Gidday Cynics,

Remember “life-hacks?”

Today, life-hacking is a cutesy phrase that means anything from “make your bed after showering” to “rip the the transformer out of your microwave and use it to burn patterns in wood and/or instantly stop your heart.” But this term has its origins in the idea of actually hacking your life — and for a while, back in the ancient times of around 2012, the ultimate in life hacking was sleep hacking.

If, like many people, you feel like you don’t get enough done, the appeal of hacking sleep is easy to see. Of course, for most of us it never progresses beyond an idea, because — as anyone who’s ever pulled an all-nighter, suffered from insomnia, or attended a needy child knows — not getting enough sleep sucks. But for some, here at last was a way to claim a third of their lives back. The last enemy of productivity had fallen! Sleep had been defeated! Tim Ferris’ The Four Hour Body captures the spirit of this attitude to sleep:

“Is it possible to cut your total sleep time in half, yet feel completely refreshed? The short answer is yes… Think of the books you could read, the things you could learn the adventures you could have with an extra six hours per day. It would open up a new world of possibilities,” Tim writes. He outlines several techniques for “polyphasic” sleep, with the most extreme being never sleeping for more than 20 minutes at a time. You spend all day, and all night, awake, and snatch sleep in strictly-regimented naps. Apparently, this would allow you to not only function but thrive. The catch? If you miss a nap — or oversleep — it screws everything up, and you have to adjust all over again.

This sleep-hack was called the Uberman, and it won legions of raving fans online. Forums and subreddits sprang up to discuss sleep-hacking, and the media took note, enought to drive the idea of sleep hacking into — if not the mainstream — then perhaps a minor tributary.

This sleep-hacking craze didn’t escape me. Thanks to my own well-documented issues with insomnia, it wasn’t something I wanted to try, but I couldn’t let it go. Years after sleep hacking faded into relative obscurity, I decided to find out more. Who would come up with something like the Uberman — and why?

After a bit of minor sleuthing, I found the Uberman.

Her name is Marie.

The Uberman

At first, Marie was reluctant to talk — she’s had problems with the reporting on her sleep experimentation in the past, including an outlet publishing her last name when she’d specifically asked to remain anonymous — but after reading my account of fighting sleep and losing, she agreed to an email interview. It turned out that the reason she started experimenting with sleep was that she’d struggled with it, too.

“I always had trouble with sleep, and it got really tough in my teen years,” she explains. “I had really nasty, constant nightmares, night-terrors, sleepwalking, and something called “sleep confusion” where I would have a really hard time shaking off my dreams when I woke.”

Marie moved away for college, and soon found herself more desperate than ever. Insomnia would keep her awake for days, and then she’d sleep for 14 hours or more. This pattern repeated endlessly, making her miserable. She needed sleep to pass her classes, and wanted the long nightmare to end — literally — to the point that she was ready to try something extreme. When Marie complained to a friend that she could doze off easily, only to wake up around 20 minutes later and be unable to get back to sleep, her friend suggested: what if she just did that intentionally?

The schedule Marie’s mate suggested was based on the self-experimentation of Buckminster Fuller, best remembered for inventing the geodesic dome. A 1943 Time article strikes a blissfully optimistic tone about Fuller’s “Dymaxion sleep” method:

Fuller trained himself to take a nap at the first sign of fatigue (Le., when his attention to his work began to wander). These intervals came about every six hours; after a half-hour’s nap he was completely refreshed… For two years Fuller thus averaged two hours of sleep in 24. Result: “The most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed.” He wishes the nation’s “key thinkers” could adopt his schedule; he is convinced it would shorten the war.

Other mercurial geniuses are said to have got by on only a few hours sleep, and there are hints that they employed similar methods to Fuller; both Nikola Tesla and Leonardo da Vinci employed frequent naps and supposedly slept only a few hours in a given day (or night.) These nap-based patterns are usually called polyphasic sleep, and there are other kinds too. The standard eight hour sleep we’re all urged to get is monophasic, taking an afternoon siesta followed by a later bedtime is biphasic, and there are variations in between.

After researching Dr Fuller’s approach, Marie figured she had nothing to lose, and potentially a lot to gain. “I was motivated by mad hope,” she says.

Marie began her version of Dymaxion sleep, and swiftly descended into a kind of hell.

“The schedule is extremely extreme,” she says. ‘It’s probably the most restrictive sleep schedule possible, hell yes it’s extreme. I’ve had a physical freaking baby and I can honestly say that adjusting to that sleep schedule was harder to get through than labor.”

Others have found the schedule similarly punishing. Take the account of Mark Serrels, who tried it back in 2012, and began hallucinating, blacking out, and otherwise losing his mind. He vlogged all of his experiment, and his final entry is disturbing, like something out of a low-budget horror film; he gropes around frantically for his lost time while slurring and stumbling over his words. After his blackout, he (sensibly) quit. “I stumbled into my bedroom, curled up next to my wife and collapsed into the most profound sleep of my life.”

But Marie made it. After adjusting, she found herself with a new lease on life. The nightmares and other sleep issues vanished. Her classwork improved. And notwithstanding the need to nap every few hours, she had so much more time.

“I compulsively write things, so after I’d done it for about 6 months, I wrote up my schedule.” Marie, a philosophy student, called the method Uberman, in a riff on Fredrick Neitzsche’s Übermensch, and posted it online. It went viral — a remarkable achievement on the internet in an age before social media..

“I got flooded with email, because unbeknownst to me, what I’d written up wasn’t really information that was on the Internet yet,” Marie remembers. “So I threw up a website to track the answers I was giving by email, and then wrote a book to collect it all.”

Things were good. The schedule was working, Marie’s blog was a centre of discussion on sleep-hacking, and the Uberman became the accepted name for extreme polyphasic sleep.

“I collaborated with a bunch of lovely also-weirdos and tried a bunch of other nap-based schedules, collected tons of information on managing the difficult process of adjusting schedules, and so on,” Marie says. “In 2012 I did a second edition of the book, and I’ve done a smattering of other things, like talks and panels and interviews and one time an episode of a TV show, called Going Deep with David Rees.”

But there were downsides.

Life-hacking was having a moment and, with books like The Four Hour Body, people were embracing the idea that anyone could push their body in any desired direction, if only they had enough willpower. Marie resisted it strenuously: every chance she could, she pointed out that the reason she’d done her sleep experimentation and adopted an extreme schedule wasn’t to chase ultra-productivity — it was to defeat her sleep demons.

“The thing I’ve felt most weird about in others’ treatments of polyphasic sleep was that somebody would always want to make it work for everybody,” Marie says. She suspects the primary motivation behind this take on her work was money, not curiosity or genuine need.

“Because, gee, everybody is such a huge market and if everybody gave us a dollar, how many dollars would we have?” Marie says, rhetorically. “When things go that way, I spend all my time insisting ‘yeah, but I’M WEIRD’ and saying ‘Everybody is different! Probably especially with sleep!’ and other things that feel obvious. I said it plenty, in the book and repeatedly on the site and in interviews, and yet there’s always somebody who turns green and says, “what if this is the secret everybody is looking for?’”

Over the years, Marie’s become adroit at deflecting the weirder approaches, and says her experience with the sleep-hacking community she helped create has been overwhelmingly positive, but toxicity is hard to ignore completely. “I’ve experienced people wanting to misinterpret and hyperbolise what I did, for financial greed and other reasons, I’ve been the subject of some weird fights about gender (because most folks thought I was a dude and some made arguments based on it) and even some light stalking.”

Light stalking! Sounds horrific. Asked what the deal was, Marie is straightforward: the problem is a certain kind of person, who weaponizes the urge for self-improvement and productivity in order to put themselves on a pedestal from which they might be able to make money. In other words: tech bros.

“Tech bros suck from every angle. A lot — maybe over 95 percent — of the toxicity I’ve dealt with has been from tech bros,” Marie says, adding that as a woman working in tech she’s been the “only chick on the team” far too many times.

“I think it’s because the way they think of ‘productivity’ is a harmful, exploitative concept. You have to be really clueless to go from ‘maybe I can do better if I work hard on myself’ to ‘…and then we should sell it and gain followers and everybody will think we’re cool,” Marie says. “You have to be at least half-evil to be willing to bend the truth to make the second part work.”

