Tag: Newsletter

In your most distant memories, you remember colouring in.

You remember being good at it, and being praised for being good.

But when you slip and colour outside the lines, you howl and hide like a beaten dog, and no-one can tell you why.

You learn to read, although “learn” is probably putting it too strongly. Reading happens to you the same way as breathing.

Reading is the best thing that is or ever will be. You can no longer hear the clamour of the confusing world, or feel the tension that seems to surge from your bones, that makes you sit bolt upright, vibrating, sensitive to the slightest touch or sound.

Reading makes it quiet. In books, things make sense. The world goes away.

The tics start when you’re about eight. They are annoyingly literal, like the ticking of a clock; a sound you make in your throat over and over and can’t stop.

They change form. Soon you are 11, and everything you say must be said again, like an echo. You do this sotto voce, lest people think you’re weird.

The other kids do hear it sometimes. They thought you were weird already, and this doesn’t help.

When you’re older, you’ll look this up on a whim, and find out it is called palilalia.

At the time, you thought it was merely demons.

You start finding it very hard to do things.

You are bright, everyone you talk to says so, and you’ve been moved up a year and are taking extra subjects in school.

But on certain tasks – mainly maths, but others too – genuine attempts to work fly dead into a towering, blank wall of mental impossibility.

Because you are so bright (everyone says so) it is assumed that this is a phase.

If so, it is a long one.

It continues until your late thirties, and then? It carries on, only worse.

Your childhood saviour, reading, has become a monster. Unfortunately, society has thought to gift you an infinitely long and perpetually interesting book. You wake up each day full of ideas, and a portion of the ability required to achieve at least some of your ambitions, only to have all this potential energy subsumed by reading bullshit on the internet. Every day. Every day!

It feels like one of those ironic curses, the kind bestowed by a malevolent genie, where the wish is thwarted even as it’s granted.

Each missed opportunity, every failure, every slight imperfection compounds, compresses the shame you feel down into a savage knot of guilt that builds, layer on layer, like a pearl made of pure shit. It sits in your gut, causes nausea, sends you running blindly from even the implication of obligation.

It’s not just hard to do the things you need to do; it’s all but impossible to do the things you want to do.

Can you talk about this, lighten the burden? You can not. If anyone knew how useless you really were, how flighty, how distracted, how lazy, you’d never work again.

Complicating this obvious fact is the competing reality that you have had a number of jobs that people seemed to think you were good enough at to give you money.

This dissonance does not help. Every day, you endure the static screech of an endless primal scream, black noise, the cosmic background radiation of your brain.

You can’t let it out. People would look at you funny.

You do overhear things sometimes. “Couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.” Someone lets something slip. “Can’t do the simplest thing.” A backhanded compliment is reduced to a mere backhander. “You might be always late, but at least you’re always there.” These accumulate and fossilise in the tar-pit of your mind. They are who you are; an agglomeration of failures and frustrations so intense they surface when you’re trying to vacuum the floor and this fucking piece of lint just won’t fucking move.

The vacuum cleaner is noisy and makes it possible to yell without being overheard, so you do.

Of course you have ADHD. That’s not special. According to the latest of many ADHD books you’ve read, anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of people may have ADHD. That’s not a disorder, that’s an overly-generous pie slice. For context, that would mean here are three times as many people with ADHD as there are Libras – and there are around 680 million Libras.

Horrible.

For many, finding out they have ADHD is hugely helpful. For you, it doesn’t feel that way.

You get your diagnosis over Skype from an archetypical psychiatrist; an ineffable reduced-affect Martian giving the overwhelming impression that any given patient is just one of many items on a rapidly-growing list. He sighs his way through the checklist you filled in – ADHD is diagnosed from a checklist, and this is one of many reasons it is so easy to diagnose oneself with, as it is about as accessible and mentally taxing as a Facebook quiz – and gives you a $1000 verdict; combined-type ADHD, with elements of autism spectrum disorder.

You think: this does explain a lot.

The vicious anxiety. The constant distractability, unless you’re reading. Also the fact you could read from age 3 – quite weird, in hindsight, although of course to you it was normal. The crippling perfectionism. The tics. The absurd procrastination. The way you learned, in school, how to perform social norms like you were learning from a script; and it explains too your puzzlement at how students reacted to your mistakes and line-flubs when you said the wrong thing at the wrong time (which was always very confusing, because often the thing you were laughed at for doing was something that someone else had been rewarded for just a week or so ago). The way people looked at you expectantly, like a malfunctioning robot; wondering what new runtime error you were about to throw.

Now, as an adult, with a series of masks so embedded you can’t tell where they stop and flesh begins, you learn that some of this agony might have been optional.

You think: hooray, I guess?

Social media, which of course was the source of the first inkling you might have ADHD, is unhelpful. Once the algorithms learn that you are ADHD-curious, your feeds become wall-to-wall relatability. If 25 percent of the world’s population has ADHD, about half of them seem to have taken up as ADHD influencers. There is an enormous industry dedicated to selling coaching and courses and one-weird-tricks and likes and subscribes, all through the lens of, at long last, being seen.

At first being seen feels great. But soon enough, it starts to feel more like being watched. According to influencers, ADHD is the ur-condition, the cause and effect of everything in your life. Overly talkative sometimes? ADHD. Feel strongly about genocide? ADHD. Forgotten to do the dishes? ADHD. The influencers, hungry for the next viral hit, have strip-mined the human condition down to bedrock. The relatable becomes hateful, because there are no solutions in sight: just an endless parade of half-working temporary life-hacks that link to purchasable courses.

Everything is ADHD.

And when everything is, nothing is. Maybe ADHD, despite mountains of evidence, doesn’t exist at all. Or maybe you just don’t have it. There’s nothing different that explains you, apart from being a screw-up.

