your gonads so they can sell you powders or red-light machines has: an appeal to ancient wisdom. Tell me, have you heard of… the Spartans?

Well, they were an ancient society of Greek warriors and blah blah blah. You’ve all seen or heard of 300 and the associated memes and learning opportunities. Did you know that there weren’t just 300 Spartans at Thermopylae there were actually thousands of Greeks ugh, I’ll spare you the rest. But there’s one thing that’s well worth remembering about the Spartans, and is easily the thing I find most endearing about them: they were laconic.

Spartan children, for whom education was compulsory, were taught from an early age to be laconic in their speech. Essentially, it’s being concise to excess.5 This example is often given:

Persian commander: “Our arrows will blot out the sun!”

Spartan: “Then we will fight in the shade.”

According to a wildly funny Wikipedia entry, this might actually have happened. It certainly seems to have been in keeping with the sort of thing Spartans actually said.6

Back to the point: while Spartans obviously cared very much about being masculine, I can’t imagine that these bloke’s blokes would have been even mildly interested in drawing diagrams explaining how a rich and famous man who performed the actions necessary to produce a child with someone as infamously hot as Rhianna is actually a cuckold. If it’s masculinity you’re looking to cultivate, then there are plenty of methods I’d argue are non-toxic, more fun, more accessible, and much better for you than worrying about it. Here is a short list, pulled entirely from the top of my head:

• Exercise (if your arms work, pullups are free and satisfyingly difficult yet easy to improve at)
• Learning a manly art of some kind. Go find a woodworking class, or learn to paint. Build a table or something.
• Channel the masculine urge to protect and serve into learning about and dealing with actual problems, like climate change, instead of pretend ones like how much sun your balls do or don’t get
• Make a good cup of tea (there’s an art to it)
• Learn an instrument: you can get an OK second-hand guitar for $50 and tablature can be found for free online
• Get in the sea. Seriously, ocean swimming is good for your soul
• Get a bunch of rocks or other small objects and throw them into a bucket; my flatmate and I got hours of entertainment from doing this when I was at University and a literal bucket of rocks is leagues smarter than Andrew Tate
• Touch grass. Just go for a goddamn walk

It’s not that I think any of the above should be the exclusive province of men; it’s just that I think there are lots of useful and manly things that dudes can do on the cheap without needing to spend their time worrying about how manly they are. By all means, go to the gym. Shoot arrows at targets. Acquire a collection of flannel shirts. Grow a beard. Do other forms of male-gender-affirming self-care. Just get off the goddamn internet for a bit and stop worrying about whether men are leaning correctly or whether a given celebrity is a simp or the state of other blokes’ nuts. Because, if that’s something you’re giving undue attention to, you’re being grifted. Here’s Molloy again:

By presenting men insecure about their masculinity with an enemy in need of domination, fascist-friendly media personalities can pull their audience to the right. This is what’s currently happening with the moral panic about “grooming” playing out across right-wing media and being implemented as policy by right-wing politicians. A recent video of the crowd at a Trump rally chanting “Save our kids“ shows just how successful this type of messaging continues to be, consequences be damned. The goal is to not only halt social progress, but to reverse it by painting pro-equality messages as part of nefarious schemes to undermine Western civilization.

If you’re a guy, and you’ve been caught up in anything like what I’ve described — please, take a step back, and think about how weird it all is. Whatever positive masculinity is, all that shit is its opposite. The world needs good men. Go be one.

I’m about to take my own advice and go for a walk, but to keep you on top of my own self-improvement experiment, I managed to do a colossal eight consecutive pull-ups the other day, and there’s a new painting did. Even better, this one has a video to go with it. Go on, lick and subscrub. I’ll see you in the comments!

@tworuruCan I fix this Pikango painting in Breath of the Wild? #botw #breathofthewild #legendofzelda #totk #art #fanart #artistsoftiktok #gaming #fyp

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Gidday Cynics,

It has been a Week. The day job Matrix has me, and while this is definitely cause for celebration — having a job is an increasingly rare privilege these days, plus I actually like what I’m doing and suspect I may be borderline good at it — it has left scant time for newsletters.

So I’m going to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and throw over to you, the readers. Although Cynic’s Guide is still just a baby in the newsletter lifecycle, I’m thrilled to have already acquired a brilliant and engaged commenter community. Imagine the comments on typical news website Facebook page, then imagine the opposite. That’s you. Be proud!

So for the rest of this newsletter I’m going to take some of the best reader feedback from the Webworm that kicked off this whole boondoggle as well as the newsletters that I’ve put out since, and give some more in-depth responses.

Let’s start with Michele, one of many readers who offered solid feedback and insight on that first Webworm article.

Michele says:

Yes indeed ‘the fields are ripe unto harvest’ for the opportunistic grifters (who are simply me or you with the volume turned WAY up) to ply their message of hope and validate our distrust of anything we are not.

This is extremely true. A lot of people in the self-improvement space really are just randoms with unwarranted confidence: living embodiments of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Whether or not they deserve the term “grifters” is debatable. I’m pretty sure some are intentionally grifting, but is it worse if they’re amplifying and manipulating people’s dissatisfaction unintentionally?

Emily says:

I’ve always felt like churches, cults, mlm’s, and the self help industry all recruit in a similar fashion. They look for an emotional vulnerability they can lean on, hit it as hard as they can, and then offer you both a solution and a community. The thought of a solution to your problems draws you in, and then the community traps you. It’s hard to pull yourself away from something when it feels like your whole life is wrapped up in it.

Yup. It’s all part of a continuum. I’m pretty sure a lot of my own distrust of cultish self-improvement communities comes from bad religious experiences. Even exercise classes tick that box for me, and for a long time I disliked participating in improv warm-up exercises. Too culty!

Bentia says:

It’s wrong to mock those who are trying to improve themselves but it’s well and good to truly interrogate those who are selling it to us because they are so often, deeply sick themselves… I try to stay away from self improvement for my own sanity since I don’t deal well with failure at all (I don’t even do New Year’s resolutions) I truly believe that the only safe form of self improvement involves therapy with a licensed professional and possibly an actual psychiatrist. There are too many scams out there and too many unwell people who are trying to get better by selling you something that hasn’t even worked for them.