Marie is disappointed that the bad aura of would-be and actual self-improvement influencers can put people off, but she says it helps to remember that tech bros aren’t genuinely interested in any of the topics they put forth on, whether it’s coding software or self-improvement. “Rather, they’re all wannabe-CEOs who will generally grab onto anything new and cool and try to make an empire out of it. My lack of interest in having any kind of empire was probably frustrating for some of them — and others were just frustrated over something, and then acted like crybabies because they had exactly the emotional maturity you’d expect from a wannabe-CEO.”

She’s quick to add, though, that the majority of her discussions on the topic were positive, and that the few that did become toxic were dealt with through the time-honoured block-and-mute. “I will say that insofar as there were arguments with specific people, they were mostly minor, and mostly easy to extricate myself from — the Internet is a wonderful place to mute people forever and forget they exist, and I’ve enjoyed doing just that with pretty much every tech-bro I’ve met, through my sleep experiments or otherwise.”

Over time, the furore around sleep-hacking died down. Google Trends shows interest in the Uberman and related terms slowly trending down, with occasional spikes of interest when a book, TV show or other influence makes the topic go viral.

Now that things have settled a bit, how is Marie doing with the Uberman routine she named and popularized? Much like Buckminster Fuller, who quit when his “Dymaxion sleep” proved incompatible with the rest of humanity, she doesn’t do it anymore. “I didn’t keep it as my permanent schedule, because it’s impossibly strict. Again, that makes it good for some things, but just for daily life? When you need flexibility and can’t guarantee that you won’t, say, catch a cold and then have to re-adjust to your schedule afterwards?” These days, she finds the “Everyman” routine (a 3, 4 or 6 hour sleep routine, punctuated with up to three daytime naps) most accessible — but her interest in all things sleep, be it monophasic, biphasic, polyphasic, or whatever, is undimmed.

Asked if she worries that her approach (or the publicity it gathered) might be risky, or encouraging people to sleep less than normal, her reply is thoughtful.

“Less than normal is a tricky concept, because the ‘norm’ is a broad range in humans. Some people simply don’t need more than a few hours of sleep, and many need more — I have a friend who must have 10 hours,” she says.

And that need isn’t immutable. Lots of things can affect how much sleep people need, want or get. These factors vary from common to rare, and include events like: childbirth, parenting, shift work, going to war, and sailing solo around the world. “So a wide range is normal, but my real point is that polyphasic sleep is about more than just sleeping less. This is another thing I often fought the tech bros on, because sleeping less sounds sexy and purchasable,” Marie says.

Ultimately, she advocates getting better sleep, which can look different across individuals and cultures — and is something that industrialised, Western society is terrible at making space for. In particular, the need to work or study at inflexible times means many people are forced into sleep schedules that don’t suit them. This is something that nearly all sleep experts seem to agree on. Teenagers, for instance, tend to have quite different circadian rhythms to children and adults, with late bedtimes and late waking — but they’re often required to attend school at a time when biology says they should be asleep. Parents are forced to return to work when truly adapting to their baby’s (polyphasic) sleep rhythms would require them to nap during the day. These systemic problems require systemic solutions, and aren’t something that can easily be monetised or turned into a product.

“Sadly for the tech bros, the fact that you can get better sleep by napping isn’t something you can really sell,” Marie says. “In fact, you end up saying ‘OK but then we need workplaces and public spaces to go along with this health-and-wellness need people have,’ and those are unpopular conclusions for anyone looking for their angle to get rich on.”

That’s the essence of her message: different people have different needs, and in the absence of an inclusive society that makes space for these differences, people might have to experiment to find out what best helps them manage. Ultimately, she feels her experience was worth it, so long as no-one else feels like they have to emulate it. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it — but if they’re struggling with sleep already, like she was, and want to try something different? Go for it.

“I can be — and feel — just fine on six hours of sleep if I get a midday nap, and I think that is a really cool thing,” Marie says.

Alright, Josh here again, although now I think about it I wrote all the stuff up there so I suppose I never really left.

I find this sleep-based self-improvement stuff absolutely fascinating, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it too. I really appreciate Marie giving up a bunch of time to write really detailed replies to my questions, and I think she’s ultimately got a good outlook on sleep: if you can, figure out what works best for you. Of course, as she points out, many of us are forced into sleep circumstances we wouldn’t necessarily choose. I doubt many new parents are thrilled to get up dozens of times a night. I’m naturally a night owl, and if it wasn’t for my son I’d probably favour getting a nice early midnight and waking up at 9 AM.

So does this mean I’ll be trying the Uberman any time soon? Dear God, no. It sounds like a baleful curse of eternal waking. Extreme sleep routines have been studied and are, in the blunt words of one study’s authors, not recommended. What’s more, my own early efforts to wrestle sleep into submission kind of fucked up my life. I don’t fancy rolling those dice ever again.

Should you try the Uberman? Obviously, it’s up to you, but if you sleep well (or even half-decently), I don’t know why you would. As Marie points out, chasing the deeply boring dragon of “increased productivity” is a bad reason to experiment with your sleep. However, if you find yourself forced into situations that require extended wakefulness, then perhaps being a bit more intentional about how you approach naps might be helpful. If nothing else, it’s good to remember that when you’ve had a shit night’s shut-eye, a quick snooze might be all the medicine you need.

There’s a part two to this piece coming up soon, because as I’ve hinted, there are lots of people who are essentially doing the Uberman — but not by choice. And I want to make sure their voices get heard.

As always, thanks for reading. This newsletter is free, so if you’ve found this piece valuable, please hit the “share” button, or — if you’re reading this in your email — feel free to forward it to a friend.

I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago and thought it’d be a good opportunity to reflect, piecemeal, on where I find myself in life, the universe, and this whole self-improvement thing.

Psuedo

The pseudoephedrine has been left in Australia lest I be convicted as a drug dealer and I’m already missing it in anticipation of my next cold. Of course, the flippant joke article I dashed off about using cold medicine for self-improvement inevitably became the most popular thing I have written for this newsletter. This is extremely funny.

The sleep stuff is sorted, for now

I’ve written a lot about sleep, and how I felt I wasn’t getting enough of it. I’m still really interested in the topic but I’m happy to report that (largely thanks to my son taking up sleeping through the night) I am now getting enough sleep that I don’t feel like I’m in a permanent fugue state. The other big reason for not getting enough sleep was spending too much time playing video games, which has been solved by:

Lifting weights

Panaceas are never real, and it’s still early days, but weight-lifting looks like one of those rare things that solves several problems all at once. Making your body tired makes sleep much less optional, and the temptation to play video games late into the night goes entirely away when your arms are too munted from DOMS to pick up a controller. Plus, if you want weight-lifting to actually do anything to your body, you need to be getting sleep. The counterpoint is that getting out of bed is as difficult than ever. I’m pretty sure my body’s preferred chronotype is Night Owl and it’ll probably never change, but for now I’ll settle for finding it easier to get to bed earlier.

Cold showers

I wrote about the cold shower thing a few weeks back now and I’m still enjoying it as much as when I first started a year ago. A bunch of commenters said they’d given it a hoon and were getting a good buzz out of it. I hadn’t mentioned yet that I’ve also given a year to that classic self-improvement bugbear (and one of Jordan Balthazar Peterson’s 12 Rules): making your bed every morning. The results are jaw-dropping!1 I’ll write about it soon.

Journal Ling

The spell check refuses to acknowledge “journaling” so I’ve allowed it to insist on “journal ling.” This, for the curious, is a ling:

I started keeping a journal again, not for any of the purported self-improvement benefits, but because I was alarmed to look back at the previous decade or so and have next to no idea what happened in it. The phenomenon of time speeding up as you age is real to the point that it’s become a cliche, and everyone I know comments on how time seems to have frozen solid circa 2016, but what really alarms me is not being able to remember important personal things. They say hindsight is 20/20, but that’s a lie; looking back is like staring into a rapidly-thickening cataract fog, and the more you age the blurrier it gets. Clearly, I need to write life down so it makes sense. Also, my handwriting was becoming terrible.

Obviously this newsletter is a kind of public journal too, so I guess I’m attacking it on two fronts.

Rage, rage against

I am angry.

