In Parks and Recreation’s third season there’s a moment that perfectly captures the introvert’s dilemma.
Ron, a man who guards his privacy and peace fiercely, dreads Leslie’s notorious penchant for over-the-top celebrations. As the day approaches, his anxiety builds. But when the moment arrives, he’s met with an unexpected gift - solitude. Leslie has arranged for him to enjoy a steak, whisky, and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” in peaceful isolation.
I see my own struggles mirrored perfectly in this scene. Like Ron, I approach birthdays with trepidation.
The obligatory dinner out fills me with unease. I spend the evening on edge, anticipating the dreaded moment when waitstaff emerge with a cake, subjecting me to the half-hearted “happy birthday to you” singing of strangers.
Gift-opening becomes a performative ordeal, with anticipating gazes fixed upon me. My struggle to express enthusiasm has disappointed gift givers more than once.
The same is true of reading cards. You can feel their expectant eyes burning into you as you read their kind words, unsure how to react or what to say. Do I go and hug them or just say thanks? I never know.
You don’t want to complain about any of this of course. People’s hearts are in the right place and they’re just trying to be kind.
Though, there are those few who take a perverse pleasure in purposefully doing things they know you’ll hate. Seeing you distressed and uncomfortable seems to bring them joy.
It’s ironic that on the one day meant to celebrate me, I too often feel like I’m conforming to others' expectations. It feels less about my happiness, and more about fulfilling social conventions.
This birthday conundrum exemplifies a broader issue: our extrovert-centric world often overlooks the needs of introverts.
So the idea of a Ron Swanson-style birthday - one tailored to my own quiet, simple preferences - sounds like bliss. And I’m sure it does for other introverts too.
Research psychologist Robert Epstein argues that our understanding of the human brain is being held back by the persuasive ‘the brain is like a computer’ metaphor.
I especially like this passage showing that our knowledge of ourselves has always been influenced by the technology of the time. We’re just too complicated, so we shoehorn in mechanical parallels:
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit…
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature…
The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software…
What about digitising a brain?:
Even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it.
I’m currently reading “English Food: A People’s History” by Diane Purkiss. I thought this passage on Virginia Woolf’s depression treatment interesting:
Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, was in the 1920s treated, if that is the right word, by the then recommended regime of complete rest – not even books were allowed, lest they excite the brain – milk, weight gain, fresh air and early nights. One of her doctors, Sir George Savage, was especially keen to treat neurasthenic women by excessive feeding and complete rest. Woolf was given four or five pints of milk every day, half a pint every two hours. After five days of milk on this scale, she was allowed to add a cutlet, malt extract, cod liver oil and beef tea. The rather brainless thinking behind the regime was that since patients like Woolf stopped eating and lost weight when depressed, they could be forced back into wellness by being made to gain weight.
Imagine having depression and your ‘treatment’ is being forced to do nothing and drink loads of milk.
Side note. I like this picture of her. She looks so very human:
There’s a section on the hardships of people during the Great Depression. And after a sad, brief mention of a woman named Annie Weaving who died aged 37° potentially due to not being able to feed both herself and her family there’s a reference to something called “protective foods”.
I’d never heard the term. I thought they might be “protected” as in having their price controlled by the government. But it’s actually the precursor to the food pyramid idea.
One poster I found promoting it suggests this:
PINT MILK, 1 EGG, 1 POTATO AND TWO OTHER VEGETABLES (ONE OF THESE A GREEN LEAFY ONE), 2 SERVINGS OF FRUIT (AT LEAST ONE RAW), 1 SERVING OF MEAT OR FISH, 1 OZ. BUTTER.
And I think it still holds up. Could it be improved? Probably. But it’s simple and realistic. I like it.
People often overthink diet. So I like simplicity. It reminds me of Michael Pollan’s mantra:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Some info on the history of the food pyramid here°.