Yes! A lot of people selling self-improvement are deeply fucked up. This speaks to a big part of what I’m trying to do — I want to find self-improvement stuff that isn’t being hawked by people who are themselves doing it to feel less broken, and that’s relatively safe to try doing yourself. Here, like before, there’s a continuum, and people are going to have to find their own comfort. Technically, going for a run is unsafe — you could have a heart attack, or get hit by a car, or be savaged by two wolves1 who aren’t inside you — but it’s rewarding and long-term it’s probably going to be quite good for you.

Karen says:

I have been involved in some of the wellness world a bit and here is how it sometimes goes:

1. You’re very special

2. You’re also fucked

3. Only I can fix you. Give me your money

I have read too many self-help books with that exact plot. It’s too predictable. They need to mix it up a bit.

A. Michelle says:

most of self-improvement pop culture is a grift. I think that monetizing the grift has shifted from books to influencers, the latter actually being *worse* because anyone who likes taking selfies and pointing at invisible pop-up text boxes can do it. It doesn’t need to be accepted by a publisher or go through an editor.

Fucking hell. This is too real and it makes me feel old. I can’t be doing with TikTok, I just can’t. It stresses me out. The app got wind of the fact I’m interested in self-improvement so it keeps trying to hook me on tradwife influencers peddling Christo-fascism and weird Jordan Peterson acolytes trying to sell me the benefits of testicle-tanning and (judging from the adult zits and haunted eyes) steroid use. I just about manage to put my art on YouTube but doing dances while pointing at the blank space where a text box could be while that horrible obnoxiously cheerful robot voice reads out the caption… fuck that all the way to hell. I’ll stick with my text-heavy newsletter like a common ageing millenial troglodyte, thank you very much. Humbug!

Denis says:

Self-improvement was considered to be a vital part of being “successful” in MLM ! We were forcefully encouraged to BUY, read and study books by Zig Ziglar, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, Robert Kiyosaki (net worth $100 million) – in fact you couldn’t “go core” until you’d bought these books and introduced a certain number of people to the business in one year! Basically “going core” meant you were sucked in by the carrot offered to you – work hard at recruiting and selling for one year with the promise of an afternoon on the Amway super yacht rubbing shoulders with one or two “Diamonds” in the business!

When I was a kid I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and found it exciting (I was 16) but disquieting. If I remember correctly, it was an cheat sheet for becoming a slum lord. I soured on it completely when I realised that Kiyosaki had become rich by selling a board game called The Cashflow Quadrant about how to become rich. So yeah, spot the grifter.

Jamie says:

I think grift/scam is actual a semi positive term for some of these self help gurus, these people are after far more than just your money. They want to program you, and they’re very open about their objective, they want your money, time, endorsement & your success stories.

Yup. Like so much in our current state of so-called late stage capitalism,2 you and I are not just the customers; we are the product.

JP says:

Second, the unhealthy-ness that comes with people taking self-improvement too far has always facinated me but I don’t see it discussed so openly. I’m frustrated how self exploration and educating yourself in history, philosophy, psychology and spirituality so often bumps up against this unhealthy obsession with someone trying to ‘fix’ you and nothing ever being enough. It’s so healing to see this being talked about. Thank you so much.

Thanks JP! I’m sure there are healthy ways to explore this stuff. I’m convinced self-improvement is a pretty fundamental human impulse and I’m tired of seeing it monopolised by grifters and earning a reputation as garbage.

Kat says:

I feel like your assessment of self-help is quite gendered as you haven’t identified any of the ways parents (mostly mothers) are preyed on and all the ways they could be improving their parenting. I hope that’s included in your longer project 😊

This is true, and a good point. I replied to this comment when Kat wrote it on Webworm, but I wanted to do it again here. I’m looking at the world of self-improvement from my perspective, which is as mid as it is possible to be. I am a married straight white man with a corporate job, approaching the pointy end of my 30s, who has become overly interested in pull-ups. Fortunately, I have friends who identify otherwise and have different perspectives, and some of them have offered to write guest spots. Others have agreed to interviews. I’m looking forward to showing their perspectives here, and if you have expertise you’d like to see shared, I’d love to hear from you.

Some more recent comments! This one popped up just a couple of days ago but I forgot to reply. Linda says:

If you could share some tips on how to get out of bed when the alarm goes off that would be great!

Putting your phone away from your bed is just cruel to your morning self, I can’t do that to poor morning me.

Uhhh. I’ll share what works for me, in order of “sometimes effective” to “100 percent guaranteed effective:”

1. Putting my phone in a different room. Sorry! I do this most nights, and perversely, I find that the antici3 of getting up to see all the exciting messages that have undoubtedly arrived in the wee hours can help yank me out of bed. Then I get up and reply to work emails. Brains are weird.

2. This one is embarrassing, but it works. I pretend I’m a robot. Instead of trying to will myself out of bed, I just watch as my limbs kind of autonomously operate to drag me to the kitchen kettle where I can make coffee. Binary solo.

3. Acquire a child. Having a screaming infant in the house will get you out of bed at any hour of the day or night, repeatedly. I guarantee it. The human brain is hardwired to be unable to shut that sound out.

And, stealing advice from others: you might benefit from more sleep, if that is possible for you, and more exposure to sunlight in the morning. Both can really help.

More comments I forgot to reply to! Amy Smith says:

I once played assassins creed so much during highschool (HSC Trials) that I experienced the Tetris effect and was playing it when I closed my eyes and hearing/hallucinating the eagle scream 😳

Ugh, shut-eye hallucinations after doing the same thing too much during the day can be really intense. It’s happened to me with videogames many times, but the worst ones I ever experienced were when I worked as a beekeeper. I’d shut my eyes and they’d be full of bees.

Here’s one of my favourite comments, from the Two Wolves fakelore article, courtesy of my friend Jackson:

Shaped by late stage tech capitalism we’re being reduced to ‘gramable characters of ourselves with all the gory details almost literally filtered out. All this unfactchecked trite superficial bullshit is easy, it’s a nice story that helpfully neglects the complex’s realms of neuroscience, psychology, and physics (how the fuck do two full grown wolves fit inside a human let alone have enough space to fight?)