I think in everyday life I come off as an affable sort but underneath simmers a constant low-key fury. This is a dangerously uncool thing to admit to, least of all because you might come off as the sort of person who’d unironically create a meme like this:

I think my saving grace is what I’m angry at: it’s mainly climate change, and our carefully-engineered inability to do anything meaningful about it. A thought that occurs to me at least a few dozen times a day is that in a sane world, we’d be bending all of humanity’s considerable ingenuity to the task of halting mass extinction. It’d be the biggest project in the history of civilisation, a human mobilisation dwarfing World War Two, for even greater stakes, and there’d be a job in it for anyone who wanted one. Instead, we have the real, reality-denying world, where we2 are carrying on with business-as-usual to ruinous effect, and those of us who’d like to do something often find ourselves trapped. I have written about this before, once or twice, but I almost never stop thinking about it. Others are writing about it too, and often a piece of their despair and grief catches me and starts my wheels spinning again.

Denied any real outlet, the anger comes out at importune times, like: when sucking at Halo, scrubbing at a chunk of toddler-discarded Weetbix with the consistency of concrete, or when repeatedly vacuuming at a pet hair that inexplicably just won’t fucking move. Perhaps there is a better way. Now I’m 40 I think I can make a friend — or at least an ally — of anger, and put it to good use, as others have.

Logjam

A side-effect of a much needed holiday is that everything you didn’t do while you were resting smashes you the moment you’re home, often negating the effects of any rest you managed to get. Yesterday I felt like I was losing my mind with everything I hadn’t done pulling me apart, like hooks in my flesh attached to heavy wire and relentless winches. Louise heard me out, sat me down, made a list, helped me pick two things to concentrate on, and made me sane again.

With a day or so of relative clarity I can see that the more I feel I have to do, the less likely I am to get anything done. The logs jam in the waterway of my mind and the poor executive function lumberjack hops across them fretting over which one to hack at. The answer is the same thing it always is: just fucking pick one.

I am frustrated that after 40 years of being alive this has not yet sunk in.

Epiphany

I read this XKCD at least 15 years ago now and it was a dagger in the gut. Not because of the pickup artist thing — I might write about that at some point because of its roots in self-improvement culture, and because it seems to have morphed into a social movement that might actually be much worse — but because I’ve never been able to stop thinking about the last three panels:

I sometimes wonder how many other flimsy 20-something male egos Randall inadvertently destroyed with this particular extremely funny comic. Now I am 40, the effect is even worse. If it hits you hard too, let me know, and we’ll bask in our shared misery.

Yeet the phone

Fuck smartphones, fuck software manufacturers for making them addictive, and fuck society for embracing them so comprehensively you can’t live without one. Every time you, and by you I mean me, pick the thing up and check a notification you’re being yanked out of whatever you actually wanted to be doing and imposing a heavy mental cost to getting back on track, turning your life into one long, barely-controlled stall. I am slowly learning that I can’t actually get much done with a smartphone anywhere near me (or any other sort of notification going “ping” and bouncing around my brain like a wreeecking balllll)

The spider bite

When it comes to self-improvement I think a lot of us want it to be a bit like in Spider-Man where Peter Parker wakes up suddenly swole, able to backflip tall buildings in a single bound, jizz from his wrists, and indirectly murder his relatives. At least two of those things sound wonderful. Self-improvement tomes are full of stories of people who had some kind of life epiphany (see XKCD comic above) and suddenly gained that most super of powers: the ability to change. I do not doubt that this actually happens — I know too many people who have abruptly and permanently stopped drinking4 to disbelieve in the epiphany’s power — but at 40 I feel like I’ve enough life events under my belt to realise you can only really diagnose an epiphany in hindsight.

Birds

For my birthday I got up at 5 am and drove for an hour and a half to reach O’Reilly’s in Lamington National Park, Queensland, just as dawn was breaking. My brother and his partner had invited me out to see a bird they hadn’t managed to spot yet: this sprightly fella.

In a nice bit of serendipity my brother and partner arrived at the exact same time I did and we saw the Regent before we’d even left the car park. A birding tour had just showed up and the local avian residents realised it was feeding time.5 There were only a few people on the birding tour and they invited us to join them. Within a few minutes walk we’d seen or hand-fed a few dozen species including white-browed scrub wrens, Eastern Yellow robins, logrunners, whip-birds, satin bowerbirds, and more. We were stoked. It was probably the best birthday morning I have ever had.

I was already feeling a bit choked up about how goddamn nice this all was and then my immediate family made it much worse by throwing a barbecue and banding together to buy me a really good pair of birding binoculars. I’ve been told I’m hard to buy for because I have off-kilter interests and tend to impulsively purchase stuff I want anyway, but this present really touched me. A good gift — new, second-hand, activity-based, it doesn’t matter which — can do that. Someone did the hard mahi to figure out the state of your soul and what you currently lack, and drew a line correctly connecting the two.

Things are good, actually

It is easy to get wrapped up in everything you aren’t, or don’t have. The shifting baseline lies to you, meaning that even when you objectively improve you still feel like you’re standing still. Add this to the fact that the world is in a precariously dire way on any number of fronts and you have a recipe for despair. But: I have a good life. I have an incredible, beautiful wife and wonderful son. I have an interesting job that keeps us fed and watered and housed. On that note, somehow I own (about 20 percent of) my home. And there is space in my life to see family and go birding and bask in the beauty of the world we inhabit, if only for a while.

As cheesy as that might sound to some, at 40, I might finally be past caring.

Gidday Cynics,

I’m on holiday in Straya at the moment so you’re enjoying a shorter newsletter than normal.

You’re in luck, though, because this newsletter contains my number one life pro tip: one weird trick that doctors may or may not hate, an incredible life hack that can turn grey skies blue and smash a head-cold into the Sun.

It is, of course, pseudoephedrine. And guess where it’s still legal?

I’m still a bit crook, because apparently spending winter with a toddler who attends preschool is just an unceasing series of practically Biblical plagues. So after developing a monster head cold — either the tail end of my previous malaise or the pointy end of something else — I waltzed Matilda into a chemist to see if they could supply a cold medicine with actual active ingredients.

Turns out, after giving them enough personal details to keep an ID thief happy for years, they could. On my packet of generic cold medicine, the pseudoephedrine is advertised as a “decongestant.” This is technically correct, in much the same way that heroin is an effective cough medicine, but it’s not the point. The point is that pseudo makes you feel amazing. When it comes to self-improvement, I know of nothing that more instantly improves one’s self. When you’re laid low with a cold getting some pseudo in you is like biting into a radioactive spider. You come out swinging.

But being able to regain a semblance of functionality while ill has a dark side. And, unlike Australia, New Zealand was wise enough to see it.

It’s yet another timely reminder that, apart from small matters like the weather, the economy, the price of living, public transport, wildlife variety, beaches, outdoor recreation in general, sporting prowess, public health care, and probably a few other things, New Zealand is far superior to Australia. In New Zealand, we can see the wool for the trees. Long ago, we realised that over-the-counter pseudoephedrine was fuelling a methamphetamine epidemic. Sure, most actual meth ingredients were being imported through black market channels by criminal gangs, rather than being bought over the counter by desperate mules, and there are plenty of ways to make meth that don’t involve pseudoephedrine at all, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that at some stage, over-the-counter pseudoephedrine might have been used to make meth.

Luckily, unlike in the Lucky Country, our leaders were willing to take a stand. At the time, New Zealand was governed by a wise and powerful political party called John Key, and it was about to make its most momentous political decision: banning cold medicine. With a single stroke, John Key would end the meth epidemic in New Zealand, and all it would cost was permanently immiserating the millions of Kiwis who suffer from colds. This was back in 2009: here’s how the media reported the decision at the time.

Prime Minister John Key is convinced all Kiwis stand to gain from his decision to designate pseudoephedrine a Class B2 drug.

He wants hundreds of thousands of law abiding citizens to do the decent thing – forgo using their perfectly legal and effective cold medication and snuffle in silence in the fight against “P” (“pure” methamphetamine).

“I think New Zealanders are fair-minded enough to see that,” Key said in an opinion piece in the Herald outlining his “war on P” initiatives.

And look how well that turned out! Crime is at record lows. Methamphetamine is only used for legitimate purposes, like keeping Spitfire pilots awake. No-one ram-raids anyone for anything. After banning a widely-used, seldom-abused, and incredibly effective cold medication for the greater good, New Zealand is, at long last, a P-free utopia.

Or at least I assume it is. Let’s see what the news has to say. I’ll just do a quick Google and…

Well. That was in 2018, only nine years after banning pseudoephedrine! Perhaps the ban took a while to bed in. Today, in 2023, things must surely be better.