One of the things I don’t like about certain religious groups and people is their love of round numbers. Or more specifically round years. Every new century, half-century or decade they claim something miraculous and/or terrible is going to happen1
To me it’s just lazy, easy prophesying. And I find it rather silly. If religion is fantasy then these predictions are high fantasy. They’re always the same. The non-believers will burn. And the believers will live in a utopia or be taken to heaven. There’s never any subtlety or precision.
And it’s been happening for centuries. In the book I’m currently reading – “Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire" by Roger Crowley – it talks about how as the year 1500 approached Christian’s in Europe were expecting a huge event, as always. And of course nothing happened, as always.
Researching this phenomenon I’ve discovered there’s a name for it: Millenarianism. I’m sure it’s a phenomenon that won’t end any time soon.
Though 2012 wasn’t very round. I’ll give them that one. ↩︎
The Romans knew of the Canary Islands, a smattering of rocks off the coast of Morocco, which they called the Fortunate Islands and from which they measured longitude.
After some research, I discovered that while Ptolemy used the Canary Islands as a theoretical reference point for longitude, the Romans did not actually use this method for navigation.
The second passage:
[In China] in 1500 it became a capital offence to build a ship with more than two masts; fifty years later it was a crime even to put to sea in one.
While there were indeed strict rules on shipbuilding in China during this period, it was never a capital offence unless it was associated with piracy or treason.
The importance of citing sources
It’s possible that the author had access to sources I’m unaware of, and I could be mistaken. However, this experience reinforces my wariness of books that don’t cite their sources.
I still enjoy reading non-fiction books that are free of citations, and I do my best to trust the information they provide. However, I often assume that around 25% of the content is inaccurate. This doesn’t even take into account the potential inaccuracies, omissions, or biases in the historical sources themselves – a topic for another post.
This a lesson in how useful, but worrying, it can be to try and find sources for what you read.
[I acknowledge the irony of not citing sources in this post!]
Staying up late harms mental health regardless of one’s natural sleep preference. Surveying nearly 75,000 adults, researchers discovered that both morning and night types who stayed up late had higher rates of mental disorders. Surprisingly, aligning with one’s chronotype didn’t matter—early bedtimes benefited everyone. The study suggests lights out by 1 a.m. for better mental health.
[…] “The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late,” Zeitzer said. Night owls being true to their chronotype were 20% to 40% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared with night owls following an early or intermediate sleep schedule.
[…] They also tested the possibility that it was poor mental health causing people to stay up late, not the other way around. They tracked a subset of participants who had no previous diagnosis of a mental disorder for the next eight years.
During that time, night owls who slept late were the most likely to develop a mental health disorder.
I’ve noticed this – anecdotally. I’m a natural night owl, but I feel at my worst when I go to bed late.
I feel happier and healthier when in an earlier pattern. But I find it tough to remain in that pattern. My body and brain is constantly asking me to stay up later. And once or twice a week I’ll really struggle to get to sleep.
One thing that study didn’t look into is wether the increase of mental health issues is caused by what people do late at night, rather than just being awake late:
There may be many explanations for sleep timing’s link to mental well-being, but [the studies author] thinks it likely comes down to the poor decisions that people make in the wee hours of the morning.
Many harmful behaviors are more common at night, including suicidal thinking, violent crimes, alcohol and drug use, and overeating.
[…] His team plans to examine whether particular late-night behaviors, rather than timing per se, are linked to poor mental health.
In my case the bad outcomes seem to be caused by the staying up late, not what I do in those late hours.
Last week the clothing company Asket removed all images for their products.
I would be curious to know how much their sales dropped during that week.
Well, I’m guessing they dropped. Who knows, maybe the publicity outweighed the loss of sales. Hey, I’m talking about it. So the marketing has worked.
Aside: I always mix up Asket and Arket. They have similar names and they both sell slightly expensive minimal clothing. Maybe Cos should rebrand to Atket.
Want to be known as dependable and great at your job? Focus on the big and the small tasks.
People notice when that critical project is struggling. They also notice when you promise a small favour but take forever to deliver.
It’s tempting to tackle the medium tasks first. The small ones can wait until later. But suddenly it’s the end of the day and they’re not done.