Now there’s nothing wrong with having a yarn and spinning a tale — even if it is a bit of a shit one. The problem arises when we’re so bombarded by these simple black/white narratives which just do not stack up with out insanely complex lived experience. They start to make us feel shit. If I could only tame that wolf. Next thing you know your YouTube recommendations are all videos about how to tame wild animals and your Insta ads are all at home surgery kits.

The weird thing is that Seneca kinda foresaw all of this. His works are littered with aphorisms which, 2000 years later, still ring true.

To boil this all down to one pithy quote — and tie up this little story where I’ve railed against little narratives which fit nicely in gift wrapped boxes replete with bow — here is Seneca:

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”

Oversimplifying problems, then trying to solve them, is at the root of so much of what is wrong with self-improvement. Alphas and betas. Two wolves. Crows and eagles. The mating habits of Maine lobsters. You can’t fix those things, because the metaphors are too tortured and have devolved into nonsense. It’s a brilliant insight. Thank you, Jackson.

Final word on Two Wolves goes to another old friend and welcome presence here on CGTSI, Lucy:

For my coaching work I’m learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and was listening to a podcast interview (ironically, on a podcast called The One You Feed) with Russ Harris, who is an excellent writer on the topic. Check him out (The Happiness Trap should be required reading). Anyway, he doesn’t like the metaphor, because he thinks as long as the wolves are fighting neither will win – better to have the wolves learn to coexist and make peace with each other, to co-operate and work together, because neither can dominate the other for long.

I really like that. Starving wolves are notoriously troublesome. So don’t starve the wolf. Befriend it. If you’re going to indulge the metaphor, this seems like a healthy way to do so.

And, lastly, here’s my increasingly insurmountable reading and podcast list, as recommended by you. Feel free to suggest more in the comments! I look forward to reading them at some point in the next decade or so.

Podcasts to check out

• Conspirituality
• If Books Could Kill
• Maintenance Phase
• What Matters Most

Books to check out

• Feeling Good by David Burns
• The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry
• Keeping House While Drowning by KC Davis
• Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
• How To Do The Work by Dr. Nicole LePera
• Suckers by Rose Shapiro
• Slow by Brooke McAlary
• The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris
• Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong by Kelly G. Wilson and Troy DuFrene
• The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A Fuck by Sarah Knight

YouTubers to tolerate

• WheezyWaiter
• Iilluminaughtii

Even more self-improvement stuff to do / strenuously avoid

• Reiki
• Tai Chi
• Sound healing(!)
• Crystals
• Oils
• Wellness festivals

That’s it for now! Thanks for your kind and thoughtful comments. You make this newsletter what it is, and I’m stoked to have you here. Now, I’ve got a request: please talk amongst yourselves! I’d love to hear from those who might have been feeling a bit shy up until now, and for you to let other readers know what you’re about. Let’s hear your ideas about self-improvement, and (especially) in what ways you’ve found self help has actually helped your selves. It’s all valid and interesting. Sound off in the comments, and then I can do another one of these clip-show newsletters when I next have a frantic week at work.

Also here is a painting I did. First watercolour in a year and a half.

Gidday Cynics,

I hope you like my new idea, which is to give every newsletter a title that looks like it’s straight from a self-help book. Readers should be able to pick which one I’m riffing on.

I’m still experimenting with the best time to send these things out, which is code for “I got all up in my head about writing a newsletter for four days.” Once I managed to extract myself from Instagram, a terrible app run by awful people that I almost never actually post to so why God why do I even use it, I tried to dig in to what it was I was actually avoiding. It’s weird. I like writing this newsletter, just like I genuinely enjoy doing  other things I chronically avoid, like art.

That line of inquiry didn’t go anywhere, so I tried instead asking myself why I couldn’t get started. And I think I may have figured it out:

Trying to hype myself up to do things fucks me up.

This, seemingly, flies in the face of all recieved wisdom about motivation. Think of dudes like Dave Goggins giving a lecture about how we need to “stay hard” while running his daily marathon. That’s what motivation is, right? Surely, or why else would YouTube be stuffed with videos bearing glorious clickbait titles like “David Goggins – STAY HARD – The BEST OF Motivation – Motivational Video” (4.9 million views.)

I suspect a lot of us have the same idea; that motivation is that raring-to-go buzzy feeling we get before diving into something we very much want to do. But the more I think on it the more I think it’s not. I think that feeling is simply excitement, and we all know excitement’s fretful counterpart — anxiety.

Maybe I avoid things because I am excited about them. Or, put another way, anxious about them.

Maybe I’d been making myself anxious about things because I think that’s how we’re meant to make ourselves do things.

Maybe that’s not quite right.

Look. This newest epiphany probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. Obviously, the harder things seem, the harder they are to get started.  “Hard things are hard.” Well done, Josh. That’s the kind of insight everyone’s signed up for. But what I have found, looking back on the occasions where I’ve managed to pull off a surprising variety of somethings ranging from stupendously boring to genuinely frightening, the same feeling seems to be at the centre of it all.

“Meh.”

That’s right. Chalk one up for Generation Meh, the Millennial slacktivists, the perpetually bored, the Simpsons-poisoned sardonic ironists. Maybe we had it right all along. Because, if I’m being honest, “Fuck it, may as well,” seem to be the magic words that move me through the invisible wall of inaction into actually doing a thing that needs doing. The motivating factor isn’t excitement, it’s a total lack of thought, an infintesimal brain blank that’s helped me with everything from:

• actually washing the three-day-old handwashing dishes I’d spent maybe an hour trying to talk myself into doing, to
• that time I went rock climbing with my brother and jumped from one wall to another, twelve metres up in the air, which is kind of a big deal for me

It might not be just me. People who making a living from doing hard things seem to make use of it as well. I just spent twenty minutes trying to dig up a half-remembered quote from someone —  snowboarder Shaun White, I think. In my memory, the exchange went something like this:

INTERVIEWER: “When you’re standing at the top of a halfpipe for a run that might net you a gold medal, what’s going through your head?”

WHITE: “I’m thinking ‘I don’t care.’”