What’s this? Could the evidence show that blanket drug prohibition simply doesn’t work? Does this suggest that we banned the single most easy, effective and accessible way to improve your miserable cold-addled life for no fucking good reason?

With that epiphany under our belts, let’s take a step back. In the recent past, pseudoephedrine may as well have been manufactured and marketed by Influenza Inc. The idea was that you might start the day a gibbering fever-wracked wreck but a couple of Codrals would sort you out to the point that you could stride confidently into the office and gift your germs to every single co-worker. It was probably less effective at spreading germs than tongue-kissing an entire commuter train, but only slightly. This ad gives a good impression of the wildly problematic vibe:

Now that Covid is over1, things have changed.2 It is, in some circles at least, frowned upon to go into work while sick, the better to cough into your co-workers’ open mouths. This is a net good, but sometimes — to pick an example not at all at random — you get sick, and then your wife gets it, and then your two-year-old son gets it, and even though your bronchial tubes and sinuses resemble the Yellow River in flood you still have to get up and make breakfast and do dishes and do the stuff you do to pay the mortgage. In short, you must soldier on, if only via Zoom. Of course you should lie down and take the rest you need but there are times in your life when you simply can’t.

If I have to be sick, I’d like the chance to feel capable of doing the needful during the day before gratefully collapsing into bed. Yes, there are longer and more nuanced discussions to be had about taking self-improvement in tablet form, or capitalism’s insistence on carrying on while crook, but I feel it’s entirely reasonable to feel shortchanged by some politician’s clumsy attempt to be Tough On Crime by removing an entire country’s access to medicine. And maybe, just maybe, there are larger lessons to be learned about the ineffectiveness of wholesale drug prohibition.

All this is a long way of saying that any political party that runs for election on the platform of restoring pseudoephedrine to its rightful place on New Zealand pharmacy shelves will win in a fucking landslide.

Share if U agree!!!1!

Thanks for reading. Don’t worry about me. It’s not Covid, I’m feeling much better, I’m enjoying my holiday, and I’ve got pseudoephedrine to thank for it. None of this really has anything to do with self-help but I have helped my self by ranting about it. Thank you for your time.

Gidday Cynics,

My routine has, as routinely happens, gone completely to shit. I mentioned that I’d got sick: barring a nagging cough, I am now pretty much better, so naturally my wife and son wanted a turn. The routine for the last couple of weeks looks something like this:

• Wake up at 2 am to crying child
• Soothe son back to sleep with a story so boring he can’t help but nod off
• (Repeat)
• Wake up at marginally more civilized hour
• Cough
• Spit
• Cough
• (Repeat as often as necessary)
• Get son up
• Food
• Cryotherapy
• Look after son
• Work
• Food
• Look after son
• Work
• Takeaways
• Sleep?

And so on. Happily, they’re both getting better, and I am once again finding time to go to the Place Of Picking Up Heavy Things And Putting Them Down Again, with the goal of becoming swole. That’s all very new and pain-inducing, so ask me about it again if I manage to stick at it for more than a few months.

In the meantime, let’s talk about something in the self-improvement vein I have managed to stick to.

The portable ocean

For a lot of people, “get in the sea,” is sound life advice. It definitely is for me.

I can’t think of many things I like better than ocean swimming. The one real regret in my life, currently, is that I don’t live closer to the sea. In an another universe, or possibly several, there is a version of me who lives in a shack on the beach, talks to driftwood, and swims every day. I definitely prefer my current life, which comes with a comfy house and a wonderful wife and son, but I have no doubt that my mad alternate-universe self is very happy, because he’s near the ocean.

There’s just something special about getting in the sea. I much prefer it to touching grass, which at this time of year is mainly mud with far too many tiny slugs in it. The ocean might be full of uncountable trillions of viruses and millions of dead bodies, but swimming in it is just so relentlessly great that it’s difficult to describe without resorting to poetry. When it is warm, you can float and laze, buoyed by the waves; when it’s cold the shock of immersion surges like electricity.

Then there’s the thrill of surfing1. No matter the time of year or ocean temperature, there’s not much that compares to the rush of that first plunge, as you leap into and under a wave and feel the surge and push of raw power wash over you. To ride a wave is to be humbled and exhilarated all at once: it is to meet a power much greater than you, an inhuman force that will drown and grind and eat you, and — for a moment — dance with it.

People have been seeking out the seaside to improve health for a long time. The Victorians saw “sea air” as a cure for everything from consumption and rheumaticks to good old-fashioned hysteria. Today, there are plenty of efforts to scientifically quantify the benefits of getting wet, but I believe this is one of those cases where you can trust the evidence of your eyes. If this video of what happens when autistic kids are taken surfing doesn’t prompt a shed tear, I’m not sure what will.

I have my own, entirely unscientific, experience of using the ocean as a cure. I used to get head colds a lot as a kid; luckily, we lived near the beach. Once I was old enough to drive I’d go to Matauri Bay, still one of my favourite places in the world, and go bodysurfing. After getting tumbled over the falls a few times my nose would be a fire hydrant of snot; it’s really something, just how voluminous sinuses really are. Push on one nostril, blow hard; bye-bye head cold, hello dubious fish food. Every time I pick up a head cold now, like I did last week, all I can think of is how much I want to go swimming.

But now I’m a landlocked dad with responsibilities and a two-hour round trip from the nearest beach. So what to do?

I take the ocean with me.

That’s right: I’m a Cold Shower Guy.

I’m surprised it took me so long to cotton on to cold showers. I started taking them just over a year ago and, apart from when I’ve been seriously crook, I’ve had one every day since. It began, of course, with a trip to the sea. Some overseas friends were staying over and they found themselves without a ride to Hawke’s Bay. I offered to chauffeur the five-hour drive. It wasn’t exactly altruism: I needed a break from some troubling work stuff and I figured I’d be able to squeeze in a swim. And I did. We went to Ocean Beach — there are about a thousand Ocean Beaches in New Zealand — and I got in the water like a bullet. I was tired and stressed and anxious and it all vanished the moment the icy water closed over my head. It was the middle of winter but I felt like I could have stayed out there for hours.

When I emerged, I felt cleansed, baptized, born again, refreshed, reset. A funny thing happens when you’ve been exerting yourself in cold water; as gravity reasserts itself and circulation returns to your extremities, you feel the warmth of your own blood, the heat of your own skin.

I thought: there’s something in this. And: Isn’t there some guy who advocates cold swimming?

There is. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of him too.

I drove home the same day, and listened to most of The Wim Hof Method on audiobook on the way. I found it… frustrating. It’s a bizarre mix of mysticism, genuinely impressive athletic feats, obvious pseudoscience, some (potentially) real science, weird personality-cult stuff, and — in between all that —  an interesting and often tragic life story. Today, these compelling ingredients have combined to make Wim Hof a wealthy bro-science hero. Every damned alt-right-adjacent influencer in the world is taking Instagram reels of self-immersion in a custom-built ice bath and talking up unproven “benefits” like testosterone gain or fat loss. It’s almost enough to put me off cold showers entirely.

Almost.

As someone who’s prone to sudden enthusiasms and brief fancies, the only reason I ever continue anything for as long as a full year is because I genuinely like it. Cold showers are uncomfortable, but in a comforting way. I start with a normal hot shower (side note: for the longest time in human history, hot showers would have been an exception rather than a norm) and when I’m pretty much done I flip the shower knob to the full-bore cold setting. It’s a shock, every time. The cold water hits my back, and I’ll gasp, or involuntarily yip. Spin around, soak the chest, plunge my head under. It’s awful; but then something in my brain trips and I’m in the cold ocean, a wave passing over my head in that muffled-thunder way, and everything seems to slow and stop.

The time I actually spend under the cold water varies, but it’s usually anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes. No matter how long I spend, when I hop out, there’s that buzzy warm feeling. Those old, unhinged “How it feels to chew 5 Gum” ads are the closest I can come to articulating both how cold showers are simultaneously silly and superlative:

But the cold shower connection to woo and pseudocience and fundamentally shitty people remains disturbing. It takes next to no effort to find social media feeds full of griftfluencers boasting about how their cold plunge habit has made given them even bigger dicks (Sign up now for my cold plunge crash course and SAVE!) It’s got to the point where if you say “cold shower” three times in a mirror a goose-pimpled Wim Hof cultist will appear and drag you into an ice bath. What’s particularly annoying is that conflating vastly different forms of cold exposure seems common: taking cold showers is quite different to (and an order of magnitude less dangerous than) swimming in an ice-covered stream.

