I had a birthday the other week. The numbers are starting to run together but this one is special because it’s 42. If you know, you know. (I suspect quite a few of you do; even the title of this newsletter is a riff on what you know it is).

As befits the number, it was an ordinary birthday. I mostly got books — well, money, which I spent on books. I went for a walk in a wetland with my son. We got a curry. There was a thoughtful, bird-themed cake made by my wife — as in, stuck to the icing was a piece of paper on which was written the word BIRDS in permanent marker.

If there is a lesson to be taken from a nondescript number attached to an arbitrary date, it’s that much of what makes life meaningful is ordinary, and given the seeming rarity and sparseness of life in the Universe, it’s extraordinary that we live at all. That some of us have lives of (sometimes relative) comfort and joy may seem unfair, but it’s also a reminder that with great privilege, comes great responsibility.

The Big Tree

My son likes things that happen reliably; they lend form to the world, make it make sense. One of these is an enormous, gnarled, and quite dead pine tree that stands about halfway between our town and the relatively bustling cosmopolitan metropolis of Hamilton. “Here comes the Big Tree!” he would exclaim, in one of his first full, non-scripted sentences.

I also like the Big Tree. I have always meant to take a photo of it. There is something about way it stands stark in the paddocks against the sky, shedding bent limbs, leaning a little more precariously each time we drive past it. I’ve been doing that for years, each time thinking “I should take that picture, it’ll fall down soon.” But it is in a tricky location, on a corner. I’d have to park the car on the verge a few hundred metres away and walk up to the fence line. Hardly insurmountable, but just enough of a barrier to stop me. Once we thought it had fallen down, but we’d just been distracted and looking in the wrong place for just one journey; our son eventually corrected us on a later trip. This was a shock, a sign that I’d better take that photo soon.

A few weeks ago, the Aurora Australis flared on a reasonably clear night. It was the perfect chance to grab the best possible picture of the thing. Silhouetted by the dark hills, lit by the glow of stars, Southern Lights and passing cars. It would be epic. I got my DSLR ready and didn’t go. It was cold. I was tired. Not absurdly so, but you know.

A few days later there was a storm and the big tree fell down. I will never have that picture; I never even snapped one on my phone as we went past. Leo calls it out each time we drive past. “That’s the place where big tree falled down,” he says. “Big tree’s gone now.”

Dead wood

I planted some citrus trees several months ago. They’re doing all right, thanks to a climate that renders citrus unkillable by even the worst gardener. One even has limes growing. To plant them I had to dig up some stumps and hack at some unsightly camellias. I made a pile of the dead branches and stumps that I would take take to our green waste bin, which we pay to be emptied each month. Often it gets emptied empty.

Each morning I make coffee, breakfast, and lunch for Leo, and look out on the back yard where the dead wood is and realise I’ve forgotten to take it to the green waste bin. And each day I remind myself that I really must take the wood to the green waste bin and then I forget to take the wood to the green waste bin.

The other morning I looked out at the dead wood and felt that familiar clout of guilt, the one-two punch of “I’ve forgotten to do something” and then the numbing balm of some helpfully unhelpful subconscious subsystem coming online to take away the shame of forgetting to take the dead wood to the green waste bin, by… making me forget about the dead wood that I need to take to the green waste bin.

Then I saw the birds. Sparrows, chaffinches, silvereyes, fantails. They were flocking to the dead wood, hopping all over it, feasting on the insects, rubbing their beaks on the bark, scolding and flitting and swooping as tiny birds do. It was a cold, misty morning; the dead wood was their haven and playground. There were at least twenty. They moved around too much and too fast for me to get a good count.

I heard them piping their ineffable songs and felt less bad about the dead wood for the moment. I figured I would write about it, then just kind of didn’t for multiple weeks.

Now I have.

The wood is still there.