It took a while to find anything close to what was starting to seem like one of those weird “did I actually hear that or did I just dream it” memory artifacts, but I eventually pinned down the source of the quote —  a seven-minute-ish snippet from a cringeingly-named Apple TV show called The Greatness Code. I had to sub to Apple TV to get this, so I hope you’re happy. Here’s Shaun White:

The weather is turning, the shade is coming over, the clouds are moving in. It just was looking like Mordor. You know what I mean? I’m like, “Oh, great.” And I’m complaining to my coach. “I don’t think I got it. Like, I’m so tired. My legs are giving out.”  That’s when the pressure really started to be put on me.

I got these, like, visions going through my head of, like, being this huge hype and not even making the team, which is something you don’t want to have in your mind. I’ve always described those pressure situations as being completely focused on what you’re about to do and then having a slight bit of, you know, “I don’t care what happens.” Because you need that sort of thing to take the pressure off, to put it into perspective. And it all comes down to this…

A bit more looking around suggests this purposeful mental de-escalation is pretty common, especially among performance atheletes. Maybe it’s a shortcut to a Zen moment, a kind of mind-meets-matter koan that acts as a gateway to a flow state.

I don’t know if this will come as a surprise to anyone else. Part of what worries me about this project is the idea that the things I find surprising or helpful are just  garden-variety banalities that everyone else already does.  But the more of this shit I do, the more I think that it isn’t just that things are banal and obvious, it’s that the trick is reminding yourself of banal, obvious things. And the reason they might be a bit obvious is because, well, they work.

So yeah. Time to do a couple of things I’ve been anxious — sorry, excited — to do for a while. There’s a painting that wants doing.

And a newsletter that needs sending.1

Gidday Cynics,

First, a warm welcome to the new readers who’ve signed up after reading my Webworm guest post “An Insult To Life Itself” on AI. It was… interesting to write. AI is complicated and confusing, but I think it’s best viewed from a few steps back, where it becomes clear that it’s mostly just gas on our cultural garbage fire.

Why AI is Arguably Less Conscious Than a Fruit Fly

Hi, Thanks for all the feedback on the 3-Year Anniversary newsletter! Your comments warmed my cold dead heart! “I’ve been here since the beginning and Webworm has been a bit of mental refuge. I read it during the depths of covid, in the hospital while waiting for my son to be born, in the middle of dozens of boring work meetings. The eclectic mix of artic…

Webworm with David Farrier

If you’ve read that piece, or my previous Cynic’s Guide piece “A Scientist’s Guide To Self-Improvement Science (For Non-Scientists)” you’ll be familiar with Dr Lee Reid. He’s helping me out with a problem I’ve been perplexed by since I started this newsletter: how can normal people tell good advice from bad, or good science from suss?

The last newsletter was a really deep and quite dense dive into stuff like the philosophy of science, but this one is all practical. Here’s how you — whether you’re a layperson with a casual interest in scientific topics, a die-hard gym-bunny, a dedicated psychonaut, a journalist, or just an easily-distracted dilettante like me — can apply some of the tools scientists use to the big claims we’re so used to seeing all over news and social media.

Dr Lee “Actual Neuroscientist” Reid’s Guide for Adults Who Can’t Science Good And Who Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too

Books

Books are not where reputable new science is published. If a book appears to makes new claims, or new leaps in understanding of something, leave it on the shelf. If a book aims to make published science understandable, this might be for you… but see if other scientists who work in that area stand by it. What do the quotes say on the back cover? Some examples:

Toss it:

“This book revolutionizes our understanding of…”

“Dr X provides creative insights into…”

“… digs into X to reveal…”

Consider it:

“Does a great job of summarizing…”

“… clear writing style provides an accessible overview“

“… cuts through the jargon with straightforward…”

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

All reputable new science is published in these. Non-reputable science is as well. These are split into review articles and original findings.

Go straight for the review articles. The author has done the reading for you. Google Scholar and PubMed (health only) are the best places to search.

Find the primary (first-listed) author’s bio on Google Scholar. Ask yourself: before this article, did they publish many things on this topic that have citations? If so, it’s likely to be a high-quality review. It not, double check that the bio of the most senior (last-listed) author looks OK.

What’s the journal? Journals get ranked. Generally, the better-ranked the journal, the more fierce the peer review. For most niche topics there are fewer than 10 top journals, but hundreds of journals available to publish in. If it’s not a Q1 (top 25%) journal for this topic, then abort. You can find Q1 lists online.

Skim read. If it’s covering what you want to know, read it again more carefully. If it doesn’t have enough depth, take note of some of its citations and look at them.

If there are not enough publications in a new area for a review, this probably means there’s not enough evidence to make a financial or life decision on. If you want to move ahead anyway, dig into the original research. Reading too much of this in a day can melt your brain, so getting through it is all about efficiency. There are plenty of guides for this, but most are for new graduate students. Have a read through a guide like that, taking special note of the order to read the article’s contents in. As you’re probably without much academic background in the topic, some added advice:

• You’re going to need to Google jargon as you go and note down what words mean. That’s normal. Don’t get too in-depth as some things take a long time to grasp.
• Recall articles are broken up into Abstract (a summary), Introduction (background information), Methods, Results (results without interpretation), and Discussion (interpretation of results).
• Before tackling these, try to first find an “accessible abstract” or “plain language summary” on the article website. Famous articles also sometimes have a commentary that sums them up well.
• If this is one of the first few articles you’ve read, DO read the introduction. Most articles will provide a mini literature review to get you started.
• You’re not likely to understand the methods section or even much of the results – skim read them at best.

Before trusting what you read, make sure the results have been replicated multiple times by multiple groups. Anything short of that is interesting but frankly inconclusive. Most importantly, look for red flags:

Big Red Flags:

• Authors:

  • Work in industry (check for disclosures), politically-interested institutions, or a non-reputable institution.

  • Are from a non-scientific field like Law or Economics.1

• Methodological issues:

  • No statistics, or not mentioning the statistics.

• Misrepresentation

  • Any limitation that seems clear to you as a layperson, and yet is not discussed.

  • The sample size is small – say, 1-10 people – and they make a strong conclusion or advice-like suggestions to the general population.2

  • The study doesn’t mention other papers that you know contradict this study.

  • Cherry-picking their own results by only discussing those that support the conclusion.