And the big projects feel overwhelming, so you wait for the perfect time to start. Which never arrives.
So you spend most of your time on those hour-long tasks, neglecting the day-long ones and the 10 minute favours.
I’ve fallen into this trap. But I’ve learned that to be seen as reliable and effective, you need to prioritise the big and the small and get them done first.
Break up that big, daunting project into a bunch of different tasks and treat them as totally separate pieces of work.
When someone asks for a quick favour, do it quickly. So create time in your calendar. Choose one of the below:
5-10 minutes every hour.
A good cadence if you like a ‘break’ every so often and can pick up right where you left off after the 5-10 minutes are over.
10-20 minutes 3 times a day.
11:00, after you’ve finished your 09:00-11:00 focus period.
13:30, after lunch when your energy is low.
16:45, right before the end of the day. Your desire to be done for the day will mean you will do those tasks fast.
45-60 minutes once a day.
Do it in the post-lunch crash.
The medium tasks won’t make or break your reputation. But nailing the big projects and small details? That’s how you become the go-to person at work.
One of the biggest changes in my personality with middle age is that I no longer really enjoy travel beyond local weekend getaways. Almost no destination has a pain/novelty ratio that makes it worth it… Even though travel has gotten way more convenient overall (smartphones, eSIM cards, cashless payments, Uber, Google Translate — though at the expense of phone-loss anxiety), my tolerance for discomfort has plummeted. I don’t like shitty hotels/hostels, awkward couchsurfing, wrangling luggage, driving unfamiliar cars, figuring out transit systems… I especially don’t like wading through lots of options figuring out food options. The net effect is that I’ve gradually gone sessile.
I used to think I was supposed to love travel. Everyone else seems to. But I’ve realised it’s just not my thing.
I like the idea. Seeing the world, trying new things. And I love travel shows – Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown is a favourite. But the reality doesn’t live up to the hype for me.
Unknown places? No thanks. Spending tons of money? Pass. Flying? Hate it.
Every trip I feel a sense of dread and regret for booking it. Even visiting somewhere great, like my upcoming Seville trip, I’m just not that excited.
I don’t hate travel. But the joy I get doesn’t outweigh the things I don’t like.
And I feel embarrassed admitting this. People judge you as boring, lacking passion. There’s so much pressure to love travel.
Maybe when I’m old I’ll regret not traveling more. It’s a common deathbed regret.
But for now, I’m owning it: Travel? Meh. Just not for me.
Research psychologist Robert Epstein argues° that our understanding of the human brain is being held back by the persuasive ‘the brain is like a computer’ metaphor.
I especially like this passage showing that our knowledge of ourselves has always been influenced by the technology of the time. We’re just too complicated, so we shoehorn in mechanical parallels:
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit…
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature…
The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software…
What about digitising the brain?:
Even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it.
I love discovering a wonderful new homepage or blog. Especially on the weekend when I have time to gently sip away at its content. This time it’s Arun and their website arun.is.
It’s a technology-focused blog that’s simply, but sensationally, designed. There’s quite the archive, so I haven’t read all their stuff, but here’s some of my favourites:
I’m a big fan of Guy Ritchie’s films. His first two, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch”, are the business. Even as he’s gone more Hollywood over the years, his work always maintains that unique Ritchie touch – the clever dialogue, the inventive filming style. His Sherlock Holmes felt fresh and modern, despite the period setting. And “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” was a blast. Even when he slightly misses the mark, like with “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” or “Wrath of Man” (a poor man’s “Heat"), there’s still enough Ritchie magic to make them worth a watch. His “Aladdin” was okayish too. Really, “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” is his only true dud (even the title is bad).
So, I was excited for “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. The premise is great, revolving around a secret British commando unit formed during World War II to carry out covert operations against the Nazis. And the first hour was exactly what I wanted from a lazy Sunday flick. It was quintessentially English, almost to the point of parody, and it moved at a cracking pace. I love a good mercenary team-up film, and this one delivered.
