Imagine yourself submerged in the ocean. The water’s freezing cold and every nerve in your body is urging you to get out. Your lungs tighten. Your skin burns. Time goes on forever. After twenty painstaking minutes, you finally step ashore, wrap yourself in a thick towel, and settle in front of a roaring fire with your favourite hot drink in hand.

Warmth seeps back into your fingers and a quiet relief spreads through you that feels euphoric.

Now imagine sitting in front of that same fire, holding the same drink, but without first enduring the freezing sea.

The scene is identical, yet the experience is not. The comfort would feel pleasant but it would not feel exhilarating.

Why is that?

In Morgan Housel’s latest book, The Art of Spending Money, he attributes much of this feeling to contrast. Housel argues that the experiences we enjoy most are those that stand in sharp contrast to what came before. As he puts it: “What actually brings happiness is the contrast between what you have now and whatever you were just experiencing. The best drink you will ever taste is a glass of tap water when you’re thirsty. The best meal you will ever eat is cheap food when you’re starving. The best sleep you will ever experience is when your newborn allows you to sneak in a quick nap.”

While contrast is a compelling explanation, I am not convinced it captures the full picture. I suspect that it is not contrast alone, but discomfort that sharpens our appreciation of comfort. Put differently, we value good things when they are preceded by something worse.

If contrast alone were the mechanism, then negative contrasts should also generate pleasure. A person accustomed to five-star dining should, in theory, find joy when forced to eat consistently poor meals. A billionaire who gets chauffeur-driven should enjoy the novelty of a crowded subway commute. We know this is not how it works. Contrast only brings pleasure when the new experience is an improvement on what came before.

It is reasonable to assume that most of us are striving, in one way or another, to improve our lives. Yet as circumstances improve, expectations tend to rise in parallel, and the range within which we are able to experience joy gradually narrows. When the baseline shifts upward, what once felt indulgent soon feels ordinary. If you only ever stay in five-star hotels, accommodation that most people would regard as perfectly acceptable is likely to register not as comfort, but as disappointment.

This isn't just about wealth. The impulse to improve our lives also expresses itself through ease. We streamline, refine, optimise. If home delivery of groceries once felt like a luxury, it now feels routine. That’s why companies such as Walmart now take this further by offering services that place the groceries directly into your kitchen cupboards and fridge.

As a result of all this convenience, when a delivery arrives outside its one-hour window, or worse, a day late, frustration flares. When an Uber is five minutes behind schedule, it feels unacceptable. The more convenient life becomes, the less tolerant we become of reality.

Over time, this erodes our resilience.

For most of human history, life was uncomfortable and often dangerous. Comfort came in brief, infrequent bursts: a successful hunt, the warmth of a fire, or the rare sweetness of honey discovered by chance. Life oscillated between hardship and relief, and comfort was deeply appreciated because it followed difficulty.

Here in the UK, we talk endlessly about the weather. The cold, dark, wet days of January are miserable. Yet, it is precisely this greyness that makes the arrival of spring feel so special. Without the winter, the lighter and slightly warmer days followed by first birdsong and the sight of daffodils would lose its magic.

Counterintuitively, contentment is not found by eliminating discomfort, but embracing it. The constant pursuit of ease, efficiency, and pleasure weakens our ability to appreciate what we already have. Anything left “on” for too long, whether comfort, indulgence, convenience, or stimulation, eventually produces dissatisfaction.

Life needs oscillation between difficulty and comfort.

When I lived in the UAE, an environment that is almost entirely temperature-controlled, I noticed that my internal "thermostat" withered. When I returned to the UK, I found myself shivering in mild weather.

Tolerance behaves like a muscle: when it isn’t tested, it weakens. This extends beyond temperature to effort, boredom, and friction. By chasing “easier” living, we are effectively making ourselves more fragile.

Cold-water swimming offers a similar lesson. The first immersion is shocking and unpleasant. Yet within a few sessions, tolerance increases rapidly. The discomfort does not disappear, but your relationship with it changes.

Most of us can think of things we dread doing, a long walk in bad weather, an awkward obligation, a tedious chore. And yet, more often than not, we feel better afterwards. Not because the task itself was enjoyable, but instead it reminded us that ease feels good precisely because it is not constant.

“People have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s the path to it, for it’s only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment.”

—Gurwinder, The Prism

In parallel, doing things ourselves rather than outsourcing it to an app or service designed to remove effort gives us a sense of agency and achievement. That positive feeling does not come from comfort, it comes from competence.

We are encouraged to believe that life should only get better. A better house, a newer car, more automation, fewer chores. We are constantly told that inconvenience is a problem to be solved. But as soon as life improves, we adapt. What once felt luxurious becomes normal. Then insufficient. Like any tolerance, it demands ever-greater doses.

A contrarian way to look at life is to limit the amount of nice things we consume. Housel captures this idea well when he writes: “My own desire to live a relatively simple life is not because I don’t enjoy nice things. It’s quite the opposite. When you live a simple and modest life, your occasional experience with nice things can generate more joy than if you had those things all the time.”

I would take this further. Alongside limiting indulgence and convenience, we should deliberately include effort, discomfort, and things we are not looking forward to. Not out of self-punishment, but because difficulty restores perspective.

Completing something hard, whether a task, a responsibility, or an uncomfortable experience, recalibrates our expectations. It makes everyday life feel sufficient again. It quiets the constant urge to optimise, upgrade, and escape.

The mistake is not enjoying comfort or pleasure, but normalising them. When everything is designed to please us, nothing rewards us. By allowing space for effort, inconvenience, and moments we would rather avoid, we preserve our capacity for joy. Life does not need to be relentlessly improved. It needs to fluctuate.

A life that never asks anything of us eventually gives very little in return.

“Living in Surrey was a mistake—the most boring time of my life.” That was how a friend recently summed up his years in one of England’s most idyllic counties.