• Reputation

  • Not a Q1 journal

  • The article is 5+ years old and it has only been cited 2 – 3 times. It’s likely other scientists have simply ignored it. (Note that a high citation count can mean the article is important or it’s controversial.)

  • Being rubbished in the media by multiple scientists.

Borderline Red Flags:

• Authors:

  • Are sponsored by industry.3

  • Are all from a mismatched scientific department, like the Psychology Department when the topic is Cellular Biology.

  • Are fronting a study on thousands of people, that does not have an epidemiologist, public health expert, or statistician as the first or second listed author.

  • All lack PhDs. This includes all-MD publications. MDs are very skilled but rarely have equivalent scientific/analysis experience.

• Methodological issues:

  • Lots of statistical values (e.g. > 10 p-values) when the sample size is not in the thousands.

  • The work relies entirely on the honesty and good memory of people via surveys.4

  • Populations studied do not match the population being compared to. A study on the mental health of Orkney Islanders, or hormones of lobsters (yeah, that’s a dig), is unlikely to have much relation to people living a bustling lifestyle in New York.

• Weak Peer Review:

  • Publishing occurred very quickly after submission5

  • Methods sections seem too short for another scientist to assess the work.

  • Any discussion using words like “groundbreaking”. This is rarely true and suggests peer review was weak.

  • Any result that just sounds off, and the authors don’t discuss it as such.

Also, before changing your life based on what you read, there are some real scientific language and statistical gotchas that trip people up:

• “Significant” means reliable, not “big amount”. Things need to be significant and represent a big change or difference to matter.

  • i.e. If someone says a new pillow design results in “significantly more sleep,” read that as “reliably more sleep”, then ask “how much more?”

  • If someone says their new pillow design gives an extra hour more sleep per night, but this is not significant, take that as meaning that there’s no good evidence you’ll get that extra hour of sleep.

• When people talk about risk or odds, look up the exact term they use. A 10% increase in risk sometimes can mean your chance increases by one-in-ten, and sometimes means something else.6

• Scientific graphs can be more complicated than what is taught in school. Instead of looking at the graph, base your understanding on the text description of results, unless you feel you really understand every squiggle, dot, and bar on that chart.

There you go. You now know how, in the words of astronaut Mark Watney, to “science the shit out of this.” You’ll probably note that the methods Lee outlines are often both difficult and time-consuming. Welp, that’s science for you! It’s no wonder that a lie can race around the world when the truth not only takes several months to lace up its boots but first has to go through several cycles of intense peer review on the best ways to tie them.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. This post is free, so you’ve found it helpful in any way, please share it.

In personal self-improvement journey news, sleep week is going well. Ish. My watch tells me I got 8 hours sleep the night before last, which is a very rare thing. The following day was unusually productive, which might be a clue to how helpful getting more sleep might be for me. Let’s see if I can do it more than once. I’m also getting a lot more exercise than before. Art is still languishing, but I have an idea on how to deal with that. I’ll talk about it next time.

Also, thanks again to the new subscribers. It’s great to have you here — feel free to introduce yourselves in the comments!

— Josh

Gidday Cynics,

Thanks for waiting for this newsletter. There’s a lot of info here, so I wanted to take extra time to make sure it was as solid as possible.

This one has been brewing for a while. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need a lot of us feel to improve our sleep, and referenced a book called Why We Sleep, by neuroscientist and sleep specialist Dr Matthew Walker. My plan was to write another newsletter picking out what I thought was the good stuff from the book, while raising a few things I wasn’t so sure about. But, as several readers pointed out, the book was quite controversial. So I looked around online to see some of the reactions. Some  suggested the book was merely unhelpful, creating sleep problems by increasing readers’ worry about their sleep. Others went as far as to say it was overtly harmful, or that it had been mostly or entirely debunked,  which is itself a very big claim.

A couple of readers suggested I check out a podcast called Maintenance Phase, hosted by Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon. I was happy to, because I was already a fan of one of the hosts, having subscribed to Michael’s Substack newsletter Confirm My Choices.  Plus, the podcast topic — a skeptical look at wellness and health trends —  seemed right up my alley.

Unfortunately, I hated it.

Your mileage may vary. For me it was like having my ears crucified. One host spends a great deal of time denigrating Walker’s personal appearance, which is something I absolutely can’t stand. Can we just leave people’s looks alone? This was followed by discussion about about how Walker “talks slowly,” and that the hosts had to listen to him on 2x speed, which is both unfair and ridiculous,1 because the way these hosts talk did not spark joy. They hail from the extremely American podcasting style of screaming with laughter every ten seconds at things that aren’t jokes, like an unlikable crew of randos that dominate the kitchen at a house party held by a friend of a friend. I suppose this can be fun, for people who are familiar with the hosts, but for a newcomer it’s agony. Here’s a brief sample of the dialogue, from memory:

We have to like, so I’m going to send you, so I’m sorry like

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh like, I know but I’m going to…

Hahahaha!

…send you a TED talk

HAHAHAAAAAA

HA HA HA HA HA

pfthllllbttttt

SNORT

HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW

Oh my godddddddd

I still haven’t finished the podcast, and I don’t know if I will. I told myself I’d listen to the rest of it while I mowed the lawns, only to find myself myself preferring the soothing cough of the lawnmower choking on over-long grass.2

To be fair, I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with ridiculing ideas that evidence shows are erroneous, misleading, or dangerous. If I did, I’d be a massive hypocrite. But I do think it important that the message not be completely lost in the medium, and I was dismayed to find myself so annoyed by the hosts that I felt inclined to disagree with everything they said. What’s more, the more I listened the more I felt that the hosts were guilty of exactly what they accused Walker of: indulging in hyperbole at the expense of evidence. And who can you trust, if you find yourself unable to trust the people doing the debunking?

I was desperate for answers. So I phoned —  or rather, emailed — a friend.

Fortunately for me (and you), this friend is the smartest person I (or you) have ever met. Dr Lee Reid is a neuroscientist, and before he did that, he learned software development from books while writing code for a music composition program with voice-recognition software and a foot-operated mouse. The story of his recovery from a crippling, mysterious pain disorder is absolutely extraordinary and I encourage you to check it out. Choose from the prose version or comic-book version, illustrated by, uh, me. I’m stoked to have him here.