Those might have been metaphors, who knows

For all of my adult life and quite a long time before that, I wanted to understand why I don’t do the things I want to do. Or, more worryingly, why I don’t do the things I need to do. Why I struggle so mightily with such inscrutable inertia. All I ever really wanted was to make things I liked making, regularly enough to earn a living from making the things I like making. Books, mainly; I want(ed) to write, both fiction and non. But also art. Comics. Paintings and whatnot. Artifacts, I suppose.

I found out some of the why. I am autistic. I have ADHD. It’s like the Two Wolves meme, if it were real, which it is not. Unfortunately I don’t really get to choose which one I feed. They share the same stomach; they’re both me.

I always assumed knowing the “why” would unlock the “how.” That it would be my spider bite. If you are a regular reader of my irregular newsletter, you will know this is not the case. Some days I think knowing why is helpful, or a kind of comfort. Other days I just feel like diagnosis is a box containing infinite smaller boxes, also labelled “why.”

The spider bite

You might have heard this story if you’re alive and have either the ability to hear, to see, or both. There is a high school student. He is bitten by a magical spider (don’t quibble, I know the story, but face it: it’s magic.) The spider bite confers upon him tangentially spider-related powers. He is very strong and very coordinated and very alert. It is everything he ever wanted. He does a cool parkour thing on the way down the stairs to have breakfast with his adoptive aunt and uncle.

We want self-improvement to be our own spider bite. We all long for a one thing that will give us or unlock in us what we’ve always wanted to do or be. While we all know there’s no such thing as magic, obviously good things take time, but it’s the unlocking that’s the point. The spider-dam will burst and our inner spiders will pour forth. We’ll finally be able to write the 400 words nearly every day we’ve been promising ourselves we’ll write since 2004.

With each self-help book consumed this doesn’t happen, so we read a new one.

“This one,” we think, “this one will be the magic spider.”

Unfortunately spiders are not magic and when they bite you it tends to fester.

I thought that writing about self-improvement might unlock some self-improvement. 🎵 Spider-bite, spider-bite. All I want is a spider-bite. 🎶 I’ve been doing this for some years now and I can’t honestly say if it has helped. I take cold showers. I like it. I’m reasonably fit for a bloke of 42. I can play with the kids and not puff when I take the boy to school on the bike. Those are good things. But as for the self-improvement: to what end was it? Did I need to read books to know that I should exercise and eat good food and that if I do things regularly, things would get done?

I did not. But I did want to feel less alone in the struggle to do simple things that are not easy, and to believe that change might be possible despite what seems like a lifetime of evidence that it’s not.

A couple of weeks ago a media outlet got in touch asking me if I wanted to write something about self-help. Surprisingly, I did. It feels like a fitting coda to The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement — or, tantalisingly, a reset.

Here it is at The Spinoff. Go give it a hoon.

Everything

This project, the one you’re reading, isn’t over. But it is changing. I feel tapped out on self-improvement, if for no other reason that the books are incredibly boring and often — when you’ve read as many as I have — very depressing.¹

As I’ve written in the above article, reading is certainly a way to be thinking, but it’s a terrible way to be doing. So I’m changing the project to have just one goal: make something and get it out each week. When I am honest with myself, the main form of self-improvement I want to achieve is that long-elusive consistency. And I think I’ve hit on a way to do this that encompasses a bunch of my other interests — chiefly art, art education, and making silly videos — and broadens a focus that I feel has become myopic and cloying.

If you’ll allow me to paraphrase three years of this project and however much self-improvement consumption before that, nearly every book renders down to regularly do something that is hard but helpful.

And that is the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement.

I’ll have something new for you next week.

Do me a solid? I would love to know if this newsletter has helped you in any way, however arcane or tangential. This is a bit of a selfish request, but it’d be quite lovely to hear some nice stuff around now. You can reply to this email, or if you’re reading this on my site, you can leave a comment. Thanks so much.

1. There is some other Life Stuff going on (don’t worry, we’re ok) which I can’t really talk about at the moment, but which has also had an impact.