And there are pitfalls lurking outside social media. There’s plenty of “science” on this stuff that just… isn’t. One initially legit-looking literature review I found via Google Scholar breaks down the various applications of hydrotherapy (doing stuff to bodies with water, cold or otherwise) and comes up with a long but non-exhaustive list:

“[hydrotherapy is] used to improve immunity and for the management of pain, CHF, MI, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, asthma, PD, AS, RA, OAK, FMS, anorectal disorders, fatigue, anxiety, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, hyperthermia, labor, etc.”

But a second glance reveals that this is one of those cases where Lee Reid’s red flag index isn’t even necessary: both authors hail from the “SDM College of Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences.”

So is there any real science that showcases the benefits of cold showers?

Perhaps surprisingly, yes.

One study in the Netherlands published in the journal PLOS ONE found that cold shower-ers called in sick 29 percent less than a non-cold-showering control group: good news for our capitalist overlords, who may soon find a novel use for office fire-prevention systems. Then there’s a neuroscience study in the journal Biology which found, essentially, that people like cold showers: “We measured brain connectivity and self-reported emotional state before and after cold-water immersion. Our findings showed that participants felt more active, alert, attentive, proud, and inspired and less distressed and nervous after having a cold-water bath.” The study also found measurable differences in brain activity, which seem to corroborate that “cold water can make you feel good.”

It’s useful that the science also seems to show that cold showers are unlikely to be harmful to people living without known health issues (the Netherlands study, which was on a notably large cohort of 3018 participants, did not turn up any cold-shower-related adverse events) but I wonder, for the layperson, if the research is strictly necessary. To me, cold showers are a perfect example of what self-improvement could and should be; free, accessible, and possibly even fun. Sure, they’re advocated for by some questionable types, but who cares?2 If there’s no harm — and potentially some benefit — in an activity, there’s no reason to leave it as the exclusive bastion of griftfluencers and alt-right weirdos.

So can I point to any health benefits from of a year of cold showering? Absolutely not. I seem to be getting exactly the same number of colds and aches and pains as I always did. The closest I can come to a health benefit is that despite the every-time “what the fuck!” minor body horror of suddenly being pricked with ten thousand tiny icicles, I feel absolutely stoked for a good few minutes after getting out. That’s enough benefit for me, and I’m not the only one. I’m sending this out on the winter solstice, and all over the country people are braving some seriously chilly waters to take a shortest-day dip. And from the smiles I see on the socials, they really like it.

There might be a life lesson to be learned from cold showering, specifically that it is possible to learn to handle or even enjoy hard or uncomfortable things. This is what I’m choosing to take away from it, but as always I want to emphasise that we’re all different and that your personal mileage may vary. I don’t want to burden anyone with yet another fashionable self-improvement thing that may offer nothing more than a cloying, nagging feeling of obligation. Not meditating? Not journaling?  Not cold showering? Big deal. If it sounds interesting, give it a go. Keep going if it works for you, but please feel no guilt in abandoning it if it doesn’t — or even if you just need a break.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. I am trying to guilt-trip you into sharing this post but I’m not very good at it. Please share anyway.

FAQs

These mostly aren’t real questions but I typed a question mark at the end of each one so you can imagine each one being said with an upward inflection?

I want to do cold showers?

Then do it.

I don’t want to do cold showers?

Then don’t do it.

I’m keen to try it but I’m worried I won’t like it?

Try it, and if you like it, you can keep doing it. If you don’t like it, you can stop.

So I really don’t have to do this?

No, you really don’t.

Are there any medical reasons to not do take cold showers?

With the obvious disclaimer that I am not a doctor or even anything vaguely approaching a doctor, I know of only a few conditions that might preclude cold showers. They are: epilepsy, migraines, and heart problems. If you have any of those, talk to a real doctor before subjecting your body to avoidable, optional cold shocks.

I’m worried I might enjoy taking cold showers?

You might. That’s a risk we bold self-improvers all take. But, importantly, you do not have to start taking Tik-Toks of yourself talking to the camera while chilling out in a cold shower. That is extremely optional.

I love this! Imma go break some ice and jump in a frozen stream!?

Yeah, nah. Taking a cold shower and plunging yourself in freezing water are quite different, in a similar way to how you might enjoy sitting by an open fire but you probably shouldn’t get in it. That was more joke than metaphor, to be honest. Unlike setting yourself on fire, icy bathing has a long cultural heritage and there are valid reasons to enjoy an freezing swim — but it’s best done in the absence of dangerous health conditions and in the company of friends who can haul you out of the water lest you start dying.

So. What do you reckon? Cold showers: yeah or nah? If you’ve got any low-key mascochistic self-improvement habits, I’m all ears.

Gidday Cynics,

I was planning to write a follow-up to the previous piece on routines, but it turns out I have the gift of prophecy. Here’s what I said last week:

The problem with a planned schedule or routine is that it will inevitably, often immediately, break. If you have anything like a normal life, something unforeseen will come up. In the likely event that whatever life throws at you is going to take more than thirty minutes, your precious schedule is fucked.

Being a pessimist has its advantages; mainly that you’re occasionally pleasantly surprised. But habitually expecting the worst also means that you come to hate being right, and boy, was I right about plans being immediately foiled. Just when I was getting all stoked with myself for sitting down with Louise and planning out a routine that would actually work around our family needs,1 I got hit with the one-two punch of munting my back and man-flu. As in, it wasn’t Covid, and probably wasn’t influenza, but a gnarly head cold that immobilized me for the best part of 24 hours. After that, my voice sounds like a bandsaw cutting through a wasps’ nest, I’ve been coughing up gobs of stuff that could plausibly be used to seed life on barren planets, and I’ve become exhausted through my efforts to not drive myself too hard.2

So I was stoked to have my guest piece run on Webworm, and even stoked-er to have the very first Cynic’s Guide guest piece land in my inbox. Let me introduce Lucy. She’s a regular here — if you’ve checked out the comments  you’ve probably seen her laying down some insight. She also happens to be one of my oldest friends. Lucy and I have been mates since we worked together on the Waikato University student magazine, in the Ancient Times. I say “worked” with heavy caveats — although we did do plenty of writing, we also spent a lot of time chortling over early I-can-has-cheezburger-tier memes and discussing Harry Potter fan theories.

Sigh. Remember when the young adult books you enjoyed had a modern heroine for an author instead of someone who’s gone so comprehensively to seed that they’re practically a Triffid? I remember. You don’t always know when you’re in the good times, or what dark turn is going to make them bad. And that’s probably a good segue to Lucy’s guest post, which is about finding your way through ennui.

Hi, fellow Cynics. My name’s Lucy. I’m 38, a parent, a professional development coach, and apparently experiencing late-30s ennui.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how you can have fairly in-depth knowledge of all kinds of things, but not identify it in yourself? I can tease this stuff out of people with GROW, DiSC, and various other development and self-awareness acronyms, and yet it was Josh who suggested it to me, on a sunny, wintry afternoon during one of those disjointed conversations you have when chasing your respective offspring round a playground.

And what do you do when you have a moan to a friend who happens to have a Substack about personal development? Apparently, you write a guest post.

A quick Google informs me that late-30s ennui is absolutely a thing, but (apparently) we don’t talk about it much. However, there are many, many articles about it aimed at the millennial generation —  those of us who can carry on whole conversations in Golden Age Simpsons quotes, and who worry that the makers of Bluey have our houses bugged.

Full credit to Buzzfeed for the very excellent term: Millennui.

So what’s it all about?

In your 20s, you’ve got unparalleled freedom (you just don’t know it yet). You can stay out late and still manage to work the next day, because your job’s probably entry-level and (if you’re lucky) not that hard, plus you’ve got boundless energy. It’s fine if you change your mind, because your 20s are for finding out what you don’t want from life anyway. And if you get to 26 and decide you’ve got it wrong all along, that’s okay, because you can go travelling, or (appetite for student loan permitting) go and do another degree and still be in your 20s when you finish.

Yet we don’t realise it at the time. We want our lives to be like Friends, with exciting love tangles and randomly falling into high-powered jobs, and lots of time to have coffee. And when we realise we don’t like the job we got our degree to do, we worry that we wasted all this professional development time, and we’re going to be, like, old when we finally have it worked out.