(Content warning: readers are advised that the following conversation contains references to self-harm and suicide.)

Hi, Dr Lee Reid, if that is your real name. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Sure. So, in short I’m a software engineer and neuroscientist. I began in Auckland, NZ, where I studied human physiology and medical science. I did my PhD at Australia’s CSIRO and the University of Queensland, focusing on how we can use medical imaging, like MRI, to measure brain changes that represent learning or physical rehabilitation. That’s an area where it can be easy to unintentionally make claims that ultimately don’t stack up. Post PhD I developed imaging software to help clinicians plan safer brain surgery — work that I hope to continue at the University of California this year. Again, that’s an area where detail is everything, and being picky in your science is fundamental to safety.

On the flip side, I’ve also spent some time in and around biomedical start-ups and in pure software engineering. In both these environments, workers are often pushed to “move fast and break stuff” while the business makes fairly wild claims in the interests of securing funding one way or another. I’ve also spent some time assessing articles made by Big Pharma about the cost vs benefits of their medicines — an area where there can be clear incentive to exaggerate but where making clearly inflated claims could backfire.

Cool, that’s really helpful to know. So, this self-improvement experiment I’m doing — one of the things I ran into straight away was the sheer volume of either inflated claims or anecdotal stories or a lack of hard evidence or just full-on lies that riddle the field. As a journalist, I was keen to avoid the worst of this minefield by trying to stick with stuff that was well-evidenced, drew on expert research, or was written by experts, but I’ve run into problems there too. For instance, I’ve read a 2017 book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley. A few claims in the book raised my eyebrows, such as the claim that “sleep is a panacea;” and this passage (from the first page of the book):

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.

…but I told myself, well, he’s the expert, not me. Then I found resources, including Walker’s Wikipedia page, that claimed there were inaccuracies and vital omissions in the book, and readers of my newsletter commented with links that some said added up to a full-on debunking. And now… well, I have a lot I could say or ask about this, but for now I’d welcome your thoughts.

I’ll tread carefully here as I’m not someone who specializes in sleep science.

Look, there really are a lot of claims packed into that paragraph. While some seem plausible to me — for example, that you need sleep to have your immune system working optimally — some seem to go against my knowledge of the literature.

Let’s take cancer as an example. Scientists check a claim like this by reading as many good-quality studies as they can, weighing up how robust those studies really were, and then coming to an opinion on the truth of the matter. Often the answer is “it depends” — for example, often people have a reason to not sleep much (such as anxiety or noise in a city) which themselves might be detrimental to health. Or perhaps lack of sleep is linked to issues but only in certain situations. Usually, we don’t have the time to chew through all available studies on a topic unless it’s our full-time job.

Another way is to read a meta analysis. In a meta analysis someone combines lots of studies using statistics. Meta analyses tend to give fairly straightforward answers but can lack that nuance we mentioned before. In this case, there is more than one meta analysis and they pretty clearly state that for most of us, no, the evidence doesn’t suggest that getting less sleep causes cancer. Thankfully.

So, back to those claims. Do you need sleep to function well and generally feel OK though? Yeah, of course you do. You don’t need neuroscience to know that, though, because you feel crap when you don’t get enough. Could that lead to bigger problems down the line? The science (that I’m aware of ) says yes, but not cancer.

Something that strikes me about what you’ve quoted is how emotive it is. Personally if I read any health book whose opening paragraph ends in “X contributes to suicidality” I get the impression I’m trying to be scared in to some kind of marketing hook. It’s very easy to get an emotional response without lying by using technical words like “contributes” so let’s be clear here: People don’t harm themselves primarily due to bad bedtime habits. They just don’t.

Right. That makes sense to me, and seems to square with some of the more, uh, vehement criticism out there. Might a better word be “correlates?” Like, obviously this is conjecture, but I can easily imagine a situation where — in addition to the numerous other factors that might converge in suicidality —  a sustained lack of sleep might contribute to, say, a breakdown. And that’s where the disappointment is for me: it seems obvious that lack of sleep is correlated with lots of bad things but isn’t necessarily a causative factor. Why isn’t that enough? Why does it have to be sexed up to the point that it’s open for criticism and the validity of the original message is lost?

I guess what you’re getting at is that there’s causality at different stages, and to different levels, and when you simplify too much you misrepresent the reality. If someone is in an emotionally dark place, cutting back on sleep even further is going to make things worse. No doubt. Will lacking sleep drive you to suicide? C’mon. Do I need to answer that?

Talking about correlations in this space can get quite interesting, but it’s hard to condense. In essence, when analyzing complex medical conditions, taking averages of people who probably shouldn’t be treated as equivalent can produce profound correlations that are either unhelpful or completely false. That happens especially when people get put into categories, which is how a lot of psychiatry works. (Simpson’s paradox is a favorite example of this problem in action). On the flip side, we can also know from experience that something is true — like, “getting enough sleep is helpful for practically everyone” —  but the limits of mathematics mean we can’t demonstrate it well.

Another thing to keep in mind is that complex statistics and statistical terms take a lot of expertise to understand. We regularly have “significant” correlations that mean next-to-nothing, “strong correlations” that we are uncertain about, and large increases in relative risk that are realistically negligible. We can even have strong significant correlations showing large relative increases in risk, only for those to be completely irrelevant to daily life.

Right. So, essentially, the answer is “it’s complicated!” But it does go to show how easily claims can be inflated, either by book authors, or in the minds of the general public. I’ve seen a lot of what seem like sexed-up or misunderstood claims in many pop-science books, no matter the authority of the author. What’s your take on why this seems to happen?

I disagree that irresponsible statements tend to appear in books from scientists who are authoritative in the eyes of their peers. It certainly occurs with some who have made tenure, and especially those at some private, high-profile, US-based universities, but that’s not the same thing. When I think back on extreme books like The Bell Curve the cynic in me can’t help but think “all publicity is good publicity” — both for the Uni and the author. Writing a book doesn’t grant any academic authority. It grants a paycheck.

Perhaps another factor is just the desire to finally speak your mind. Scientists spend their whole careers semi-muzzled by peer review.