It jars with the postcard image Surrey is known for: quiet streets, manicured gardens, a sense of tranquil order. On screen, it looks like the perfect setting for an ideal life. Yet beneath the neat lawns and polite nods, his experience was one of hollowness. Conversations with neighbours felt rehearsed, social exchanges emotionally vacant. What appeared to be community was, in his words, “a polite facade.”

Wealth and withering bonds

His story may echo a wider trend. American psychologist Patricia Greenfield has shown, across four decades of research, that rising wealth often correlates with weakened social bonds.

“We become more individualistic, less family and community oriented” Greenfield noted in an interview featured by NPR.

The reason is simple. In lower socioeconomic settings, connection isn’t optional—it’s survival. When resources are scarce, people rely on one another for help, security, and endurance. But as wealth expands, so does self-sufficiency. Autonomy replaces interdependence, freedom replaces reliance, and the incentive to maintain close social ties fades.

The paradox is clear: the more we can provide for ourselves, the less we seem to need each other.

Echo chambers of affluence

I’ve felt this happening myself. My career began in a small town, splitting shifts between a pub and a supermarket. The internet boom carried me into developing websites, London, and eventually overseas. The pursuit of better work and financial security succeeded in many ways, but it came with a social toll.

Deep friendships from my hometown were replaced by transient professional ties. Conversations that once wandered widely were reduced to talk of stock tips, restaurants, and status. Work dinners often felt like performances, occasions where I played a part rather than feeling connected. If I had to choose, I’d leave behind the staged glamour of fine dining for a park bench, a bag of crisps, and a friend who knows me.

Affluence doesn’t just improve meals; it filters life. Queues disappear, tasks are delegated, economy gives way to first class, campsites to private villas, public beaches to velvet-roped shores. Leisure follows the same pattern: stadium seating becomes private boxes, community gyms become home gyms, and the ultimate indulgence becomes swimming solitary laps in a private pool.

Gated communities, private schools, and elite clubs all serve to filter social contact, ensuring that only those of similar status gain entry. This filtering, though comforting, becomes isolating. The world shrinks into a curated enclave of sameness, where the diversity of the human condition is replaced. Within such spaces, the soul is not enriched but dulled, deprived of friction and contrast.

Invitations to events and social gatherings are extended out of strategic interest instead of genuine regard. Here you mingle with fake companions who masquerade their affection.

Smiles from personal trainers, assistants, and therapists are transactional and out of obligation instead of an expression of warmth. One no longer meets people; one hires them. Even personal relationships can lack organic trust when subjected to legal frameworks; pre-nups, contracts and NDAs.

Loneliness, in such contexts, is not the absence of people, but the absence of sincerity.

Descending the ladder

Recently, I joined a no-frills council-owned leisure centre. At times, it can be best described as dysfunctional; the queues are long, the lockers broken, and the roof leaks. By contrast, when I lived in London, I was a member of a luxury gym in Canary Wharf that felt more like a five-star hotel than a place to exercise, with beautiful staff that looked as though they had been handpicked by a fashion agency.

Automated gates meant there was never a queue, and the changing rooms were lined with carpets so plush you felt guilty treading on them in outdoor shoes. The facilities sprawled across several floors, offering everything you could imagine.

But the cheaper gym wins where it matters. Each morning, I’m greeted by a receptionist who has worked there for decades, welcoming everyone with warmth that no automated gate could match.

Striking up conversations with fellow members comes naturally, especially in the sauna, where there’s almost always a discussion in progress and you can choose to join in or simply listen. By contrast, the sauna at my London gym felt more like a silent retreat. An unspoken rule seemed to demand that you keep your eyes fixed on the floor and your thoughts to yourself. That silence echoed the wider social norm in many London apartment blocks and lifts, where even long-time neighbours often avoid eye contact. Attempt to break it, and you risk being written off as eccentric or worse, the local crackpot.

In Canary Wharf, the demographic skewed almost entirely toward finance professionals. At my current gym, I’ve spoken with café owners, doctors, gardeners, delivery drivers, police officers, builders, and teachers. Conversations have ranged from insights into the NHS from a nurse to an unexpectedly detailed exchange with a gardener about cultivating magic mushrooms. These moments, which are unfiltered, surprising, and human, give the place a charm no luxury facility has ever matched.

It’s not just gyms where this contrast shows up. Some of my fondest travel memories come from no-frills guesthouses in places like Senegal and Sri Lanka, where dinners were eaten communally and conversations with strangers quickly turned into friendships. Luxury hotels, by comparison, delivered everything they promised with immaculate decor, world-class service, flawless food, but left little to remember. The stays were pleasant, but clinical; I came away with no lasting stories, no friendships, not even a conversation worth recalling.

In the end, authenticity leaves a deeper imprint than luxury ever can.

Reduced serendipity

As wealth increases, it strips away an increasing number of life’s small frictions. Technology has the same aim; apps and gadgets eliminate queues, chores, and delays in the name of efficiency. After all, time has become our most prized currency.

On paper, this should make us happier. Fewer chores, fewer inconveniences, fewer things we don’t like doing. But, as with many aspects of life, the obvious logic is often misleading.

Chores, waiting in line and requests for help may feel like inefficiencies to be eliminated, yet they are also points of contact with other people. When we strip them away in pursuit of productivity, we do save time, but it comes at the expense of reduced serendipity and connection. And in the process, as Patricia Greenfield and others have observed, we become more atomised, more individualistic, and less human.

Take something as banal as a trip to the local tip. Recently, I was about to dump an old trunk into a skip when a stranger stopped me and insisted it was worth keeping. I took his advice and carried it home. The exchange was fleeting, but oddly uplifting. Human encounters, however minor, tend to be.

We get a similar lift in traffic when a driver flashes their lights to let us out of a junction or when we do the same and receive a grateful wave. These gestures don’t change the course of our lives, but they feed something subtle inside us. The same happens in a corner shop when you exchange a joke with the cashier, or when a barista remembers your order without asking.