And then you reach your mid-30s. By then, you may well have kids and a mortgage and be wondering if you’re saving enough for retirement. Possibly you’ve had a big relationship break down. You don’t get to see your friends often enough. In hindsight, you realise that your 20s was a time of unstructured freedom and you probably wasted a lot of it worrying about what was to come, or flitting about trying out new things and never quite finding something that stuck.

You’re a different person, because that’s what time does to you. And because you’re more worldly, you discover all these new things that you want to try, or you know what you want, but now your spare time, energy, and money is inversely proportional to your levels of responsibility and tiredness.

And this late-30s is like no other generation has experienced.

If you were born sometime during the 1980s and your experience was anything like mine (though I know experiences vary wildly), your parent/s were quite possibly doing a job they studied for at university, and expected to remain there until retirement when they’d collect a nice pension for their trouble. It’s what their parents did. (My grandfather left school at 14 to work as a paperboy, and retired as the managing director of the company.) Perhaps they advised you to go to university, then the world would be your oyster too.

But you also probably graduated sometime around 2008-2009 into a global economic meltdown. House prices and rents exploded, inflation inflated, and however hard you worked there was the looming spectre of being one restructure away from redundancy. Global politics got rougher and more divisive, the vulnerable became more so, moth holes started to appear in the social fabric…and then Covid came along, and now, as we’re still trying to catch our breath, climate change has kicked off in earnest.

I am exhausted just thinking about the last 15 years.

So, it’s not that something’s wrong with you.

It’s not that you’ve spent your adult life making the wrong choices — generally, we make the best choices with the information that’s available to us at the time. The information that we had in our early 20s is not going to be current some 15 years later, and there’s a bunch of stuff that we don’t get to control. So let’s scrap that dwelling-on-past-decisions stuff and think about what we can do now.

Figure out our values

It sounds so self help-ey and trite, but actually getting to grips with what matters to you now is an important part of breaking out of ennui. Often, we feel ‘meh’ and dissatisfied because we haven’t re-evaluated what’s important to us, so we’re still working towards what a past version of ourselves would want.

It doesn’t have to signal a seismic change, like changing careers or moving country. But it might involve removing parts of your life that aren’t serving it now — including particular activities or relationships — and replacing them with things that do serve.

Break old habits

We all have habits that really don’t help us: mine is procrastination through doomscrolling. I’ve managed to curb that by getting rid of social media apps from my phone, deleting my Instagram account, leaving all the Facebook groups that I don’t need for work purposes, and physically putting the phone in another room. Reddit’s API fiasco and the subreddits going dark has helped too!

Instead, I’m gradually starting to replace the unhelpful habits with things like drawing, actual physical books, and good old-fashioned talking to my family.

Gradual habit change is the key. I know Atomic Habits is the talk of TikTok, but I preferred Tiny Habits. More practical and less lecture-y.

Unhook from it

I am a giant fan of Russ Harris’ The Happiness Trap and cannot recommend it enough to anyone who ever has that mean little voice in their head. I named mine Ursula.

I know Josh is going to read this book and go more in-depth on it later (aren’t you?), but I like using the very simple process outlined in it, called ACE.

• Acknowledge and name the thought or feeling
• Connect with your body
• Engage with your surroundings

The key with this is that you’re not trying to make those thoughts go away, or turn it round into a positive statement, or any of those things. You’re saying, “yup, I’m having a thought, I’m going to go and do this now.” Because thoughts and emotions come and go through the day — the trick is to notice them as dispassionately as possible and let them go. You can’t control them coming (I forbid you to think about a purple giraffe eating ice cream) but you do have some control over what you do with them.

And that’s the thing with ennui. It’s a common state for a lot of us, and apparently it can be expected at particular life stages and milestones. But maybe it’s also a sign that we’ve changed — because of course we have — and now it’s time to get to know ourselves better.

Josh here again. I really liked that piece. It’s funny how often we spend ages trapped in our own heads, spinning out over quite mild things that, reframed, are often very good things (like still being alive after nearly 40 years of it) and how these same things feel much clearer and lighter after a good yarn with a mate. Which raises the possibility that you can also get some of the same clarity by talking to yourself as if you were a friend, as Lucy’s done here. Results, as always, vary — but it can be helpful, and talking to yourself nicely instead of nastily almost certainly won’t hurt.

Lucy’s just put a new Substack together. She didn’t ask, but I wanted to promote it here. It’s about business and professional development coaching, which Lucy is living proof can be done in an ethical and non-grifty way.  You’re reading a self-improvement newsletter, so there’s a solid chance you’ll get something out of the excellently-named Happy Monday. If the first couple of posts are anything to go by it’s going to be very good.

Happy MondayA Substack about professional development, navigating crossroads in life and work, the work-life blend, and being happy that it’s Monday.By Lucy

I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this also subscribes to David Farrier’s Webworm, but on the off chance you don’t, my guest piece is there, awaiting your eager perusal.

Why Are So Many “Christians” Hellbent on Being Horrible?

Hi, There’s a question that’s been swirling around in my head for years now, and I think it started when Trump won in 2016. Here you had this man who was just objectively hideous, being voted in by hardcore Christians. It was weird. Since then, every additional fact we’ve learnt about Trump makes him seem

Webworm with David Farrier

Thanks for reading — I’d love to discuss Lucy’s post, your experiences of late-30s ennui3, and how you deal with it in the comments.

As always, this post is free. Please, feel guilty — then, assuage that guilt by sharing the post everywhere you can.

Every day, the first thing I do is wake up.

In my experience, that’s the best way to start a successful day, and I haven’t missed one yet.

It is, of course, 3 AM, the time all high-functioning people awake. The bright stars shine, brightly. Elves are abroad, softly singing songs of long-lost Valinor. Normies would never witness this.

I go for my first of several runs, bowels loosened by my pre-bedtime breakfast of Soylent, castor oil, and vitamin R. Then I go for a run using my feet, and legs.

As I complete the marathon, the sun is rising. I pause to do my morning breathwork, staring deep into the baleful yellow eye of Earth’s only known star. My eyes water gratefully.

From there it’s a quick trip home, deftly avoiding the odd tree or car that seems to rise up above the black void that has opened up in my vision — as a result of, I presume, mindfulness. Then it’s to work, at whatever vague thing I do. After thirty minutes of prompting ChatGPT to give instructions to the people who I have artfully coerced to do my job, the working day ends and I do my first hour of mindfulness. Then there’s lunch, a quick skip across the pond in a private jet to do lunch with the latest PM, then golf, followed by 19.2 minutes of extremely high quality time with one of my children, not sure which. I journal on the flight home — there’s nothing like flying for getting writing done — slug my soylent cocktail, and at long last slip into bed at 5:30 PM, utterly spent. My wife nudges me with a light in her eye, but I’m already snoring, satisfied in a way that mere intimacy with another human being can never provide.

In case you can’t tell, I was being sarcastic.

Barely.

Routines are a whole thing in self-improvement land. Search Tik-Tok for “morning routine” and prepare to be (if you are me) incredibly bored by beige weirdos earnestly explaining how and why they get up at 5 AM to journal before nipping to the gym, interposed with people dunking on people who get up at 5 AM and journal before nipping to the gym. Such is modern life. Everything is polarised; pick a side.

The routines of the famous make even richer reading. Here are the daily routine and affirmations of current jailbird and former Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, written down on (of course) a piece of stationery from a high-priced hotel.

Celebrity routines are even funnier. Because the job of most celebrities is to go to the gym in between acting gigs, their routines can be as wild as their imaginations can make them. From an interview with the Sunday Times, here is Orlando Bloom’s routine:

I’m a Capricorn, so I crave routine. Fortunately my partner is really into that too1.I chant for 20 minutes every day, religiously. I’ve had a Buddhist practice since I was 16, so that’s infiltrated my whole being. I’ll read a bit of Buddhism and then I’ll type it up and add it to my [Instagram] Stories. Other than that, I won’t look at my phone yet. I don’t want to be sucked into the black hole of social media.

I like to earn my breakfast so I’ll just have some green powders that I mix with brain octane oil, a collagen powder for my hair and nails, and some protein. It’s all quite LA, really. Then I’ll go for a hike while I listen to some Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots.

By 9am it’s breakfast, which is usually porridge, a little hazelnut milk, cinnamon, vanilla paste, hazelnuts, goji berries, a vegan protein powder and a cup of PG Tips. I’m 90 per cent plant-based, so I’ll only eat a really good piece of red meat maybe once a month. I sometimes look at a cow and think, that’s the most beautiful thing ever.