And even if you do have ADHD, this condition is permanent. You’re stuck with it. If you want a picture of the future, imagine shooting yourself in the foot — forever. The solution is, or appears to be, accepting there is no solution.

Except for one thing.

You don’t like the idea of taking amphetamines every day of the rest of your life, but it’s got to be better than this.

The generic ADHD medication Rubifen, Medsafe says,

is a central nervous system stimulant. It is thought to work by regulating specific chemicals in the brain that affect behaviour. It helps to focus attention, shut out distraction and allows impulsive people to think before they act.

The first few days on medication are astonishing. Everything snaps into focus. The cloud of amorphous haze in your head coheres into a single bright beam. Tasks that once had impossible weight become somehow airy. Things that have lain undone for days, months, years, slowly accumulating the slow gravity of guilt, get done. You message a friend:

“Is this what being normal is like?”

In a follow-up telehealth appointment, you tell your Martian shrink that it’s going great and you feel like you’re cured, and his face flickers momentarily like the ghost of emotion past has walked over his grave. Or it’s a video-call glitch.

After a time, you notice some things. Your jaw has a tendency to clench. Headaches set up evening and occasional matinee showings. Your mouth is dry. You find it hard to write, literally; your fingers freeze up on the keyboard and it is difficult to move them to the correct places. Sleep is erratic. You lose weight, without trying or particularly wanting to. Sometimes the anxiety is quelled; sometimes it seems to surge more than ever, like hot wires laid under the skin.

You notice, to your horror, that some of the tics seem to be trying to come back.

Slowly old habits manifest, like water released from a dam, determined to return to its old path. If you manage to wrestle the laser light of attention on to the right task, you might be all right. But if you should allow it to illuminate the endless well of shiny internet objects, God help you.

Eventually you are back where you started, but this time with side effects.

You don’t like the drugs, but it would seem the drugs can’t even give you the common courtesy of liking you back.

So you quit.

Some time later, in despair, hoping to plaster over the cracks in your facade that threaten to become structural, you start again.

The process repeats, and you quit once more.

Later again, when the weight of the big and small things you swore – and needless to say, failed – to do consistently seems ready to crush you, you start over.

You look at the capital letters on the box of Rubifen, the ones that say DO NOT STOP TAKING THIS MEDICATION.

This time, you decide, you’ll make quitting part of the plan. One or two days on, some days off. Apparently some people with ADHD find this works for them.

You hope it works for you.

You are here ⬇️

Map of the Problematic – The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast

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A while back I set up a podcast to listen to while I mowed the lawns. It was ostensibly about weightlifting, by an outfit called Starting Strength, hosted by a bloke called Mark Rippetoe. I’d seen stuff by Starting Strength before – I’d used their YouTube videos to learn how to deadlift and squat when my bad form threatened to mutilate my spine – and when it came to novice lifting programmes they seemed to know what they were talking about. ^[1] I was looking forward to learning more about strength, and lifting, and sports science in general. I put on my headphones and got to work. ^[2]

I was rounding a tricky bit out on the front verge by the fence, one of those bits where the grass grows out long from somewhere the mower can’t quite get to. My frustration at this was compounded by a growing sense of confusion as the Texan drawls on the weight-lifting podcast turned their talk, for some reason, to solar power.

I wish I had examples of what I heard. Infuriatingly, I can’t find the recording anywhere in my various internet or app histories, which is sad, because it was very funny. The gist was that solar power doesn’t work. This perplexed me, because I have solar panels on my roof, and a battery next to my house. I can watch them work in real-time by turning the lights on. Of course, to give credit to Rippetoe and friends where probably none is due, he was talking about how solar power at scale doesn’t work. Which is also wrong, but for different reasons. This talk inevitably segued into general riffing on climate change, and how it was a myth (feat. manly guffaws). All this was, for reasons that remain mysterious, presented as a metaphor for weightlifting.

I don’t know a lot about lifting. Nor do I know much about climate change, in the scheme of things; I’m not a climate scientist. But I know a hell of a lot more about climate change than those yahoos. It was howler after canard, bullshit piled on bullshit so deep that it stopped being offensive and became riotous. I had to stop the podcast because muttering “that’s not right,” “well that’s wrong,” and “what the fuck?” under my breath — punctuated with occasional disbelieving yelps of laughter — was starting to attract looks from passers-by.

Mower parked for the moment, I did a bit more digging into Starting Strength’s online oeuvre. Their “how to lift” videos seemed excellent, and in aggregate, were about twenty minutes long. Time well spent. Their novice lifting programs seemed, to my untrained eye, fine. There’s plenty of stuff like interviews with strength coaches and athletes and the like, which I assume is also fine. The rest was dismaying. It was much less about strength and more a telling meander through the myriad pathologies of the modern American male mind. It’s a grab bag of conspiracist nonsense: there’s both climate denial (a recent episode features professional fossil fuel shill Alex Epstein opining about “the need for increased usage and accessibility of fossil fuels”) and Covid-denial (Naomi Wolf and other cultural dingleberries receive guest spots).

So yeah. They’re lunatics.