Well for the first hour or so. As the second half of the film doesn’t quite stick the landing. The villain feels underutilised and not quite menacing enough. The fight scenes, which initially impressed with their stylish effortlessness, start to feel a bit repetitive and lack any real tension. You never doubt that our heroes will come out on top, which saps the stakes from the numerous altercations and the final big fight. The last hour just drags a bit, and I found my attention wandering.
Despite these issues, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is still a really solid film. It’s a fun, old-fashioned adventure that feels like a throwback in the best way. It reminded me of a combination of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Operation Mincemeat” and “The Wild Geese”.
April 12, 1835. London. The weekly Friday lottery draw is about to take place and a young woman clutches her ticket with desperate hope as she speeds up Denmark Hill.
A ticket is difficult to get as it all but guarantees that you’ll see a favourable outcome in the draw. So every morning for the past three days the woman visited various wealthy homes, begging the servant who answered the door to let her see their master so she can plead her case for her worthiness of a ticket. And eventually she was thankfully gifted one.
However, once she arrives at her destination the staff on the door tell her the draw started ten minutes ago and they won’t admit her. She begs, telling them it’s a matter of life and death. But she’s simply reminded about the importance of punctuality to this establishment and asked to leave.
Dejected and distraught, she leaves the building and the city of London and returns to her home in the countryside. A few days later she dies.
The young woman – The Times reported – was suffering from a fistula, inflammation of the brain, and consumption. The ticket was to give her the chance of admission to King’s College Hospital. She’d been at the hospital earlier in the week, showing symptoms like abnormal discharge, fever, headache, vomiting, chest pain, shortness of breath and swelling. However, she was turned away. It was a Monday, and she was instructed to return on Friday’s “taking in day” — the sole day of the week when new patients were accepted.
“In the nineteenth century, almost all the hospitals in London except the Royal Free controlled inpatient admission through a system of ticketing. One could obtain a ticket from one of the hospital’s “subscribers”, who had paid an annual fee in exchange for the right to recommend patients to the hospital and vote in elections of medical staff. Securing a ticket required tireless soliciting on the part of potential patients.”
The ticketing system was just one of the many cruel and arbitrary features of 19th-century London hospitals. Governors, not medical staff, determined which patients were admitted. Patients were required to attend daily chapel services, facing the threat of going without food if they did not comply. Punishments were meted out for offenses like gambling, swearing, and drunkenness. No patient could be admitted more than once with the same disease, and those deemed “incurable”, such as those with cancer or tuberculosis, were turned away. As were those with venereal infections.
The plight of this woman underscores the stark injustices of Victorian healthcare. It was an era where medical assistance was often a privilege reserved for the wealthy or well-connected, leaving countless people facing insurmountable barriers to treatment. And it serves as a reminder that despite the abolition of such Victorian healthcare systems, modern healthcare will still harbour poorly designed systems that perpetuate bias, cause needless delays, and foster negative outcomes.
You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
I’m an overthinker and overworrier. This article didn’t cure that. But it’s important for me to regularly read content like this to try and keep myself somewhat in check.
Ever feel like you’re hurtling through life, desperately trying to cram everything in before it’s too late? Oliver Burkeman’s book “Four Thousand Weeks” aims to help you (4000 weeks is 80 years, the average human lifespan). But it’s not your typical time management book. It’s a philosophical and practical look at why you’re stuck in the hamster wheel of “getting things done.”
I read it recently. So let’s take a deeper look at it and it’s ideas.
And stick around until the end, as I’ve created an 8 week plan on how to put those ideas into action and improve your life 4000 weeks 🚀
The efficiency trap
We’re obsessed with efficiency. Apps, to-do lists, life hacks – we’ll try anything to squeeze more into our days. But here’s the kicker: it’s a trap. The more efficient you become, the more you pile on. It’s like trying to outrun your own shadow.
This “efficiency trap” is a hamster wheel to nowhere. You run faster and faster, but you’re still stuck in the same damn cage.
“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important…is that you definitely never will.”