There’s a doctoral thesis in there. I find “brain octane oil” especially intriguing, but so are beautiful cows and an entire food pyramid masquerading as “porridge.” Let’s not get too hung up on Orlando’s relatively sane routine, though, when we could be looking at Mark Wahlberg’s, which he posted to his own Instagram.

–   2:30 a.m. — Wake up

–   2:45 a.m. — Prayer time

–   3:15 a.m. — Breakfast

–   3:40-5:15 a.m. — Workout

–   5:30 a.m. — Post-workout meal

–   6 a.m. — Shower

–   7:30 a.m. — Golf

–   8 a.m. — Snack

–   9:30 a.m. — Cryo chamber recovery

–   10:30 a.m. — Snack

–   11 a.m. — Family time, meetings, and work calls

–   1 p.m. — Lunch

–   2 p.m. — Meetings and work calls

–   3 p.m. — Pick up kids from school

–   3:30 p.m. — Snack

–   4 p.m. — Second workout

–   5 p.m. — Shower

–   5:30 p.m. — Dinner and family time

–   7:30 p.m. — Bedtime

This came out a while ago so better sleuths than me have covered it, including the 2:30 AM wake-up, the venality of mingling “family time,” with “meetings and work calls,” the improbable 30 minute golf game, and the 1.5 hour snack2, followed by another hour spent in a “cryo recovery chamber,” whatever that is, to deal with whatever the snack was. An elephant, I assume.

This has been the stuff of mockery for a long while. In the Ancient Times circa 2016, some daily routines — from routine dudebros, not celebrities — went viral. Because the Internet is actually not the bastion of permanence we all thought it was but an ephemeral void populated by ghosts, I can’t find it anywhere. From memory, it was stuff like “I wake up to the red light alarm I had installed to deal with my SAD and go stare at the sun3 for twenty minutes, before meditating and making myself a kale shake.” At the time, it received plenty of mockery on Twitter, whose users love a new Main Character.

And I feel that is just a bit unfair.

The trick is that writing anything down in a deliberate, ordered, meticulous format automatically makes whatever you’re doing seem psychotic, even if it’s painfully ordinary.  For example, here’s how my day actually tends to go.

I wake up and listen to Leo chatter to himself in his bed. Eventually I hop up, get him out of bed, change him straight away if I smell anything suspicious, stumble to the kitchen, put the kettle on, sit Leo down and give him whatever he’s getting for breakfast. Then I’ll grab my phone and read whatever’s at hand – emails, messages I got during the night, the usual social media time-suck. Often enough I’ll follow that by grabbing my laptop and tap away at work stuff (or, too often, hop down unhelpful time-wasting rabbit holes like checking my various inboxes over and over and over) in my pyjamas while I slurp at a coffee. Some days, I’ll fit in a run or a bodyweight workout. At some stage I will have a shower, followed by making the bed, and then the day is a miscellaneous hodgepodge of work, meetings, bouncing off unhelpful websites and time-sinks, responding to a sporadic but constant patter of notifications, making food, dad tasks, eating food, putting Leo to bed, staring at a big screen while taking breaks to stare at a smaller screen, sometimes writing something like this newsletter, then bed.

Fairly normal for a dad who works from home and thumps a keyboard for a living, I assume. But watch what happens when I write out the same thing, add some extremely hypothetical timestamps, plus a bit of of flowery description and self-help psychobabble.

• 7 AM: I awake, watching the sun slip through the gap in the curtains and feeling my heart swell with love as my son laughs himself awake. I leap out of bed, stride purposefully into his room and help him begin his day.

• 7:15 AM: I begin my morning routine in the kitchen, relishing the aroma of coffee brewing. I take my coffee outside, and drink in the cool morning air and bright sun. I also drink the coffee.

• 7:30 AM: I prepare my son a healthy breakfast of oats and milk, with a touch of cinnamon and honey. Sometimes I add a little fruit — perhaps peach, or kumquat.4

• 8:00 AM: I begin my working day, responding to emails and requests from clients and colleagues.

• 8:30 AM: I drop my son at preschool, watching him skip happily away and chatter with his friends. I am truly #blessed.

I’ll stop there or it will go on for another thousand or so intolerable words. I was starting to feel queasy so I can’t imagine how you were doing.

The reason I bring this up is because we all have routines, whether we know it or not. I don’t have a set bedtime or an alarm, but since I started wearing a smart watch I’ve been amazed by how consistently I go to sleep and wake up very similar times. Without planning or meaning to, I do nearly the exact same things every morning, with slight differences.

My realisation is that if I nudge just a little bit more purpose or planning into things I already do I could get quite a lot more done with very little additional effort. To take one example: what if — once I was on my computer — I didn’t flick between social media, work emails, and random internet bright lights and loud noises, instead concentrating on just working, or just socializing, or just scrolling? Or how about if I cleaned the kitchen while my son eats his oats (with just a soupçon of cinnamon) instead of zoning out at my laptop? Going a little further — what if I bundled up my heavy day-job workload into a specific time-bracket, thereby carving out time for my elusive alleged hobby, actually fucking painting?

Doing these fundamentally sensible things has occurred to me many times in the past, and I’ve even given it a go a few times, but I’ve never stuck the landing. I think the reason I have struggled with intentional routines — as opposed to the unintentional ones I follow effortlessly — is, I think, twofold: I haven’t wanted to buy into the psychotic cult-like thinking of extreme routine-followers, and because I feel all plans are doomed to fail. The problem with a planned schedule or routine is that it will inevitably, often immediately, break. If you have anything like a normal life, something unforeseen will come up. In the likely event that whatever life throws at you is going to take more than thirty minutes, your precious schedule is fucked. And then, instead of feeling joy from having answered work emails or stared at the sun for the requisite twenty minutes, you’re staring down the black hole of an early-morning failure.

But perhaps the fact that celebrity routines are stuffed with obvious lies should be a clue: a perfect routine simply isn’t possible. So what needs to change is the expectation of perfection. Of course it’s not always going to work. It just needs to mostly work. And you don’t need to get up at 2:30 AM with the elves.

So — how about you? Let me know if you’ve had any success planning routines, or sticking to them, or if you’ve had more luck throwing yourself before the whims of chaos. I reckon both are valid, but if your plan involves shutting yourself in a freezer for an hour every day, maybe see a doctor first.

Thank you for reading The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement. If you’ve found this post helpful for some reason, share it, you coward.

Gidday [CYNIC NAME HERE],

We hope you’re enjoying all the cynicism and self-improvement the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement has to offer. We’re updating our our prices to bring you more great entertainment.

This update will allow us to deliver even more value for your membership like new logos I made using Canva, stories about lifting weights, not doing pull-ups, or just telling tales that simply make your day a little more cynical.

Thank you for choosing Netflix The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement, and we hope you stay with us for years to come. We look forward to arbitrarily removing your favourite content in the near future with absolutely no explanation as to why.

The catch

I hope you enjoyed my best parody of a price rise email. The catch is that I really am putting prices up, to $10 a month, but don’t worry. I’m only doing it so I can bring prices down.

On the face of it, this makes even less sense than Netflix telling you it’s putting prices up so it can cancel yet another critically-acclaimed or audience-beloved show for tax  reasons, so let me explain.

I’ve wanted to move the Cynic’s Guide to a pay-what-you-want model for a while now. People have told me they’d like to pay for my stuff, but that $8 USD a month is a lot in these financially-cursed times, and I agree. Substack doesn’t actually offer pay-what-you-want functionality yet, but I’ve figured out how to emulate it with some carefully-arranged perpetual percentage discounts. That’s why the price has gone up to 10 bucks — it’s a lot easier to fiddle with percentages when you’re working in tens. And now that I’m done fiddling, you have quite a few more options when it comes to supporting the Cynic’s Guide:

If you already pay for my work, and you’re happy paying $10 a month, carry on! It’s very much appreciated.

If you already pay for my work, but you’d like to pay less than $10 a month, this allows you to continue to support the newsletter at a rate that’s comfortable for you. Simply cancel your existing subscription (oof) and pick a new price from the links below (yay.)

If you don’t yet pay for my work because it’s a bit pricey, but you’d like to, the new perpetual discounts will allow you to contribute at any level you’d like.

If you’d like to keep paying me (a person with a day job) but you’d rather the lion’s share of your limited subscription budget went to someone who needs it more (because they make their whole living from Substack,) please, make it happen.