The implications are troubling. If I can’t trust Starting Strength’s ability to filter fact from fiction in their podcast, what am I meant to make of their fitness program? I don’t expect perfection, or anything close to it, from my sources of information. Nor do I require uniformity of opinion or values. But this stuff was so egregiously wrong it was difficult to look past it. I suppose the real question is: why do people so reliably assume that their expertise in one domain — let’s say, weightlifting — gives them the ability to comment on another, wildly different domain like climate science? ^[3]

The easy explanation is that weightlifters are meatheads, but I don’t think that’s it. ^[4]

Let’s look at another telling example, someone who cannot be dismissed as a meathead. If you have spent any time at all in the online self-improvement space, you have run into Andrew Huberman. A scientist, a Stanford professor, a weightlifter and runner; chisel-jawed, muscle-bound, blue-eyed; this gleefully earnest podcaster and video-maker boasts subscribers in the millions. Huberman is — or at least appeared to be — one of those cases of nominative determinism so egregious that if he was a character in your draft novel or screenplay you’d get a strongly-worded email from an editor. “So this professor guy, he’s good at everything? And extremely good-looking? Runs marathons, lifts heavy weights? And you put “Uberman” right in his name? Yeah, I’m going to need to get you to revise that draft.” Huberman’s style is simple, and instantly identifiable: his Huberman Lab show consists of really long recordings, sometimes with guests, often without, always with a camera on. He doesn’t talk down to the audience, or at least, he affects not to; you feel like you’re an undergrad in an introductory university science class being enlightened via bewilderment. Huberman endorses free, science-based “protocols” for a wide variety of things — eating, sleeping, exercise, fertility — as well as a dizzying array of supplements, beginning with the podcast staple Athletic Greens and multiplying from there. In addition to the red flags raised by supplement-hucking, recent revelations have both asked and answered questions about Huberman’s character, as well as just how scientific many of his protocols and podcasts really are.

In short, the “lab” part of “Huberman Lab” is at best a stretch and at worst a fiction; his supplement regimen is spurious, some of his claims are implausible, others are bunk, and he was, until recently — there’s no polite way to put this — boinking five different women. If the boinking had occurred in just one time and place I’d have no other comment apart from praising his stamina, but as it turns out, it was just boring old-fashioned non-consensual cheating. At least one of the women interviewed claims he gave her HPV; another says he was prone to outbursts of rage.

None of these things speak well of Huberman’s character, and they’re opposite to his image as a very cool and together guy, but I’m almost equally bothered by the revelations that he strayed almost as far out of his lane as the Starting Strength guys. It doesn’t take much to start seeing this pattern repeat everywhere: well-meaning people begin opining on their area of expertise, which quickly grows to encompass everything. As well as sounding endless klaxons in my own head – I am swimming in the same sea with my little self-improvement newsletter – I’m struck by how difficult it is not just to produce accurate information but to consume it. How can we know what’s true or helpful?

This is where I risk going wildly wrong myself, but here’s how I try to manage it. As is eternally the case, your mileage may vary.

No gods, no heroes, no gurus

If you’re looking for information, and a high-profile person is providing both helpful and unhelpful content, this is easier to parse if you haven’t been worshipping at the altar of a cult of personality. Hopefully, you can take whatever useful stuff they’ve produced without feeling that you must either publicly defend or defenestrate them. The same applies for me, in the unlikely event that anyone feels like putting me on a pedestal. I often worry that my occasional ability to make England word good will result in people taking me too seriously. Try not to. This will not do wonders for my following or reputation as a producer of “content,” as everyone in the space seems to thrive on delivering every word with the same total sense of self-assurance, but I think it very important that you take what I say with a nutritionally correct amount of salt. I try my best to get things right but I’m inevitably going to get stuff wrong. When I do, I’ll try to correct it after the fact.

Domain expertise only

This might the most helpful way to map around the problematic. Here is an example: Is it 1976, and is Richard Dawkins talking about evolutionary biology? Then you should probably listen. Is he talking about trans people on Twitter in the 2020s? Good news, he’s so far out of his domain that he may as well be a fish on the Moon. You can safely ignore his pronouncements on trans folk, and much else besides. Hooray!

It doesn’t follow that expertise in one area can’t apply to others. And there are methods of inquiry that can throw up insights across multiple domains. Done properly, journalism is one of them. (If it wasn’t, I should probably stop writing this newsletter.) But if someone is being a dingbat in public then you’ve got a heuristic to hand: are they being a dingbat about their domain, or about something else? By way of example: Andrew Huberman is an ophthalmologist and a neuroscientist. In the event I find myself very interested in optic nerves, I will listen to him with reverence. The Starting Strength guys are very good at lifting weights. I’m happy to take their advice on my squat form, but I can safely leave their opinions on climate change in the trash where they belong.

Don’t be Rick

I’m an sometime fan of the show Rick and Morty, which is a reluctant admission because have you looked at that show’s fanbase? The premise, for anyone unfamiliar, is a kind of warped, multiversal Back to the Future in which Morty is a mostly inept teenage kid (and a bit of a piece of shit) and Rick is a autodidactic genius (and a complete piece of shit). The problem, as I see it, is that fans have not only taken “how to behave in real life” lessons from a cartoon, always a bad idea^[5], but also that they’ve settled on being a know-it-all-asshole as a prerequisite to being an autodidactic genius. Needless to say, it’s not — or, at least, it doesn’t work that way around. There have been plenty of geniuses who were complete dicks in their personal lives, but their lesson should be that being an asshole is completely optional. Of course, being an asshole it doesn’t necessarily diminish domain expertise. I’ll happily accept drumming lessons from Ginger Baker or painting tips from Picasso, but I’m not going to take life advice from either.

How much information do you really need?

When you get interested in something, in self-improvement or any other field, it’s natural to want more information. But how much of it is necessary to what you want to achieve? I’m not telling any budding neurosurgeons to throw out their textbooks, please don’t do that, but in the self-improvement field a lot of information boils down to “do something quite simple very consistently for a long time.” Starting Strength teaches you how to squat, deadlift, bench, and press. If you are most people, this is much of what you need to know for the first stages of your lifting journey. Yes, one size doesn’t fit all, and I’m sure there are more optimal programs, but the fact remains that if someone who doesn’t lift starts to do so regularly and safely they’ll get stronger. ^[6] And that’s all the information a beginner needs!