I agree that exaggeration is not necessary. Science is riddled with incredibly interesting things and there are plenty of scientist communicators out there who are acclaimed for conveying nature’s wonders in a responsible and engaging way. Attenborough, Hawking, Sagan… If you want something smaller, Pint of Science is an annual sell-out event in 26 countries and I’ve not yet heard anyone tell any porkies.

When it comes to Walker and Why We Sleep he’s addressed some of the criticism he’s faced on his website. What are your thoughts on this?

There’s a lot of critique he’s discussed there. In some parts, he walks us through some of the nuance I mentioned earlier, which should be applauded, as doing so is tricky. In other parts… well. It’s not hard to find places where disagreement between studies has not been acknowledged. Studies disagree almost as a rule, and peer review makes us pare back our interpretation of results to something people can be reasonably sure of. Any work you come across relying on a single citation is immediately something you should take with a pinch of salt.

If this landscape is difficult for people with science qualifications to navigate, what hope do laypeople have?

It’s not that that science is necessarily difficult for a scientist to navigate. It is just very fiddly, which means it takes time. It’s also that a scientist’s view of truth is quite different. I’ll try not to go down a philosophical rabbit-hole here, but I wish we had space for that because it really explains so much. In short, science thinks truth exists, but thinks that every way we can access it is fraught with error, so “how much doubt” we have is something we always need to factor in.

Think about accessing the truth more like a criminal court case. Get as much evidence as you can and ask if you have reasonable doubt left over. Then, maybe, consider not making a black and white life decision on it and, if possible, experiment yourself. Grab the cheap version of the product, somewhat increase consumption of product X, spend more time alone but don’t leave your partner just yet, and so on.

Fair enough! It sounds like what I’m trying to do here. So, what sort of pinch of salt are you talking about here? How can we get a good idea of what’s true or not?

How do you sift through evidence? Well:

At this point, Lee dropped a science bomb. The good kind, not the Manhattan Project kind.

I was expecting a couple of paragraphs on sifting through evidence the scientific way. He gave me nearly four pages, and they’re fantastic — I’m going to find them incredibly helpful, and I think you will too. In fact, they’re so comprehensive that I think they’re worth their own post, rather than being buried down the bottom of this one. Look out for it in your inboxes later this week.

As far as my personal self-improvement journey goes, I’ve decided that (Why We Sleep controversy notwithstanding) this week is Sleep Week. I’m going to give myself the best possible shot at getting a solid 8 hours shut-eye every night for seven days and see what happens. There is no guarantee of success — I meant to do this last week, but several nights plus a hospital trip with a sick toddler scuttled the idea entirely. However, something that is within my control is a brief retirement from my long,  undistinguished Halo-playing career. I’ll report back next week.

As always, this newsletter is free. If you want to thank Lee for the extraordinary amount of time and effort he put into our correspondence (and you/your friends are musically inclined) go check out his music composition software, Musink. And the best way to pay me for this work is to share it around, so please think about who might find it useful, and send it their way.

Looking forward to your feedback in the comments!

— Josh

Hello, Cynics. If you subscribe to one or more Substack newsletters, you are now likely drowning in requests to join Notes, the noo feature Substack just launched. Obviously, you should ignore all those other emails, and pay attention to mine.

I like what I have seen so far of Notes, although I think they missed a trick on the name.

Look at that top-tier Note. Now look at the engagement numbers. This is why I need you to join Notes, readers. With your help, that Note could have at least twice the Likes it currently does.

Notes does also have some non-Noot uses. For instance, I was able to use it to highlight this comment from reader (and wonderful friend, ) just by hitting the “ReStack” button on his comment on my newsletter. This is very cool.

Notes also has some less lovely features, like a flimsy commitment to “free speech” that looks like both a cop-out and a ticking culture-war time bomb.

I think this would be a much better and more viable platform if they acted quickly on the rampant racists, transphobes, anti-vaxxers, and others — some quite prominent — that have siezed on the opportunity to build communities of hatred on Substack. Because, let me be extremely clear, the above is not a good example of how you should be thinking about running a social network in 2023 or any other year. Quite apart from discussions of “civility” (often code for “making a certain class of people feel comfortable and unchallenged), letting the baddies in, or not having a plan to deal with them, poses an existential threat to a new social network. Shorter version: If you let the Nazis in, it’s a Nazi bar.

All that said, I’d quite like you to join me in what currently seems like a decent space, and hopefully make it decent-er. It’s worth a go. Here’s the Substack boilerplate:

Noots is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Noots” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement, you’ll automatically see my noots. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share noots of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we’re reading on Substack and beyond.

I hope you have a good time on Notes, and I hope the management finds its way to getting on top of the hate-speech-peddling culture-jackers before they burn the whole thing down. Because this place is about to be tested. Every other shitlord on the Internet is about to start an account here to see what they can get away with. Good luck, Substack! You’ll need it.

If nothing else, it’ll be interesting.

Hi, Cynics! I hope you don’t mind if I call you that, because I’m going to anyway.

I think we could all use a break from ultrapersonal infodumps, so I’m going a bit lighter for this newsletter. It’s partly out of necessity. My little lad had a fever last night (don’t worry, he’s OK!) and his mum and I are pretty damn sleep deprived. As a result, I spent a good chunk of today with a sniffly toddler lying on me wondering what I was actually going to write. I have a bunch of pretty solid stuff lined up, including an interview with a neuroscientist and a wanking expert,1 but due to circumstances it’s not coming out today.

My wife —  who I’m going to start calling Louise for in these newsletters because a.) that’s her name and b.) calling her “my wife” all the time made me hear Borat in my head — reminded me of that progress graph meme you’ve probably seen. If you haven’t, or need reminding, it looks like this:

I tried to find the creator of this illustration so I could attribute it to them, but it seems like it’s just one of those cliches that’s been done a million times, eventually making the leap to LinkedIn hustlebro clickbait. Which makes me want to dislike it, but just because boring people use it in their posts to bait algorithmic engagement doesn’t make it any less helpful. Although it’s reductive and banal to reduce human experience to a trendline, life does take a lot of twists and turns, and as I’ve written before, your baseline for progress shifts as you start doing better. So there’s enough truth in it for me to take comfort in it, and be comfortable passing it on.

It does make me want to write about other popular cliches, and what some of the problems with them might be.