If you don’t yet pay for my work and you don’t want to, that’s fine. Carry on. The plan is still for the Cynic’s Guide to remain free. Please, repay me for the free content by sharing it everywhere you possibly can.

Here are the new pricing tiers. Have fun!

Hopefully these work. If something looks broken, let me know.

• Pay $1 a month / $10 a year: https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/onedollarydoo
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• Pay $8 a month / $80 a year (current subscription price)
• https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/8outof8
• Pay $9 a month / $90 a year (more than the current subscription price, if you’re so inclined) https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/nine
• Pay $10 a month / $100 a year: Uh, just find the link to my current subscription page. Ah, here it is:

In self-improvement news, I did a workout today. Managed a few sets of 5 pullups. There you go. That’s what you came for, right?

Thanks again for reading. All going well, there’ll be an actual, non-price-related update later this week.

Gidday Cynics,

You’ll be pleased to know I have been extremely productive in nearly every facet of my life except writing this newsletter.

As far as writing goes, I’ve been busy. On top of a fairly intense day-job writing workload, I’ve smashed out quite a few thousand words for various outlets. I wrote an in-depth video game explainer aimed at non-gamer parents for the excellent Emily Writes. If you haven’t already read it, you might find it helpfully self-improvement-adjacent. Sample:

While video games are not bad for your brain, they are mentally taxing and time-consuming by design. They can foster compulsive behaviours that can look a lot like addiction in both children and adults. It’s very easy for kids — and me! —  to stay up late playing games, get very little sleep, and be a wreck the next day. What’s more, kids (particularly neurodivergent kids) can find competitive games difficult, especially if they feel that another team or the game itself is being “unfair.” This can lead to meltdowns; in gamer-speak, it’s called “tilted.” Adults are not immune. My language (not on mic!) during nighttime Halo sessions could melt steel beams. It is something I am trying actively to fix, as it’s not a habit I want to pass on to my kids.

That piece prompted a few of Emily’s subscribers to come here. If that’s you, then welcome! I hope you enjoy whatever this is.

I also wrote a guest sermon piece for David Farrier’s Webworm which may or may not appear in the near-to-distant future. Sneak peak:1

Bible translations vary a lot, but there is no version of the story where the Samaritan puts the injured man in a chokehold and kills him.

Plenty of people have made this exact observation, not least the Reverend Al Sharpton, who delivered the eulogy at Jordan Neely’s funeral. But I’m interested in what it says about the many people on the right-wing of United States politics — including, perhaps, up to 25 percent of the population — who call themselves Christians.

I don’t think they’re Christians at all. I think they’re something else.

Something terrible.

Sinister! In lighter news, the cult of orthodox economics has long been the funniest “science,” and the economic establishment has just now outdone themselves by begging the public to stop taking their predictions in any way seriously.  Yes, really. I wrote about this for my occasional media/politics blog, The Bad Newsletter:

Without a finely-honed economic sense of humour like mine you might have missed the joke. Let me explain while trying not to laugh too hard because I still can’t believe they said the quiet part quite so loud: because their predictions keep turning out to be wrong, economists are asking us to take a radically different view of the word “prediction.” Rather than assessing an economic prediction’s success using the conventional calibration — whether or not it happens — we are asked to reflect on whether the prediction tells us anything about the present.

Now that we’ve got all those accomplishments out of the way, let us get down to the more usual business of feeling shitty about our lack of self-improvement. I’ll start by asking: does anyone else do this thing?

Running away from tasks, literally

Imagine I’m beginning something new — hypothetically, let’s say “today’s Cynic’s Guide newsletter.”  I’ll feel a charge of excitement, but instead of opening a document and writing something, I’ll spontaneously stand up and stride briskly away. This isn’t a conscious thing: I’ll often be a considerable distance from my desk before I realize what’s happened. Some mute bit of my subconscious hasn’t liked my sudden urge to get things done, has seized the controls, and steered me away.

This happens in other ways, that are less noticeable as physically running away from my work. The same process happens in miniature at my computer multiple times a day. In fact, it happened a few seconds ago, which is why I bring it up. I was stuck on a sentence and instead of puzzling it out I flicked my forefinger over my laptop’s touchpad and dug into my Gmail tab. Why? There was nothing conscious about it; I’d checked my email only a few minutes earlier (and how often I check it has no bearing at all on how often I reply to things.) A momentary lull in executive function and off I go. At its worst, this is like being a passenger in your own brain, seeing through the eye-holes of a dumb meat golem with the wrong set of instructions slipped into its skull, briskly traveling away from its work and up the stairs to do yet another line of the chocolate that’s meant to be for muffins.

I’ve been trying to think through why I might behave this way, and I’m approaching something plausible: I tend to work in all-or-nothing binge slogs. They start with frantic, productive clattering and ending with me slack-jawed, prodding dumbly at the keyboard trying to remember what words and letters are. This is exhausting and it’s probably what my helpful/unhelpful subconscious is trying to get me away from.

Now I’ve noticed this tendency, I’m pleased to have picked up a new self-help book that I might even finish reading. This one rejoices in the unwieldly title of How To Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique To Boost Learning, Writing, and Thinking. It is by a bloke called Sönke Ahrens and is translated from German, which means its title is probably expressible in one lengthy word, perhaps something like Schmartnötenteknikallerninundwrittenschen. So far, it’s excellent, because it does something no other book I’ve ever read does: explains how to take notes in a way that works for my perpetually scattered attention.  Here is one of my notes: you can decide how smart it is.

As it turns out, writing down every ridiculous thought circling around in my head — projects I might do, ideas I have, topics for articles, everything else — is incredibly freeing. It pins thoughts down and stops them taking up space. I’ve always struggled with systems, like project planners, that try to get you to write your ideas or todos down in a linear way: I’m finding it much easier to just write all the thoughts down and find the connections between them later. I like the idea of doing more tinkering, and less binge-writing.

I’ll write a piece on the book once I get through it. On that note, here are some scattered thoughts I’ve been able to shape into something sensical now I’ve yanked them out of the formless ether of my brain:

On schedules and routines

Those might be the two most boring words in the English language and they’re about to become a major part of my vocabulary. After last weeks’ even-more-obvious-than usual revelation that I will not become swole by writing about how I might one day become swole (in between bouts of video games) I am starting an exercise routine that involves picking up heavy things and putting them down again. I’m also returning to scheduled posts. I’m thinking Wednesday mornings NZ time, but if you have strong opinions on when you’d like to get this thing, let me know in the comments. Here’s what you can expect in the upcoming weeks:

• A thing on Smart Notes
• A thing about routines, habits, and self-help’s obsession with bed-making
• A thing on Getting Things Done (the book, not the tantalisingly abstract concept)
• Some more stuff on sleep and sleep hacking, which I’ve been working on for ages

Now, to brighten or possibly darken the end of your week, here is some of the weirder self-improvement stuff I’ve seen in recent online travels.

Long bow of the week:

In a field full of grand, sweeping, often evidence-free conclusions, this is one of the grander and more sweeping ones I’ve seen. But wait! There’s more:

Clickbait has a lot to answer for, but it did inspire me to experiment with today’s email title to see what happens. In an effort to make writers feel terrible about themselves (evidently not realising this happens to most writers anyway,) Substack  introduced a new dashboard that shoves the most recent stats for your newsletter right under your nose. I will be disappointed, but unsurprised, if the open rate for this one is higher than normal.

Possibly unintentionally funny self-help book title of the week:

“It’s OK! I can stop overthinking! All I need to do is recall one of the 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and aaaaaaaaargh!”

Brutally ironic Reddit post of the week:

I subscribe to several self-help subreddits, mainly to see what people are talking about in the space. I’m starting to wonder if that was a mistake.

Graphic design is my passion

I made a logo and wordmark for this newsletter for some reason. There are few things I hate more than reading some exhaustive, design-wank-laden account of why so-and-so brand or such-and-such publication picked a particular font or line weight or something; anything that goes beyond “This is what our CEO eventually said yes to” is an overwrought lie. I’ll leave it to you to discuss why I picked this combination of heiroglyphics and words, should you be so inclined.

Any designers reading this who are triggered by my treatment of kerning or whatever are welcome to get in touch and pitch how they’d make it better.

That’s all for this week. As always, I’d love to have a yarn in the comments. How do you take notes (smart or otherwise), navigate through endless clickbait, avoid thinking too much about overthinking, or make logos for your newsletters? Take it away.

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.