It’s easy to overlook these small moments, but they accumulate into the invisible glue of social life. They only happen when we’re entangled in the mess of ordinary living, the very mess that wealth and technology increasingly work to smooth away.

I suspect this helps explain why so many expats eventually grow restless in their adopted “paradises.” The culture gap, or the language barrier, reduces casual contact, and life shrinks to interactions with a narrow, curated slice of people. It’s the social equivalent of moving into a gated community: safe, clean, controlled but ultimately starved of the variety and vitality that make us feel alive.

The Paradox of Progress

Newton’s third law tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The same holds true for human progress. Each step toward wealth and convenience carries a hidden counterweight. Our biology, still tuned for scarcity, drives us to hoard and accumulate, even though the world we inhabit no longer demands it. In chasing more, we risk neglecting what our ancestors had in abundance: bonds, shared purpose, and community.

They were materially poor but socially rich. We are materially rich but, too often, socially poor.

Perhaps, then, the true task of the modern age is not accumulation but balance. Too much weight in one direction, and something essential collapses.

A life that dazzles from the outside but feels hollow within is not success. It is imbalance. And balance, once survival is secured, may be the highest form of wealth we can hope to achieve.

No one other than the voice inside our heads gets to choose when making a decision, so it’s easy to understand why, overwhelmingly, the majority of us believe that the thing we refer to as “I” has total autonomy over how we live our lives.

Just as dreams feel real when we’re asleep, so too does free will when we’re awake. Its persistence is not evidence of its truth, but rather a reflection of our inability to see the mechanisms that control us.

Research consistently shows that unconscious brain activity precedes conscious awareness. In other words, by the time we think we’ve made a decision, the unconscious brain has already made it for us. We like to believe we’re in control—that the conscious “I” is calling the shots, but that’s an illusion. The real decision-maker is hidden, operating in the dark. The “I” isn’t in charge; it’s taking orders from a force beyond our control, by a puppet master we cannot see.

This invisible puller of strings, which represents our personality and ultimately who we are, is formed by a combination of nature and nurture. Our DNA, where we were born, and how we were raised were all predetermined; we had no choice—the polar opposite of freedom.

Not recognising our lack of freedom is what the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe meant when he said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”.

Whenever we have an urge to do something or make a decision, that’s our will, but there’s nothing free about it.

Machine domination

Ever since the beginning of human history, we have been inventing ways to do less and achieve more. At the root is our DNA’s built-in drive to conserve energy.

It started with the sharpening of sticks and stones, and it hasn’t stopped since. Beyond human hands, horses, camels, donkeys and dogs have helped share the workload. But in the blink of an eye, that’s all changed—we’ve gone from making fires to making machines—creations that now work not alongside us, but often in place of us.

It was the Industrial Revolution that marked the turning point. Human labour began yielding to mechanical power. The power loom was one example of that, revolutionising weaving and creating massive upheaval, which included rioting and destruction along the way.

The power-loom riots of 1826 took place in Lancashire, England, in protest against the economic hardship suffered by traditional handloom weavers caused by the widespread introduction of the much more efficient power loom.

Rioting broke out in the east of Lancashire on 24 April 1826. The first of 21 mills to be attacked was the Higher Grange Lane Factory in Accrington. The rioters marched on to Blackburn on the second day. On the third and final day of rioting the military were called upon to defend a mill in Chatterton against 3000 rioters, six of whom were shot and killed when the crowd refused to disperse after the Riot Act had been read to them.

The rioters were widely supported locally, and not only by fellow handloom weavers. Amongst those arrested in Blackburn, for instance, were labourers, a farmer, a confectioner, a butcher and even power-loom weavers. An eye-witness to the rioting in Chorley noted that "there can be no doubt that a great multitude of the townspeople were their friends. The women supplied the rioters with stones, concealing the missiles under their aprons."

Some of the soldiers sent to confront the rioters seemed sympathetic to their plight. One 16-year-old handloom weaver from Haslingden, Thomas Duckworth, records that on the first day of rioting the group he was marching with encountered a number of mounted soldiers approaching them with drawn swords. The officers in charge appealed to the mob to disperse, warning of the consequences if they did not. In Duckworth's own words:

Some of the old fellows from the mob spoke. They said "What are we to do? We're starving. Are we to starve to death?" The soldiers were fully equipped with haversacks and they emptied their sandwiches among the crowd. Then the soldiers left and there was another meeting. Were the power-looms to be broken or not? Yes, it was decided, they must be broken at all cost.

Wikipedia, Power-loom riots

Today, automation has begun to displace human labour across a wide range of sectors. Robots perform tasks once carried out by factory workers, while digital interfaces increasingly replace roles in the service industry.

At home, it’s the same story. We started with washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons. Now we have food delivery apps and voice-activated smart homes.

At its core, technology is about efficiency, not safety, not connection, not empowerment. If a tool doesn’t make life easier, no one wants it. The more effort that’s saved, the more attractive it is. That’s why we tap for an Uber instead of calling a cab, order takeout instead of cooking, and scroll TikTok instead of going outside. Convenience wins.

So we keep delegating. Cooking, cleaning, fixing things—skills we used to rely on fade out. All we’re left to do is navigate a touchscreen.

Technology replacing labour isn’t particularly new—it’s allowed us to focus on what sets us apart: The ability to think. But now, we stand at the threshold of a deeper transformation. As technology begins to take over not just our physical tasks but our cognitive ones as well.

Computer says no

In my late teens, I spent time trying to learn how to mix house music on a pair of turntables. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I wasn’t particularly good at it. Long story short, my DJ career never took off.

Mixing vinyl requires choosing tracks that work well together and manually adjusting the turntable speed to match the beats per minute (BPM) between two records, aiming for perfect alignment. Even being slightly off causes the beats to clash, which sounds terrible and will generate unwanted attention from the dancefloor.

Finding vinyl was also a challenge. It meant digging through obscure record stores to try and discover something unique.

Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically. Turntables and vinyl have largely been replaced by digital mixers and downloadable MP3s. What once required effort and technical skill can now be done from a laptop, and music can be downloaded without stepping outside.

Many of the skills that once defined DJing are now automated. Software can match BPM with precision, reducing the chances of error. Where DJs once relied on instinct and experience to choose tracks that complemented each other, modern tools can analyse a song’s musical key and make suggestions in real time.

There is still some skill involved in digital DJing, but it’s undeniable that technology has lowered the barrier to entry. What was once a difficult and manual process can now be imitated with the push of a button. It’s possible to fake an entire set; press a few buttons, mimic turning dials, wave your arms in the air, and most audiences won’t notice the difference.

This shift is how individuals with little musical background have managed to secure high-profile DJ gigs, based more on celebrity status than technical ability.

Digital DJing is just one example of a broader trend, where skills once developed through experience and intuition are increasingly replaced by automation. And it’s a trend that’s only accelerating.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that any task requiring human thought today will, eventually, be handled by a computer.

Our drive to conserve mental energy is as deeply ingrained as our desire to reduce physical effort. This isn’t a modern phenomenon. Just as we invented tools to spare our muscles, we now build machines to spare our minds. From the abacus to the calculator, paper maps to Google Maps, learning new languages to relying on translation apps, memorising plants and birds to using recognition software.

We’re heading towards a world where thinking itself is becoming optional.

Losing will

It’s understandable why we have trusted machines with tasks involving complex and precise calculations. When it comes to tasks rooted in logic and exactness, it is clear that we cannot compete. In such areas, the superiority of machines is indisputable.

A similar case can be made for delegating physically demanding and hazardous labour. Tasks such as mining, construction, or heavy industrial work often involve extreme conditions, repetitive strain, and significant risks to human health and safety. In these environments, the argument for automation becomes just as compelling as it is for computational tasks.

A point of concern emerges when we begin outsourcing not just tasks, but our own decision-making. The danger is not in the use of machines, but in the gradual surrender of our responsibility to think, choose, and forge opinions.

Technology’s impact on manual and computational labour is clear to see—it’s visible in every warehouse, factory, and spreadsheet. Technology's influence over how we think and decide is harder to detect, though. Take something as simple as online reviews.

Before the internet, reviews existed in newspapers, magazines, or word of mouth, but they weren’t omnipresent. Now, we’re saturated with opinions. We rarely choose without consulting the aggregated judgments of strangers. We’ve become dependent on star ratings and review scores, hesitant to make even the smallest decision without external validation.

Watching a film without checking its Rotten Tomatoes score feels reckless. Choosing a restaurant without first consulting TripAdvisor is almost unthinkable. So is it still us that’s choosing the film or restaurant?

In a previous employment, I was exposed to how the online review industry works, which I can only describe as unscrupulous and borderline fraudulent. Review manipulation is rampant, not always through outright fake reviews, though those exist, but through subtler tactics. Happy customers are easily identified and encouraged, sometimes incentivised, to leave positive feedback. These glowing reviews are a biased sample that distorts the overall picture, raising average scores and masking less favourable experiences.

As a result, we’re trading spontaneity and personal intuition for conformity. We don’t rely on gut instinct or the thrill of an unplanned discovery—we follow the crowd, and the crowd is being led by those who game the system. In doing so, we become participants in a cycle of manipulation.

Some of my favourite films and books have average or mediocre review scores. Had I checked those ratings beforehand, I might never have given them a chance. Once you’ve seen a low score, you can’t unsee it. It colours your expectations and diminishes your openness. We like to believe we’re independent thinkers, but the truth is, we’re easily swayed.

And this isn’t just about movies or meals. For those of us deeply immersed in social media, the influence extends even further. Algorithms shape our emotions, preferences, and priorities. They tell us what to care about, what to ridicule, what to celebrate, and what to be outraged by. We find ourselves laughing at the same memes, getting angry at the same headlines, and echoing the same opinions.

In the not-so-distant future, you’ll step into a self-driving car, ask for a well-rated Mexican restaurant nearby, and it’ll take you there, book a table and order your meal. This is the frictionless world Big Tech wants us to live in, where we don’t have to do or think.

As with most things in life, the answer isn’t total rejection or blind embrace—it’s balance.

Technology, like alcohol, can enhance life—up to a point. A glass of wine can enrich a moment; a couple of bottles a day will wreck it. The same goes for food, entertainment, and even ambition. What begins as a tool for improvement can become a source of dependence, isolation and distortion. Technology has given us power and convenience, but we’re being dehumanised as our thinking is increasingly influenced by algorithms and the vast amounts of content we consume.

The will that originates from our unconscious mind, which is forged from our DNA, society and life experiences, is increasingly being replaced by the will of app developers.

Just as Big Food exploits our instincts by hooking us on sugar and tasty treats, Big Tech exploits our craving for convenience. Sugar once signalled calorie-rich survival; now it fuels addiction. Convenience once helped us conserve energy in a harsh world; now it hooks us and makes us passively stare at screens. Big Food makes us fat. Big Tech numbs our brains, stripping our lives of challenge and purpose.

As the prominent media theorist, John M. Culkin, once said, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Not one of us is free, but some are less free than others.

The “disease of more” was a phrase coined by National Basketball Association (NBA) coach Pat Riley to describe how, following a successful season, players can become entitled and want more of everything, including money, playing time, and media attention, which starts the onset of the team’s demise.

Needless to say, it’s not just NBA players that are affected by wanting more. Everyone wants more of everything, more so than ever before. Never in human history has there been such an overwhelming abundance of food, clothing, and material goods. Beyond necessities, consumer goods of all kinds—electronics, furniture, and household items are more accessible and affordable than ever, filling stores and warehouses to the brim.

But excess is not limited to the physical. The digital age has given rise to an endless stream of information, entertainment, and convenience. Unlike material abundance, these intangible forms of “more” seep directly into our minds, quietly dictating our actions and shaping who we become. It’s here, in the invisible world of mental consumption, where the disease of more reveals its most profound effects.