You might have seen this one before:

The issue with this, as with so much stuff on LinkedIn and other social networks, is that it’s bullshit. I am a bit of a bird nerd, so this one really rankles. While the picture is real (it was taken by Phoo Chan, a Californian photographer) crows are not “the only bird that dares peck at an eagle.” Many self-respecting bird species will have a go at an eagle if one shows up, for extremely obvious reasons. When I was a kid, we had a pet magpie for a few years, and it used to attack hawks all the time. We’d go outside and watch the show. What’s more, the thing about “eventually the crow falls off due to a lack of oxygen” is just tripe. Eagles can fly damn high but the crow isn’t going to risk hanging around on the eagle’s back for long enough to asphyxiate.

Maybe I’m taking it too seriously, but I find it hard to take inspiration from bullshit. It’s not just that someone took it upon themselves to write up a bunch of easily-debunked lies about crows and eagles, but that people accept it so passively, while making the effort to spread it so eagerly. My only hope is that the meme has led people to do some Googling and find out not only that it’s bullshit but how awesome crows actually are.

Here’s another one you definitely know:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Seems kind of profound, doesn’t it? It seems self-evident that if you give the worse aspects of your nature all your energy, they’ll come out on top. And I know for sure that you’ve seen the story before because it’s in damn near every email forward from Grandma and inspirational meme and panel-van-tier artwork and self-help book ever written.

Too good to be true? Of course. Scratch the surface and you’ll find pure, unadulterated bullshit. And not just ornithologically-inaccurate bullshit, but culturally-destructive colonialist bullshit.  As the Métis academic Chelsea Vowel pointed out more than a decade ago on her blog, âpihtawikosisân, the story has nothing to do with any Indigenous American culture. It seems, almost inevitably, to have originated with Christian Evangelical preachers, perhaps Billy Graham himself.

There’s a term for made-up popular wisdom that’s propagated and reposted endlessly: fakelore. And while I think the sentiment of the story is harmless and even inspiring enough — it has clearly resonated with enough people to inspire millions of posts and hundreds of thousands of bad wolf Photoshop jobs —  the effect it has on Indigenous culture is anything but helpful. Here is Vowel what fakelore can do:

The replacement of real indigenous stories with Christian-influenced, western moral tales is colonialism, no matter how you dress it up in feathers and moccasins.  It silences the real voices of native peoples by presenting listeners and readers with something safe and familiar.  And because of the wider access non-natives have to sources of media, these kinds of fake stories are literally drowning us out.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the metaphor of two wolves, but clearly, falsely attributing it to Native Americans is a problem. And if it somehow seems less resonant when you attribute it to Christian preachers rather than an imaginary wise tribal elder, that might be worth reflecting on.

So, if fake internal wolves and hypothetical crow-asphyxiating eagles aren’t good inspiration, what is?

Well, when I was Googling around for that success graph, with a phrase along the lines of “this is what progress looks like,” I found something rather lovely.

Because this is a self-improvement blog and you’re reading it, you have very likely heard of Seneca, the famous Roman Stoic from the time of Nero. If you don’t yet know of Seneca, it seems he was a decent dude (at least by the crucifixion-happy standards of Ancient Rome,) and he has the added advantage of the passage of time rendering him uncancellable. While I’ve yet to read much of his stuff, I get a kick out of the fact that his surviving writings originated as a kind of ancient equivalent to this blog: finding the good shit in the vast wastes of contemporary self-improvement scrolls and passing it on. Here he is writing to his mate Lucilius:

I shall therefore send to you the actual books; and in order that you may not waste time in searching here and there for profitable topics, I shall mark certain passages, so that you can turn at once to those which I approve and admire.

At the time of writing (somewhere around 65 CE) Seneca was exercising his highlighter on the writings of a Greek Stoic called Hecato. His stuff is mostly lost to history, but thanks to Seneca and others, we have snippets:

Meanwhile, I owe you my little daily contribution; you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings of Hecato; it is these words: “What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” That was indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

Now that is something I can get behind. As with the other examples I’ve listed, you could easily accuse it of being trite, but I think it has the considerable advantage of actually having happened, as well being the sort of thing that a good therapist would probably tell you. Being a friend to yourself is important. That’s been my number one personal life lesson of the last two decades, and it turns out the ancients knew it too. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably not worth listening to.

So apart from discovering that the real friend was the one I found inside myself, what progress, you ask, have I made? I’m glad you asked. I wanted something to track what I have (and haven’t) been doing on this self-improvementish journey. I’ve tried a few habit-tracking apps in the past, and I tried a few more once I started this thing, but all of them left me cold. Many seemed to focus on the Seinfeld-inspired don’t break the streak! method, which I’ve gradually come to hate. (More about that later, maybe.) What’s more, all these underwhelming apps — glorified checklists and surveys, to be honest — seemed to really want me to pay them $16.99 USD a month in perpetuity. Fuck that. “I could do the same thing with a Google Form,” I thought, “and it’d be way more customizable, and free.”

So I did.

The Cynic’s Guide to Activity Tracking is a simple way of keeping track of my goals — writing, exercise, art — plus anything else I decide to chuck in there. It works like this: every day, a little bit of code I wrote2 sends me an email with a link to a Google Form. Here’s what it looks like.

I’m pretty proud of the result. It’s free, it works, and over the last two and a half weeks I’ve filled out the form nearly every day. As a result, I’m getting a good idea of what I’m actually getting done, summarized in a set of handy graphs. Because I’m serious about being transparent with this exercise, you can see the results in exciting spreadsheet form, if you’re so inclined.

Hmm. Art is really languishing. Best get that pie graph looking a bit less like Pac-Man. If my boy gets a good night’s sleep tonight, I might even manage some tomorrow.

So that’s it for this week. As always, let me know what you think in the comments — I love reading your feedback. Seen any good examples of fakelore lately? Or some inspirational aphorisms that aren’t fakelore? Or do you have a useful habit-tracking system you’d like to talk about? Whatever it is, I’m keen to know about it. Do the thing.

As always, this newsletter is free. All I ask for payment is that you please share it around on your favourite social media time-sinks if you think anything in it was helpful or interesting.

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Thanks for reading,

Josh