One might quibble this attitude when it comes to Andrew Huberman. His entire thing is providing the research and background that (sometimes!) backs up his protocols, and surely that’s enough reason to listen. But let’s look a little closer at the protocols themselves. They are often very simple, which is no bad thing. In fact, routines.club — a truly hideous website that appears to be almost entirely an artefact of AI built to SEO-huck the same supplements as Huberman — has conveniently summarised Huberman’s daily routines, illustrated with physiologically implausible AI illustrations.

I’ll go one step further and deconstruct AI Huberman’s routine down to a bulleted list:

• Wake up at 6 am
• Drink 2 glasses of water + huck a supplement, also at 6 am
• Yoga Nidra meditation, also somehow at 6 am
• 6:45 am: sun exposure. I’m going to call this “going outside”
• 7 am: “cold exposure.”
• 7:30 am: workout
• 10 am: coffee
• 1 pm: breakfast(!)
• 3 pm: more Yoga Nidra
• 6:30 pm: cardio
• 7 pm: food
• 9:30 pm: dims lights for quiet time
• 10:00 pm: reading
• 10:30 pm: zzzz

Apart from the intermittent fasting, there’s nothing particularly controversial there. It’s a well-ordered day, if a highly idealistic one (anyone with children, chores, or a normal job will be able to spot this instantly.) The one remaining Huberman oddity is his insistence on “delayed caffeine intake” to about 90 minutes after waking up to avoid a crash later in the day, which a recent literature review has all but debunked. There’s certainly nothing that requires listening to hours of podcasts. Speaking of info-dumps: I’m going to suggest that Huberman’s podcast-lectures are not actually that well-formatted for those with a casual interest in science. On multiple listens, his style starts to resemble a Gish Gallop, an unending cavalcade of information and citations in which it’s very difficult for either scientists or laypeople to distinguish the science from the supplement sales pitch. (This podcast is brought to you by Mathletic Greens, the only balanced nutritional supplement that supports and enhances your maths skills). So not only is some proportion of the information suspect, it’s surplus to requirements.

In fact, over my long history of trying and failing to be consistent with anything self-improvement, I’ve come to suspect that all the extra information gets in the way. We labour under the delusion that more information — or information delivered in a slightly different package — is what we need, when what we really require is the ability to stop overthinking, simplify the more-than-adequate information we already have, and put it into consistent practice.

If I ever figure that out, I’ll let you know.

You’ll have no doubt heard that only a small percentage of people who make a New Year’s resolution manage to keep it. It’s a piece of pop dicta, repeated endlessly in the period just before December 31 by media in desperate need of an easy factoid to recirculate for clicks. And debunking popular notions like New Year’s Resolutions sure does get clicks. Here’s an extract from a typical article, from the venerable Time:

And yet, by some estimates, as many as 80% of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions by February. Only 8% of people stick with them the entire year.

This depressing factoid has lived rent-free in my head with a bunch of others, like an anarchist squatter commune of bad vibes. If true, there’s an high chance you’re half-way to quitting whatever it is you resolved to do by now. I thought about writing an article about it, but I didn’t feel like dancing on the graves of people’s New Year hopes and dreams. Because as much as we tell ourselves ‘“it’s just another day,” it’s not, is it? The cultural gravity of New Year is, for Westerners, as inescapable as a black hole. And how could I write an article on how most resolutions fail, when the proof that they don’t always is right in front of us?

I’ll level with you. This article was originally inspired by seeing the above image in an Instagram story, upon which I Googled it, and found this Daily Dot article, in which the author says:

Most people give up on the resolutions about 10 days in. Instead, O’Donnell appears to have accomplished hers.

Classic internet “it’s funny cos it’s mean” snark, worthy of Gawker circa 2009, right? But the claim – perhaps because it was associated with an image of a pro-gun person who literally shot themselves in the foot — stayed in my mind, limping into my mental commune of received wisdom. I’d heard it so many times before. It has to be true, right?

Because this isn’t the Wide-Eyed Eternal Optimist’s Guide To Self Improvement, you’ll have guessed where I’m going with this:

The suggestion that only 8 percent of people ever achieve their resolutions, or that as many as 80 percent fail to keep resolutions by February, or that “most people give up on the resolutions about 10 days in” is bunk.

The first clue was clicking on the link in “by some estimates, as many as 80% of people fail” led not to a scholarly paper but another webpage, and clicking on the sources cited in that page and subsequent pages ended up with a dead link. That alone wouldn’t clinch it. What did, though, was that searching for “new year’s resolutions” and similar phrases in Google Scholar didn’t turn up any kind of widely-cited statistic around resolution success or failure. Like so much else in psychology, the truth is harder to pin down than self-improvement pop science might have you think. Nor are “success” and “failure” binaries, in the context of resolutions. A 2020 PhD thesis on NY resolutions by Hannah Moshontz de la Rocha, a student in the Psychology and Neuroscience in the Graduate School of Duke University, found that:

Goals varied greatly in their content, properties, and outcomes. Contrary to theory, many resolutions were neither successful nor unsuccessful, but instead were still being pursued or were on hold at the end of the year. Across both studies, the three most common resolution outcomes at the end of the year were achievement (estimates ranged from 20% to 40%), continued pursuit (32% to 60%) and pursuit put on hold (15% to 21%). Other outcomes (e.g., deliberate disengagement) were rare (<1% to 3%).

Those figures are… pretty good, actually? 20 to 40 percent of people achieving their goal by year’s end is a lot better than the pessimistic received wisdom that most people give up by February.

Likewise, a user at Skeptic’s Stack Exchange has done the legwork on the claim that only 8 percent ever achieve their resolutions, and found it to be at best misunderstood and at worst wildly cherry-picked:

The real source of the 8% number appears to be a survey conducted by Stephen Shapiro, a management consultant, author, and speaker, and published in an article on his website. According to him,

Only 8% of people are always successful in achieving their resolutions. 19% achieve their resolutions every other year. 49% have infrequent success. 24% (one in four people) NEVER succeed and have failed on every resolution every year. That means that 3 out of 4 people almost never succeed.