More communication

Suppose you invented an incredible new passenger plane that reduced aviation fuel consumption by 50%, and every airliner worldwide adopted your aircraft. In that scenario, it’s a natural assumption to think that aviation fuel across the globe would reduce dramatically and be good for the environment. However, the opposite is true, and fuel consumption would increase because flying has become more efficient, which means more flights, lower prices and more demand for flying. This is known as the Jevons paradox.

The Jevons paradox is named after the economist William Jevons, who in 1865 observed that coal consumption increased in England despite the innovation of the Watt steam engine which was significantly more efficient than the previous design.

"It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."

—William Jevons

It’s not just fuel, though. Whenever a system is improved, it can bring with it unexpected results. Communication is one example of that.

Since the invention of writing, messages have gone from being carved into rock to being written or printed on paper, delivered by hand, horseback or carrier pigeon, to analogue telegrams, phones and to where we are today with almost instant digital messaging. It’s fair to say that communication has become incredibly efficient.

Before computers were commonplace, working in an office meant a heavy dependency on telephone communication, typewriters, filing cabinets, dictation machines, interoffice mail and carbon paper.

I’ve never typed a letter with carbon paper, but it’s safe to assume there’s a limit to the number of copies before they become illegible. This forced consideration into how many people received a communication. You don’t need to be told that in the modern workplace, that doesn’t happen. When sending emails, it’s not uncommon to have every man and his dog in the carbon copy line.

Email is just one example of how much more efficient communication in the workplace has become since the digital revolution, instant messaging and video conferencing are two other notable examples.

It’s a natural assumption to think that productivity improvements came with this increased efficiency. However, there’s little to no evidence to support that which is referred to as the Solow paradox, named after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, who famously observed, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”.

While I’m not old enough to have worked in an office before the computer, it would not surprise me if computers and especially email not only make no difference to productivity but have a negative effect.

The reason for this is the Jevons paradox, but instead of coal, it’s our time being used as a resource. Just as it was natural to assume the Watt steam engine would reduce coal consumption, it’s natural to think that digital communication would reduce time consumed compared to working with typewriters, Tipp-Ex and fax machines.

This time-saving technology should free up time and make us more productive, allowing us to spend time innovating, being creative, and generating more sales. But just as the Watt steam engine made it cheaper and more accessible for more people to travel, which meant more coal being burnt, efficient communication created an explosion of messages being sent, and instead of time being saved, just like coal, more of it was burnt.

Where messaging has become almost frictionless, it means little to no thought goes into it. Whereas before, writing a letter required thought and reflection into what was being sent, today, it’s not uncommon to have one-word messages or an emoji.

The same is true for meetings. When meeting invitations were sent through the post, it meant planning and allowing enough time from the invite being sent and the meeting date. Fast forward to today, and it’s not uncommon to receive meeting invites that start on the same day, next hour or sooner.

And it’s not just in the workplace, the shift in how we communicate has been just as dramatic with friends and family. In Superbloom, a book about the history of media technology and how it has changed society and culture, the author, Nicholas Carr, describes how things were before digital communication.

It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that postal rates fell far enough to make letter writing a popular pursuit. […] Letter writers were not just able to converse with friends, lovers, and family members across great distances; they often found they could say things through the post that they found difficult or impossible to say in person.

Letters sustained but also deepened relationships. And the care and attention devoted to a letter’s composition and reading were themselves expressions of affection and respect. Once read, a letter often became a keepsake and, in time, an heirloom.

Beyond its social role, letter writing was for many persons an act of self-expression and, more deeply still, self-reflection and self-definition. Sitting down and composing a letter provided women and men with a rare opportunity to contemplate their daily lives and, through the careful arrangement of words and sentences, shape their experiences and emotions into a coherent and meaningful narrative.

The slowness of the mail removed letter writing from life’s everyday toing-and-froing. The delay between writing and reading cleared a space for introspection, for organising one’s thoughts without regard to society’s demands for immediate reaction and response.

If, as William Wordsworth suggested, the origin of poetry lies in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ then the writing of a letter brought at least a little of the poetic sensibility into people’s otherwise busy days.

As we’ve progressed from posting letters to email to instant messaging — along that path has been an escalating level of anxiety. If you posted a letter, you wouldn’t expect to receive a reply for a few weeks. When the same message is sent by email, you’d expect a reply in a few days, while an instant message is more like a few minutes.

Instead of digital communication making our lives easier with how we communicate with friends and family in a similar way to the workplace, the reduction of friction has made us do more of it than ever before to the point where it has become all-consuming. As things become easier — we just do more of it, and in spades. It’s been an evolution of deliberate and reflective communication to text speak, forwarding cat videos and memes.

Or as Nicholas Carr writes, “We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get.”

More news

When you factor in podcasts, streaming services, radio, social media and websites—as well as links shared by friends, it becomes clear that we are constantly simmering in a soup of news, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we close our eyes each night.
[…]
It turns out that wallowing in the suffering of seven billion strangers isn’t particularly good for our mental health.

—BBC, How the news changes the way we think and behave

It’s easy to lose sight of what the purpose of the news is, which is to provide information so you can make informed decisions about your life, your community, and your government. Used correctly, the news should be a useful tool, however, for most of us, it is not. It’s become an all-consuming toxic brew that drains our psyche and warps our reality.

Before newspapers, news was slow and primarily spread through word-of-mouth, and was geographically restricted. Travelling messengers delivered information orally or in written letters and official news was communicated by town criers who would announce information in the town square.

If you went back a few hundred years it would have been a tougher life compared to today but there must have been less psychological burden from not knowing about every terrible event going on every minute of every day. Moreover, I speculate that receiving news might have been somewhat enjoyable when you consider it was often exchanged in a social setting, whether that be in the town square, church or tavern.