Creative neglect
So what’s the alternative? Embrace your limitations. Accept that you can’t do it all. Choose your battles. Burkeman calls it “creative neglect.”
This means saying “no” more often. Saying “no” to the things that don’t matter, so you can say “hell yes” to the things that do. It means prioritising ruthlessly, focusing on what truly matters, and letting the rest go.
“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week, there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.” - Jessica Abel, quoted in Four Thousand Weeks
The antidote to our speed addiction
We’re addicted to speed. We want everything now. But life doesn’t work that way. Good things take time. Relationships take time. Creativity takes time.
Patience is the antidote to our speed addiction. It’s about slowing down, being present, and appreciating the journey. It’s about resisting the urge to rush and allowing things to unfold at their own pace.
“The experience of patience…gives things a kind of chewiness…into which you can sink your teeth.”
The joy of missing
We’re terrified of missing out. FOMO is the plague of our generation. But here’s the secret: missing out is inevitable. You can’t do everything. You can’t be everywhere. And that’s okay.
Embrace the FOMO. It’s what makes your choices meaningful. It’s what gives your life its unique flavour.
“It’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make.”
Time is a shared experience
We’re obsessed with individual achievement. But we forget that we’re social creatures. We need each other. We thrive in community.
Time is a shared experience. It’s about synchronising with others, falling into rhythm, and creating a sense of belonging. It’s about participating in rituals, traditions, and collective endeavours that bind us together.
“The more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got…as if an intangible, supernatural cloud of relaxation had settled over the nation as a whole.”
This is It
We avoid thinking about death. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary. But denying it doesn’t make it go away.
Confronting your mortality is a wake-up call. It’s a reminder that this is it. This is your one shot at life. So stop wasting it on things that don’t matter.
“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives…we cannot escape it or conceal it.” - Thomas Wolfe, quoted in Four Thousand Weeks
Freedom in acceptance
Giving up hope might sound depressing, but it’s actually liberating. It means accepting the reality of your limitations and the uncertainty of life.
It’s about letting go of the illusion of control and embracing the present moment. It’s about doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.
“Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.” - Pema Chödrön, quoted in Four Thousand Weeks
8 Weeks For Living 4000 Weeks
“Four Thousand Weeks” is about embracing your limitations, choosing your battles, living with intention and finding joy in the present moment. It’s about making your 4000 weeks count. Now try this 8-week experiment inspired by the book to achieve all those things.
Week 1: Done, not doing
Action: Start a “Done List.”
Why: Most to-do lists are endless guilt trips. Celebrate what you accomplish instead.
How: Each evening, jot down everything you finished, big or small. Savour the feeling of progress, not the pressure of what’s left.
Week 2: Time is yours, claim it
Action: Schedule “Creative Rendezvous” with yourself.
Why: Stop waiting for free time to appear. Make it happen.
How: Block out time in your calendar for your passions, just like you would for a meeting. Treat this time as sacred and non-negotiable.
Week 3: Stillness is the new hustle
Action: Try “Do Nothing” meditation.
Why: We’re addicted to doing. Learn to just be.
How: Sit for 5-10 minutes, doing nothing. Observe your thoughts without judgment. It’s harder than it sounds, but the calm is worth it.
Week 4: Enjoy the ride
Action: Start an “Atelic Adventure.”
Why: We’re obsessed with goals. Discover the joy of doing things just for the sake of doing them.
How: Pick a hobby you’ve always wanted to try, and focus on enjoying the process, not achieving mastery.
Week 5: Give now
Action: Practice “Instantaneous Generosity.”
Why: Generosity and goodness is contagious. So start the chain reaction. It makes you and them feel good.
How: When you feel the urge to give someone a compliment or do something nice, do it immediately. Wether it be a total stranger or your wife of 50 years. Don’t wait or get caught up in your head about how they’ll take it or hold back because they said something mean that morning. Just do it.
Week 6: The everyday is extraordinary
Action: Go on a “Novelty Quest.”
Why: Break the routine, wake up your senses.