Of course, “Only 8% of people are always successful in achieving their resolutions” is not the same as “8% of People Achieve Their New Year’s Resolutions”. The study by Shapiro has not been published in a scientific journal.

Thanks, Stephen! Your literally incredible claim has poisoned a huge swathe of the internet when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, and (this is my own conjecture) led to a kind of low-key seasonally affective depression amongst those of us who’d like to make a lifestyle change around a culturally auspicious date.

If you’re in that cohort, rest easy. The takeaway is pretty clear: if you want to make a New Year’s resolution, feel free to. You may as well! The achievement/still working on it/still pursuing it statistics seem perfectly acceptable to me: clearly there’s some weight to the things. And it’s not too late: I unscientifically consider the “New Year” period to occupy the whole month of January, because that’s the span in which the year still feels new. I could add some stuff about setting SMART goals, or just making sure that your progress is in some way measurable, but that would be very boring and like every other article on the topic and is something you (an intellectual) probably already knew.

So I’ll just put in some potential resolutions you’ll hopefully have no trouble keeping.

Resolve not to start going to the gym in January

Look, just don’t. Especially if you’ve never gone before. There is much to be gained from lifting weights, including (obviously) muscle, but in my experience the gym in January is a Bad Time. Everyone who made a resolution to “go to the gym more” is there, hogging the machines or giving themselves renal failure from trying to deadlift too much, sweating and grunting and selfie-ing. It’s not worth it.

If you’re a regular, you might choose to power through it, but if you’re a total newbie, save the money on gym fees and buy a broomstick. It’s not a witch thing and I’m not joking. You want to learn how to lift weights before you lift any actual weight, and here the incredible Swole Woman, Casey Johnston, has you covered.

Resolve not to “lose weight”

This isn’t my area of expertise, but I’ve listened to enough people for whom it is to know that “losing weight” purely for the sake of losing weight is — for the vast majority of people — a toxic concept that can easily ruin lives. Food is good, you need it to live, and as a general rule if you’re exercising you need to be fuelling yourself properly. There are plenty of people who know better than me on this so I’m just going to recommend Casey Johnston again.

Resolve not to “do something every day” unless it’s very automatic or very low effort

You can’t move without this shit. “Go to the gym every day.” “Do X push-ups every day.” “Practice Y every day,” or my personal bugbear that I can’t swear off swearing to do: “do art every day.” So let me draw a line in the sane for myself and possibly you too: can we not? Unless it’s for something like “drink water,” or “poop,” committing to do something every day seems a fast track to the kind of demoralizing failure that only comes with overcommitment.

Take “Gym every day.” A moment’s critical reflection will reveal this goal to be both wildly improbable and useless. You’re going to get crook. You’re going to have a family thing come up. You’re going to get a flat tire. At some point, the gym will be inconveniently closed. Letting any of these all-but-inevitable and entirely reasonable life events ruin your resolution because you didn’t tick off all 365 days in the year isn’t worth it. A vanishingly small subset of people either need to go to the gym every day (actors, bodybuilders, influencers in the field of same) or will get any tangible benefit from doing so. For nearly everyone else, working out daily is a fast track to ruined health, because you’re not taking vital recovery time. Your Average Joe, including very much me, will do better resolving to “go to the gym several times a week, with at least a day’s rest in between sessions, and obviously not when sick” or something similar.

The same applies to art. Long, bitter experience teaches that if you try arting every damn day you’ll start hating art and everything adjacent to it. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, and if you’re one of those people who can do something out of the ordinary every day, more power to you — but all I’m aiming for this year is mostly consistent consistency.

Resolve not to get your New Year’s resolution effectiveness information from websites that don’t cite their sources, or management consultants

You probably didn’t need me to tell you that.

Thanks for reading. This newsletter likely won’t be on Substack much longer, due to their cataclysmically awful handling of an entirely self-inflicted Nazi/TERF/active disinformation ecosystem controversy, and (less importantly) the fact that they’d rather dabble in AI bollocks than offer basic email composition features like a native spell-checker. In short: it’s them, hi, they’re the problem, it’s them. Barring a policy u-turn, and a spell-checker, chances are I’ll move it to another provider in the next few weeks. If you do subscribe here, either free or paid, don’t worry. You shouldn’t see much of a difference, and I’ll be choosing a platform that enables comments so our discussions remain as fun and enlightening as they’ve been here.

In the meantime, comment away! It’s great to have you here in 2024. It’s only the 12th of January, and it feels like a whole year already.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen the following letter a lot lately: I’ve been meaning to send it out for a while now. I’m sending it to recipients of both The Bad Newsletter and here on the Cynic’s Guide, because — to say shortly what I’ve said at length — having Nazis on your platform when you are not a free speech platform is bullshit. I could respect an absolutist free speech stance, but Substack is not a free speech platform. There are multiple forms of speech that are not accepted here, including sex work: try using Substack to send nudes or fire out some erotic fiction and see how long your account lasts. Still shorter version: Nazis yes, nudes no. And if you’re not going to be a true free speech platform, then I’m going to have to join the voices demanding that you get rid of the Nazis.

Of course, it goes further than Nazis, who are merely the tip of the Substack garbageberg: this place is a haven for hate and disinformation merchants of all kinds who are thrilled that Substack is giving them a platform and the ability to monetize. I’m putting a piece together on how Substack enables and encourages disinformation: look out for it soon at The Bad Newsletter.

Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem:

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’…Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position.

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns.

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.”

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed,

Substackers Against Nazis

There’s this skit at the opening of the Tenacious D song “Kielbasa” that starts with KG saying “Dude, we gotta fucken write something,” and because I got into the D at an impressionable age and the lyrics are burned into my hippocampus with letters of fire, I think of this song every damn time I’m behind on a deadline, which is most of the time. And yet I resisted writing this piece, for a few reasons.