Fast forward to today, and news has become like a drug. We hear what is going on instantly all of the time. It becomes impossible to avoid. Every hour on the hour, the radio stations give us our fix. Social media was originally meant for discovering what your friends and family were doing, and now it’s just another news outlet keeping us transfixed.

You can fool yourself by saying you’re a good citizen by keeping abreast of what is going on, but the inconvenient truth is that news is mostly entertainment, and why the phrase “angertainment” was coined.

Your work might mean you need to know what’s going on with regular frequency, maybe you trade stocks or work in politics. However, the vast majority of us don’t. It seems like it’s a genuine interest for some who otherwise would have little to talk about.

I put my dad into that category. He is completely consumed with politics, and it has changed who he is as a person. Every email he forwards me is something I’m supposed to be getting angry about. And whenever we meet, he always wants to talk about “the government” or Trump or Musk or Brexit. You name a divisive topic, and my dad loves to get angry about it.

“Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be”

—Duncan Trussell

I’m confident that overconsumption of news detaches us from reality, makes us worse people and undoubtedly makes life less enjoyable.

Ask yourself this: when was the last time any piece of depressing news was useful? While, of course, this is possible, I would argue it’s a low probability while, in comparison, the likelihood that too much news leads to permanently souring your mood is close to 100% likely.

While some news is useful, just like digital communication—overconsumption is not. Or, as Nicholas Carr wrote in Superbloom, “We consume media, then media consumes us”.

More convenience

I consider myself fortunate to have experienced life before the internet, as it allows for comparisons. Before the World Wide Web, watching a movie at home meant a trip into town, wandering through Blockbuster’s aisles and hoping the film I wanted wasn’t already rented out. No online reviews to guide my choice, just the cover art and a gut feeling. Once back home, I’d often cook food that was a little more special than normal and accompany it with a beer or glass of wine. It wasn’t a special occasion, but it was an occasion. At least mildly noteworthy.

After putting the cassette into the video player, I’d pay attention from the beginning to the end even if the film wasn’t that good—in part because of the effort that had gone into collecting the film (which wasn’t over until rewinding the cassette and returning the next day), and in part because there was no other choice. It was a Hobson's choice.

Nowadays, everything is within easy reach, on-demand, and available 24/7; I don’t need to tell you how much the times have changed. At a press of a button, we have more to watch than ever before. I wonder, though, are we better off?

The term “friction” is often used in Silicon Valley. I’ve worked in digital marketing, so I’m familiar with the term and how there’s a concerted effort to make things easier for the consumer. The reason for this is because making things easier influences your behaviour. It makes you do things you might not ordinately do if it was a tiny bit more difficult.

For example, now that online shopping is so simple, we do a lot more of it compared to when we had to travel to town at the weekend. If I tried to persuade you to buy a poorly constructed gizmo that you probably didn’t need on a Monday evening, and it meant getting off the sofa and driving to a shopping centre— the likelihood of you doing it is slim to none. But make it a couple of clicks and next-day delivery, and all of a sudden, you’ll buy the said gizmo and the “frequently bought together” item, too.

For thousands of years, taking the path of least resistance served us well as it conserved our energy. Nowadays it’s a redundant feature of our DNA and has been hijacked by Silicon Valley to make us buy stuff we don’t need and do things we’d rather not be doing.

Over thousands of years, our lives have become progressively easier with the Industrial Revolution accelerating that shift, with railways, electricity, sewing machines and many other labour-saving devices. In more recent times there’s been an even bigger surge in labour-saving technology; the rise of technology that allows us to tap, swipe, click, and pay without moving more than a finger.

It’s what’s known as “convenience culture”. A culture shaped by technology and the increasing availability of products and services designed to save time and effort.

A side effect of life becoming more convenient is that we’re prepared to do less for ourselves. It appears the end game is to get to a point where we no longer have to do anything—a path towards complete helplessness.

Another side effect of convenience is that everyone expects everything quickly. Nothing can wait. So we become impatient. And impatience is just another form of anger. Whenever we don’t get something quickly it makes us angry, anxious or frustrated.

Whatever it is you like doing, there’s a good chance that technology is working in the background so you can do even more of that said thing, not just some of the time but all of the time and instantly, at a click of a button.

Now that there’s no need to travel to the video store for a film or video game, the newsagents for your newspaper or library for a book. The unsurprising consequence is a sharp increase in the amount of content we consume.

You would think that doing more of something you enjoy brings happiness. But, like many things in life, the opposite of what seems logical can often be true. More content means you overconsume, you’re overloaded with choices, you lose your capacity to concentrate, you under-appreciate and no longer enjoy it as much as you once did.

There’s a well-known experiment involving jam that you may have heard of by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. Two jam-tasting booths were set up in a supermarket, one with six and the other with twenty-four flavours. While the booth with more jam generated more interest, it led to fewer sales. The study demonstrated the concept of "choice overload," where having too many options can lead to decision paralysis.

This wasn’t the only finding though—the other was that those who made a purchase from the booth with more jams were less satisfied with their eventual purchase. I think this is a good analogy for life—we have more than ever before but we’re not satisfied.

With so many options for nearly everything, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve made the wrong decision (the Fear Of Missing Out). Whether that’s a film or someone we’ve met online—we’ve traded our attention (and ourselves to a degree) for convenience and choice.

Technology is making our lives easier, not better.

More freedom

Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.” But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige.

— , Four Thousand Weeks

Everyone knows someone (maybe it’s you) who is perpetually busy. In psychology, it’s referred to as chronic busyness. I can think of a few work colleagues that were like that.

The reason for their busyness might have been to gain status as society often sees being busy as a sign of being in demand, productive and successful. But maybe there was nothing “sinister”, and it was just their personality, and their home life was equally as hectic.

Personally, I like enough (or at least something) to be doing, but not too much. I like time to think, reflect and not be rushed. Near the end of my office tenure, it didn’t concern me that my boss (probably) thought I was lazy. While everyone else in my team was running around like headless chickens, I would try and hide, respond slowly to emails and not log in to the work messenger app.