How: Take a new route to work, try a new food you’ve always been curious about or avoided since childhood, or simply pay closer attention to the world around you. Get your head out your head and your eyes off your phone and rediscover the magic in the mundane.
Week 7: Get curious about the humans around you
Action: Become a “Relationship Researcher.”
Why: Deepen your connections by truly listening and understanding.
How: In conversations, focus on learning about the other person. Ask open-ended questions, listen without judgment, and be genuinely curious about their experiences and perspectives.
Week 8: Discomfort is your gym
Action: Embrace a “Growth Challenge.”
Why: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s where growth happens.
How: Choose a challenge that pushes you outside your comfort zone. It’s a cliche, but a true one. It could be anything from having a difficult conversation to getting up 30 minutes earlier to go for a run. Embrace the discomfort and see how you transform.
Beyond 8 weeks: living a finite life to the fullest
This 8-week experiment is just a little taste of what’s possible when you embrace your limited, not unlimited, potential and prioritise what matters.
Keep exploring, keep experimenting, and keep making your 4000 weeks count.
And if you like Oliver Burkeman’s ideas don’t forget to buy the book and subscribe to his newsletter.
You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy this article on how this person used a “Knowledge, Time, Enthusiasm” triangle to improve her daily writing output.
Here’s how she did it:
Knowledge: Know what you’re writing beforehand. In the past she knew roughly what she was writing about that day – knowing the plot and the scenes – but it wasn’t throughly broken down, step by step. So she used to waste time finding those steps as she went, which was slow and often needed rewrites. So at the start of each writing session she’d spend some time planning it out. He daily words went from 2K to 5K.
Time: She tracked her writing time and analysed patterns to identify the most productive times and writing locations for her. She realised that her words per hour was much higher with each extra hour she spent writing. Writing in short bursts didn’t work. Also her output was higher away from her home. So she optimised for longer, uninterrupted stretches in locations without internet distractions.
Enthusiasm: Her statistics showed that her writing output was much higher for scenes she was excited to write. So she got my ruthless on what she included in her book. So she stopped writing any scenes she wasn’t massively excited to write. “If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn’t want to write them, then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them.”
A look at the antinatalism and the work of David Benatar which both have the view that it is morally wrong to bring new sentient beings into existence because life inevitably involves more suffering than happiness or well-being.
There’s some interesting quotes from Benatar in this post, such as:
“Even in good health, much of every day is spent in discomfort. Within hours, we become thirsty and hungry. … When we can access food and beverage and thus succeed in warding off hunger and thirst for a while, we then come to feel the discomfort of distended bladders and bowels. … We also spend much of our time in thermal discomfort—feeling either too hot or too cold. Unless one naps at the first sign of weariness, one spends quite a bit of the day feeling tired. Indeed, many people wake up tired and spend the day in that state. … Itches and allergies are common. Minor illnesses like colds are suffered by almost everybody. … Many women of reproductive years suffer regular menstrual pains and menopausal women suffer hot flashes. … Conditions such as nausea, hypoglycemia, seizures, and chronic pain are widespread.”
[…] “The most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring. Orgasms, for example, pass quickly. Gastronomic pleasures last a bit longer, but even if the pleasure of good food is protracted, it lasts no more than a few hours. Severe pains can endure for days, months, and years. Indeed, pleasures in general—not just the most sublime of them—tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure.”
[…] “Would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure?”
And Benatar’s counter argument that when people are asked about their happiness that they don’t report they’re utterly miserable is because they’re poor judges":
“People are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives.”
[…] “Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is. Their expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of human life off that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us in this and other ways.”
And if people are in more pain the pleasure why aren’t they killing themselves? He says:
“I claim that our deepest cognitive bias is “existence bias”, which means that we will simply do almost anything to prolong our own existence. For us, sustaining one’s existence is the default goal in almost every case of uncertainty, even if it may violate rationality constraints, simply because it is a biological imperative that has been burned into our nervous systems over millennia.”