One is that I’m spooked by success. A few years back, I did a tight five minutes at a comedy open mic. I’d done stand-up sets before, to varying results, including quite a lot of laughter and at least one obligatory crash and burn. This time I was determined to get it right and I did. I learned the material backwards, including a few alternative paths should a particular punchline flop, the crowd laughed their collective asses off and I left the stage on a high. “That was brilliant!” I thought. “I can’t wait to do that again,” and I never have.

The other reason I’ve been avoiding writing this particular piece is that I’m not sure that telling people about what I’m looking to achieve is a good idea. You may have heard, as many who’ve read self-help have, that you need to make your goals public, or tell people what you’re trying to achieve, for reasons of “accountability.” Many, including Tim Ferris, suggest publicly announcing your goal, or making a bet with a friend (if I don’t do X by Y, you get to keep $Z dollars.)1

The idea is that publicly announcing a goal will help hold you accountable. But, as is usual in the field of self-help, the advice is wildly conflicting. Many authors suggest telling no-one (or as few people as possible) about what your goal is or what you’re working on. According to numerous sources, some of them credible, telling people your goals can affect the likelihood of achieving them.

Naturally, I’ve just Googled the topic, and I’ve immediately hit someone taking the bit way too damn far, because that’s always how it goes in this ridiculous field. “Why telling your goals is a fatal mistake” screams one of the first Google hits. Fatal? Really? Unless the goal is “skydive without training” or “build an electric blanket from scratch” I doubt it’s going to be deadly, but let’s find out. The piece, which I nearly stopped reading in the second paragraph when it mentioned neuro-linguistic programming, is by a bloke called Peter Shallard. He describes himself as “a renowned business psychology expert and therapist gone renegade.” This last seems accurate: his “About” page contains no formal qualifications.

It suggests that if you tell people about what you’re up to, it can give you the same kind of mental reward as actually doing the thing you’re telling everyone about. Just because I’m cynical about Shallard’s qualifications doesn’t mean it’s all a load of rubbish, though. Other pieces by more credible authors — like Atomic Habits mega-seller James Clear — suggest the same effect.

If that’s right, it’s a bit cooked for me, because I have a newsletter that’s about all the different self-help shit that I do, and telling you about it may be dooming everything I try. Having an audience for my stuff hasn’t helped me achieve my big goal, which was to post regularly: if anything, it’s made it harder. Some people pay me actual money for this writing, others seem to like it enough to hang around for each epistle, and this frankly freaks me out a bit. I always worry that I’m disappointing you.

Fortunately, when you dig into the research it gets both vague and highly specific. Good science tends to come loaded with caveats, and the original paper that everyone references, by a bloke called Peter M Gollwitzer, is no exception. As you can read for yourself, the experiments in the study have a rather tangential connection to reality. They measured whether students would do stuff like “watch videotaped study sessions for slightly longer” or “compare yourself to variously-sized cartoons of lawyers and indicate which one you feel most similar to.”2

I’m not mocking this. It’s real science, the conclusions are both interesting and valuable, but they’re not necessarily broadly applicable to the real world. That never stops self-help writers from immediately making it so, though.

Where does that leave us? Is it a yeah or a nah on telling people about your goals? How about: why not both, or neither? I think the answer depends on what sort of person you are, or what kind of goal you have in mind. If you’re the sort of person who really needs others to give you a rev up, by all means tell a few specific people about what you’re trying to achieve. Or if you thrive on working on something in secret to surprise people later down the line, do that. Curiously, this approach gels with some of the research I mentioned above, which suggests that if your goal is founded in identity — “I wanna be a gym guy/gal/nonbinarino” — then telling people about it is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the goal. But if it’s founded in something more specific — “I wanna bench press 100 kilos” — then the identity condition might not apply, and perhaps it’ll be helpful to tell others or otherwise have people help you out.

All the above is my long-winded way of telling you that, somehow, I’ve managed to consistently go to the gym for a few months now.

Again, caveats. I am using the word “consistently” slightly outside of its conventional calibration. I’ve noted the date of each gym session since August, during which I managed to go a grand total of four times. In September I went three times, a 25 percent decline, but October picked up nicely with seven attendances. In November I went nine times, and so far in December I’ve managed to go every other day.

Improbably, I love it.

I can’t quite put my finger on what changed: the nearest thing I can compare it to is the same buzzy “I hate this, but I like it” feeling I get from taking cold showers — and I’ve been doing those for well over a year now. I’ve also refined my workout a bit: I followed a plan one of the gym trainers set me for a while, and now I’ve shifted to a strength-building workout that’s easy to understand, hard to master, and never stops getting harder.

The other reason I like the gym now is that it’s working. A while back I noticed that a bunch of my favourite t-shirts were getting too small. I’d definitely outgrown shirts before, usually around the tum region, but this was a bit different. They were pulling up at the shoulders and into my armpits. Never mind, they were going to holes anyway. I consigned them to the painting-rag box.

Then it started happening to younger shirts, and I couldn’t pretend that it was anything to do with the age of my shirts or our washing machine. I’ve got bigger, in a way I wanted and planned and worked to get bigger, and that is very satisfying. Much more importantly, the numbers on the Heavy Metal Things are going up, too. In August I was knocking around a 40 kilo bench press and drawing this not-smiley face next to it: 😐

Today, my best bench press is close to double my August numbers. The emoji has changed to this: 🤨

Back when I started this newsletter, I was using how many pull-ups I could(n’t) do as a success metric. I stopped updating progress because I was embarrassed the number wasn’t going up, which is what happens when you don’t, uh, work out. But I do now, and the numbers are in: I’m doing 20+ pull-ups in a given gym session — and that’s in between my other exercises. I’m pretty pleased with that. Pull-ups are hard. But it’s still early days. I have a specific and quite ambitious goal in mind for how much I’d like to be able to lift: the goal is to bench-press 100 kilos, and to be able to do a muscle-up, which is probably the most aptly-named callisthenic exercise in existence.