There’s a saying that, “if you want something done, ask a busy person”. I believe there’s something to be said about that. Busy people attract more work, like honey to bees. Whereas those of us who take 1-2 days to reply to an email and are unavailable on instant messenger are less likely to get the “urgent” assignments.

Some psychologists believe that chronic busyness is used to suppress, deny and avoid underlying psychological issues. Another view is that being constantly busy is a way to avoid deciding or thinking about what you should be doing with your life.

In a roundabout way, we all fall into the chronic busyness category. Even if we’re not running around with packed diaries and overflowing work schedules, we’re all swamped with communication, news, things to buy, pings, breaking news alerts, and vibrations. We’re overloading our nervous system, which means we don’t have time to think, reflect, and consider. Being bored is invaluable thinking time to ponder what to do or change about your life.

One of our deepest evolutionary instincts—believing that more is always better—no longer serves us. Our ancestors struggled with scarcity; we struggle with excess. Information was once hard to find; now, we’re drowning in it. Choices were once limited; now, we’re paralysed by them. News, communication, and convenience were once scarce; now, they consume us.

If you find yourself unable to sit with yourself in the quiet, if the silence feels unbearable, if the itch to check [your phone] gnaws at you like a half-formed thought—then you must face the truth: you are no longer the master of your own attention. The world has already reached into you, has taken root inside your mind, and what you call your “self” is merely a thin layer wrapped around the endless hunger for distraction.

— Meditations for Phone Addicts by Fyodor

Never has Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words rung truer: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” But in an age where we absorb more information than ever—through technologies designed to profit from our distraction—being yourself has never been harder.

The way forward isn’t more, it’s less. Less news, less noise, less busyness, less mindless communication, fewer endless choices. More slowness, more presence, more clarity.

Only by stepping back can we reclaim our minds, be ourselves—and be free.

We work hard to get rich to buy stuff to be happy.

It’s an age-old saying that money can’t buy happiness, but few of us act as if we believe it, and why would we when the screens we’ve become subservient to tell us otherwise? One person who might believe it is Chuck Norris, who said, “Some of the most miserable people I know are some of the richest people in America; they are the most miserable individuals I’ve ever seen.”

The miserable people Chuck Norris refers to don’t necessarily represent the entire wealthy population. However, I do believe there are personality traits that help make you rich that come with associated characteristics that go against making you happy. For every action, there’s a reaction or put another way — there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

One strong opinion I have is that many rich people who have accumulated large sums of money struggle to feel satisfied. They have an unquenchable thirst. A constant hunger. There’s never enough. And that’s why they are so rich.

I recently watched an interview on YouTube between Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian wealth fund (with over $1.7 trillion in assets), and author Malcolm Gladwell. The interview had diverse questions, but the one that stood out was Tangen asking Gladwell, “Why do people at the top complain more than others?” It’s worth noting that the nature of Tangen’s work means he spends his days surrounded by some of the world’s richest people, so for Tangen to ask this question, you have to believe it’s a credible observation.

If you’re frequently complaining, then it’s fair to assume you are not satisfied with life. This lack of satisfaction is more likely to make you driven and obsessive, which are excellent traits for building wealth but at the cost of contentment being elusive.

In the Rich subreddit, there’s a post titled Why do you think many wealthy people seem to be unhappy? With over 900 replies, the consensus from those who claim to be wealthy or know wealthy people is that being “manic” helps with the accumulation of wealth but that it comes with the consequence of depressive episodes. Here are some cherry-picked replies:

I don’t know if I’m bipolar, but extreme anxiety pushed me to success. Now I can’t relax and enjoy it.

[My] older cousin who sells the shit out of his company's product in the luxury market. He'll go weeks on end in 5th gear for 80-100 hours per week, then takes time off when he collapses.

A college roommates dad soared thru college in 3 years and took over the family business and made it very very successful […] he would do the work of like 5 people for weeks on end, then smash down and wouldn't leave the house. He died at 60.

My dad was steady and hard working, but my mom is manic and struggles with addiction. She crushed it in real estate, but had many low points. Dad passed 8yrs ago and mom retired. She’s less happy now than ever bc she has nothing to chase, nothing to close and no fulfilment in the “win”.

All the high achievers I’ve worked with over the years are disciplined, organised, and highly driven by material gain. While the people I know who strike me as the happiest don’t have these attributes, and although not successful in the monetary sense — they are happy and find enjoyment in simple things, like a sunny day, a walk in the park or the smell of freshly ground coffee first thing in the morning.

In Morgan Housel’s book Same as Ever, which is about a series of observations from life, there’s a chapter about unique people and how they are often special in one way but at the cost of being unspecial in another. In this chapter, we learn about John Boyd, who is considered to be “the greatest fighter pilot to ever live [and] is known as one of the most influential thinkers in military history”. However, at the same time, “He was rude. Erratic. Disobedient. Impatient. He screamed at his superiors to the astonishment of peers [and] in meetings he would chew calluses off his hands and spit the dead skin across the table.”

I’ve known people like John Boyd, who are incredibly smart and skilled at their work but unbearable to work with. On a similar note, there’s an endless list of extremely talented people who, on the surface, seem to have it all but suffer from depression, to name but a few: Lady Gaga, Jim Carrey, J. K. Rowling, Johnny Depp, Robin Williams, Stephen Fry, Elon Musk. To be talented in something requires a lot of dedication, stress, and perseverance, which can come at a cost.

I once worked for a CEO who reminded me a bit of Tony Robbins — an incredible communicator. You’d hear him talk and feel motivated and invigorated to knuckle down and drive sales for the company. This guy seemed like the real deal. But he wasn’t. After a couple of years, we all realised he was just hot air. All talk and no execution. High in EQ but low in IQ. Again, you can’t have it all. I can’t remember who said it and I paraphrase, but it goes along the lines that it’s often idiots that run our countries. The most qualified people are terrible at giving a speech, not that likeable and highly unelectable. It’s how we end up with dictators and megalomaniacs. They know how to talk, persuade and get the public behind them — doing anything of value is another story.