Colin Farrell in “Sugar”
Watched
Civil War - 82%.Film, cinema. I love the work of Alex Garland. Ex Machina, Men and Annihilation were all great. And so was this one. Wow was it intense. You need to see this in the cinema as sound is an important part. The film does have its flaws. But I’ll skip over them because a) spoilers. And b) this was just a great experience. It’s got some humour, action, a stance, and more tension than I’ve experienced for a while.
Amy (2015) - 79%.Documentary film, streaming. Rewatch. My girlfriend is a huge Amy Winehouse fan so we decided to watch this again. Usually documentaries released so close after a persons death really are lacking. But not this one. It captures her well. The lack of talking heads, and just talking voices, works nicely and even if you’re not a Winehouse fan this is worth a watch. As afterwards you might just be, despite how flawed she was.
Scoop - 62%. Film, streaming, About the Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal. It’s okay. The makeup for Rufus Sewell playing Andrew is great. As is he. But this film very much felt like a Channel 4 TV movie and it never quite gets into top gear. And the big finale – the interview – needed to be longer and more tension-filled.
Also, I’m not going to review it just yet as the season isn’t over. But I am in love with the first three episodes of Sugar. Colin Farrell as a private detective. It’s campy, fun and utterly stylish. I love it. Watch it on AppleTV+.
blot.blog is powered by Hugo, which is static site generator. So basically my blog is a bunch of Markdown and other files that then gets ‘built’ into HTML, CSS, etc. files and then uploaded to the web. But the thing is, this all has to be done manually by command in the Terminal. It’s a pain and adds an extra layer of friction when it comes to blogging. And it also means it’s a huge pain to update the blog via my phone.
So I’ve finally gotten around to automating it via a shell script to reduce this friction. Here’s what it does:
Hazel checks if there’s a Markdown file in my drafts folder with the word publish in it. If so, the script is run.
The script edits the ‘front matter’ metadata of the post by marking it as no longer a draft and inserting the current date and time.
Extracts the title from the post and renames the file as YYYY-MM-DD - blog-post-title.md and moves it into the non-drafts folder.
Builds the blog and deploys it to Amazon S3.
Does a git commit and push.
It’s worked well so far. And as the script runs on my always-on Mac mini I can write a post on my phone and all I have to do is add publish to the beginning of the file name to automatically publish it.
Through a transport and communication mishap, a couple accidentally spend Christmas at the others' family home. One family is cold but rich. The other warm but less rich. That’s the premise.
I was annoyed at first when the couple got ‘split up’. How can you have a romantic comedy without them being together‽ But I got over that and I warmed to this film. It took quite a while to find its feet, but once it did it had just enough charm to keep me interested and satisfied. And whilst the ending doesn’t quite land this was still a worthwhile watch. Well, judge for yourself. If you’re totally against romantic, cheesy film that give this one a skip. But I can tolerate even middling examples of that category, so for me it was worthwhile.
Though I freely admit that if this wasn’t a Christmas film I wouldn’t have rated it as high and probably wouldn’t have even given it a go at all. And is it good enough to make the Christmas film yearly rewatch list? Unless it particularly speaks to you, probably not.
“The Pogues were once described as a tight, professional bunch of musicians fronted by a total shambles.”
Shane MacGowen, frontman of The Pogues, has died aged 65. A decent innings in some ways, considering his lifestyle.
I haven’t listened to pretty much anything of The Pogues and the limited knowledge I have of MacGowen is just of his hellraising. But there is one song of the band that I know very well: Fairytale of New York.
I’m not sure of its reputation outside the U.K., but here it is one of the big ones. So much so that it was voted as the nation’s favourite Christmas song°. It’s certainly one of my absolute favourites. It cuts a nice contrast against the usual sickly sweet Christmas songs, and it’s an actual proper, good song. I always listen to Driving Home For Christmas (by Chris Rea, Spotify link) and Fairytale of New York when I officially want to kick off Christmas.
Below is a good live version of Fairytale of New York. But here’s the album version if you prefer.
Alexis Petridis of the Guardian has written a brief summary° of his life and music that’s worth your time.