No-one except Louise and my t-shirts has noticed that I’m going to the gym, but I’d like to think that’s not why I’m going. I read once that, one day, you pick up your child for the last time, and — as an older dad — I want to delay that day for as long as possible. If I keep tracking the way I am now, I’ll still be able to yeet my boy Leo well into adulthood, and that’s exactly how I want it.

Hopefully telling you about it won’t stop it from happening.

I originally titled this newsletter “Harder, Better, Faster, Shorter” not just to get the Daft Punk song in your head but because it was meant to be shorter than normal. That hasn’t worked out, but oh well. Substack lets you do surveys, so I’ll pop this one here – I want to find out what kind of newsletter frequency you’re actually after here.

And, as usual, I look forward to chatting in the comments.

A few weeks back, I noticed my iPhone screen-time averages were starting get a bit silly. Like a lot of smartphone users, my device is set up to passively scold me for how long I use it, and last week it informed me that my use time was down slightly to an average of just… three hours a day.

This meant my average time the previous week was close to four hours a day.

“I had my reasons!” I reasoned. There are lots of apps I use for work — Gmail, Slack, others. I’d written a time-consuming and fraught article on Christian Zionism for Webworm and I’d spent a lot of time popping in on the Substack app to check on the comments. And there was, uh, Instagram. Gotta check the ‘gram, right? How else would I know what my rapidly ageing millenial cohort were up to?

But four hours seemed excessive.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there are only 24 hours in a day, and 8 of them (if you’re lucky) you spend asleep, so four hours is… a lot. There’s lots of other things I want to be doing, not least of which is consistently updating my self-improvement newsletter.

I started writing this article, and then I was taken with the sudden urge to Do The Maths.

It was very depressing, and it went like this:

Let’s assume I’ve spent three hours a day on a smartphone since I got my first one. It was more than 10 years ago, but we’ll be generous and allow for just one decade of smartphone use. What’s more, we’ll say that I only used it for three hours a day for six days a week. Inventing a kind of smartphone Sabbath should allow for any days I used it less than three hours.

So. There are 52 weeks in a year. Multiply 52 by 6 and that gives us 312: how many days I use my phone in a given year.

(Ironically, I am using my smartphone’s calculator app to do these calculations.)

Multiply 312 by the 3 hours a day I use my phone and I get 936. Nine hundred and thirty six hours a year.

Shit.

Let’s multiply those 936 hours by 10 years and that gives us… 9,360 hours over the last decade. God.

How many total days is that?

Break out the division. 9360 hours divided by the 24 hours in a day will give us the total number of days.

It’s 390.

Three hundred and ninety days.

Fifty-five weeks and four days.

About one year and one month.

It’s the equivalent of being on my phone continuously, day and night, without stopping, for more than a year.

What?!

I must have the maths wrong. I check it with my wife. She’s a primary school teacher, this kind of maths is her bread and butter.

(At this point I really did go upstairs and check the preceding paragraphs with Louise.)

Unfortunately, I am right.

It’s not just me. And it’s not just you. Estimates of average daily smartphone use vary, but reputable studies put it at between 2 hours a day (at the low end) and almost 6 hours a day (at the high end.)

What’s more, the only thing more popular than smartphones might be the desperate search to disconnect from the damn things. Scratch the surface and the articles are everywhere: “Device-addicted parents struggling to curb kid’s screen time,” worries an RNZ headline, with a buried lede that parents are struggling even more to curb their own screen time. Linked in the RNZ story is a piece by NYU professor John Haidt with the (contested) theory that “Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls.” Meanwhile, the Spinoff has a helpful power ranking of all the ways writer Madeleine Holden has tried to curb her own smartphone addiction, and advice columnist Hera Lindsey Bird has a …broad spectrum of suggestions:

There are easy things you can do to limit how interesting your phone is. Mute all but essential notifications. Make everything grayscale. Kill every potential source of dopamine. You could get an alarm clock, or even better, a clock radio. You could charge your phone in another room. You could swap your phone for a fax machine. You could swap that fax machine for a water blaster, and comprehensively clean all your walkways.

Take all these anecdotes of compulsive use, add users’ desperate desire to quit, and you’ve got something that looks a lot like an addiction. There are plenty of people who’ll tell you that this waddling, quacking bird is definitely a duck. If you’ve ever searched the topic you’ll be familiar with explanations like this one from Stanford professor Anna Lembke, who suggests our smartphones have turned us into “dopamine addicts.”

“We can very quickly then get into this vicious cycle, where we’re not reaching for something to feel good, but rather to feel normal or to stop feeling bad.”

Continuous over stimulation of the brain’s pleasure pathways worsens the situation, she says.

“If I continue to bombard my brain’s reward pathway with these highly reinforcing drugs and behaviours, I eventually end up with so many Gremlins on the pain side of my balance, that not only do I need more and more to get the same effect, but when I’m not using, I’m in a dopamine deficit state, I’ve got a balance tilted to the side of pain.

“I experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, anxiety, irritability, depression, insomnia, craving. And I will then seek out that drug not to feel pleasure, but just to stop feeling pain.”

It seems clear that smartphones can be addictive, but there’s always the danger — as so many self-taught self-improvement influencers do — of biffing babies out with the dopamine bathwater. Thanks (ironically) to my unhealthy YouTube habit, I’m exposed almost constantly to people who pick up the notion of “dopamine fasting” and run off a cliff with it. To make some points that should be obvious: Smartphone use is not a closed loop, there are an infinity of things that make people happy or sad that predate smartphones by a few hundred thousand years, and you need dopamine to live. The list of extremely legitimate reasons to use smartphones is long. In many countries, the villages that we need to live and work and raise children are all but gone, and in place of spaces where we walked and talked together are a billion lonely boxes, each containing social creatures with a desperate need to reach out. If you can’t do physical, then digital will do. If you’re a new mum, nap-trapped by an infant, sending memes to your mates might be what’s keeping you sane. And if you are an activist or a journalist or a politician or an artist or one of any number of things, a huge part of your job takes place in online social spaces, and you need to Post.

And for years, that’s what I’ve told myself: I’m an artist, and I write, and I need to be online. Reading an article or ten feels like virtous work, as does scrubbing through a tutorial on YouTube. What I watch is often deeply entwined with my identity. And it has to be said that screens are, in many ways, wonderful. During the pandemic, I could keep in touch with family and friends all over the world. My son knows his grandparents and cousins by sight; in ye olden 90s we would have made do with voice-only phone calls, photos and (if we were lucky) a videotape. Having all the world’s knowledge, a high-powered camera, and even a calculator (take that, maths teachers) with me at all times is a boon.

Yet. These days, as I scroll, it’s accompanied with the feeling that I’ve been conned. Looking at the numbers, it’s clear: I’ve spent more than a year of my life on smartphones and the return on investment is terrible. You could excuse the sheer amount of time spent if there’d been something to show for it — a big social media presence, the ability to code, learning a language on Duolingo, a consistent output of pretty much anything creative. But I can’t make any of those claims. I know life is about much more than “productivity,” but even with that caveat my phone time is staggeringly unproductive. I post perhaps twice on Bluesky or Mastodon on a big day. Instagram is maybe once a week. Nearly all the time I spend on my phone (and, if I am being honest, my computer) is in passive consumption. Lurking. I don’t have many good memories of the half of my life I’ve spent on screens, or in fact any strong memories at all; it’s all one amorphous, algorithmic blob of memes and blogs and socials and takes.

My first thought on doing all those calculations was: how am I even finding the time to use my phone this much? I’m busy. I have a demanding day job. I have a social life. I’m a dad to a toddler. I cook and clean and walk and go to the gym. There’s practically never a time when I am on my phone for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. I think I could count the times I’ve spent more than an hour in one session on one hand.

But a bit of thought solves the not-mystery.

It’s the in-between times. 5 minutes here. 15 minutes there. Opening the phone to a notification of a text from a friend only to open Insta to be reminded of a meme you want to send to another mate but only after watching a mildly interesting reel lifted from someone else’s Tik-Tok. It adds up quickly.

It is, to age myself with a simile, like changing gears in a manual car. If I’m finishing a task (let’s say, the weekend morning dishes) and I need to do something quite different (let’s say, go to the gym) a nice smooth gear shift will have me picking up heavy things in no time. But add my phone to the mix — a quick reply to a mate, an email check to see if that package has shipped yet (hope, nope), scrolling to pick the right playlist or podcast, pausing to download an audiobook — and it’s like leaving your car to idle in between gears, eventually to slow down or stop. Suddenly it’s 25 minutes later and getting a full workout in before I need to take my son to his appointment is impossible. May as well not go!

This sort of thing happens all the time.

It seems frighteningly obvious that the life I want to live is being eaten by my smartphone screen.

In fact, it’s so obvious that the only reason I can think of for not giving it due attention is because of how frightening it is.

I felt like a character in a whodunit who’d always known who dun it but was too scared to admit it.

And that’s just smartphones. Once you add TVs and computer screens to smartphone use, things get scary. Time spent on screens goes from a worryingly significant fraction of life to the overwhelming majority of it, to the point where the words “HE LOOKED AT SCREENS” would make a cruelly accurate epitaph.

My brain’s so cooked by it all the only way I can visualise it is in meme form:

Here’s the thing: for all the advice richocheting around the Internet on how to curb your Internet-adjacent addictions, there’s probably only one thing for it.

Cal Newport, the irritatingly fresh-faced author of a couple of self-help books I’m sure I’ll get around to reviewing one day, puts it succinctly. (You don’t have to watch the whole video. This clip should start it right at the relevant bit.)

Yes, that’s right. The answer was right there in the Book of Mormon1 all along.

Just… turn it off.

I took the medicine. Just before I started writing this article, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone. Twitter? X’d it. Mastodon? Mastadon’t. Bluesky? I blew it right off. Reddit? More like didn’t read it. Instagram? Instagone.

I wish I could say that I felt better instantly but it’s been several days now and I’ve felt twitchy and tired and I keep picking up my phone and putting it down for no reason at all.

If smartphone use is an addiction, this seems about right for withdrawal symptoms. I’ll say this: it does feel startlingly similar to when I quit smoking.

I don’t expect my productivity to suddenly peak. I’m an accomplished procrastinator; life will find a way.

But if I can get those lost slices of life back — those moments of necessary boredom, of smoother gear-shifts in between tasks, of seeing my son playing instead of gazing into the abyss of my phone and having it algorithmically gaze back — then it’ll be worth it.

I’ll let you know how I go. If you decide to do something similar, I’d love to hear how you manage.

EDIT: Annoyingly, I just found out I accidentally sent this newsletter out with comments for paid subs only, which is the Substack default, and wasn’t my intention. I’ve fixed it now, so comment away!

Also I got this notification this morning. It’s still too much, but it’s a big improvement. The system works!(?)

For entertainment purposes, if by “entertainment” you mean “being crushingly depressed,” I have made a spreadsheet you can use to calculate your own abyss-gazing tendency: how many years of your life it’s taken to date, and how many it will remove from your future. Just put your age in years in cell B1, how many years you’ve had your smartphone in cell B2, and your average daily hours of smartphone use in cell B3. Enjoy!

Yeet Your Phone: The Spreadsheet.