Talent comes at a cost. If you envy someone who has something you don’t — there’s a good chance they also have something you’d rather not have.

What’s the point of being rich?

Society sees the super-rich as the lucky ones. But are they? Is unnecessarily accumulating wealth no different to any other disorder that can’t be satisfied? Like the shopping addict who always needs something new, or the gym addict with body dysmorphia that feels constant dissatisfaction with their body regardless of how much time they spend in the gym.

Why is it that so many of us want more money than is necessary? It’s due to the material gains: the flashy cars, the grand houses, the exotic holidays, and the expensive clothes. Yet, that’s not the essence. If you spend a fortune on a Ferrari, a mansion overlooking the ocean, or over £1,000,000 on a handbag (they do exist), then fundamentally, you are doing this in a bid to feel good and enhance your happiness—either from using or experiencing it, or from the status acquired by displaying it.

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

— Aristotle

Would you rather be a billionaire and sad or earn the median income and be happy?

People want to become rich not for material possessions but for immaterial emotions. They want wealth to buy stuff to be happy. No one would buy an Aston Martin if it made them sad. Some will be driven by the security that comes from wealth, but the goal is the same: to be happy.

The psychic weight of money

“Are we hardwired to crave more? From food and stuff to information and influence, why can't we ever get enough?” These are the questions from in his book, Scarcity Brain.

In the chapter about stuff, Laura Zerra is the central figure who once planned to be a doctor or veterinarian but a life-changing event in college made her think again. As Zerra describes it, “I had a really good friend who was amazing and smart and talented but she was so stressed out by exams and work. This was because she thought that the way you live the best life is to get good grades to get a job so you could do what you want on your weekends and vacations. My friend got so overwhelmed that she tried to commit suicide in college. I actually walked in and found her. It switched something in my brain where I wondered, what’s really important?” After this, Zerra quit college and went on to become a survivalist and has since “travelled the world with nothing to her name for years”.

What stood out to me in this chapter was Zerra’s comments on the “psychic weight of money”. At one point while living as a survivalist she spent time travelling the world with billionaires and “noticed that the more people had, the less involved in the moment they seemed to be. They were more involved in the future. Doing and maintaining stuff and everything that came with it.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that wealth comes at a cost. Whether that’s your stock portfolio you worry about, or physical property and possessions — there’s stress that comes with it. The obvious counterargument is that having no money would be more stressful, which is true, but I’m referring to having more than is necessary. When you have too much, it comes with a psychic weight.

“Mo money, mo problems”

— The Notorious B.I.G.

When I think back to when I was working a job I didn’t enjoy — although I was much richer at the time — it came with a lot of underlying stress. My sleep was often poor, which made me irritable for the day. And in my experience — being tired is worse than being hungover. It’s a miserable existence.

No amount of money is worth losing sleep over. By that, I mean that all the money in the world isn’t worth it if it comes at the cost of not sleeping properly.

Maybe you are different, however, the difference in how I feel when I have slept well versus poorly is like comparing night and day. When I wake up after a good night’s sleep and drink my first cup of coffee in the morning, the feeling I have, the positive energy I can sense is priceless. Excellent + energised versus melancholic + lethargic. In my book — mood over material possessions any day of the week.

If the health trackers we wear on our wrists that track our activity and sleep could somehow accurately tell us a happiness score out of 100, and in addition, we could compare that score with friends and celebrities, then we would obsess over that number. It would be used to elevate our status as money is today. We’d all want to improve our score and make it into the top 1% of the population’s happy people. We’re fixated on wealth because it’s measurable whereas happiness is hidden, but if that curtain was unveiled and our happiness became public knowledge then it would have a seismic effect on how we live our lives.

Society focuses on the nonsubjective rich outer world and those with the most stuff because we cannot measure those with rich inner worlds.

Building a rich outer world often means working long hours, with anxiety and stress to boot. This goes against building a rich inner world, which requires good sleep, relaxation, and spending time with friends and family.

Life is full of trade-offs. To excel in one area often means sacrificing in another. It's like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

When we think about being wealthy, it’s usually the things that wealth can buy, the things we can see, touch and experience, but ignore how we might feel inside — which ultimately is the all-important thing.

Here’s a final thought experiment for you: Imagine there are two people’s lives and you need to decide which one of them you will live for the rest of your life. To help make your choice, you get to experience what a typical day is like for both of them. The caveat is that you don’t get to see or hear anything — you only get to feel— so you experience their thoughts and emotions. For the first person, you experience stress and negative thinking, which is the polar opposite of the second person where you feel content, well-rested and stress-free. Whose life do you choose? Unless you’re a masochist, then it’s fair to assume you’d choose the second person. Now what if you’re told the first person is mega-rich and the second person isn’t but has enough to get by? Would you change your mind?

With all the media we consume, I’m convinced our visual senses mislead us. A happy life is not one with a bigger home, better holidays, or nicer clothes. It’s the things that aren’t depicted on Instagram or TikTok. It’s a life where you feel good, sleep well, and are stress-free with minimal negative emotions—things that money can’t buy and oftentimes the opposite of what too much money brings.

We are brainwashed and misled into focusing our lives around doing and having when in reality, a better life is all about feeling.

“A constant truth you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don't happen when everyone is happy and things are going well. They tend to occur during, and after, a terrible event. When people are a little panicked, shocked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear.” This is according to Morgan Housel, the author of Same as Ever.

Housel goes on to give examples of positive change and great innovations happening after terrible events. This includes one of the deadliest industrial disasters in US history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire where 146 garment workers were killed from being burnt alive or from jumping from a burning building. Many of these deaths would have been avoided if it wasn’t for the doors to the stairwells and exits being locked, which was a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorised breaks.

The public outcry at the time was huge, in part because of the many traumatised observers who had witnessed people jumping to their deaths from the 8th, 9th, and 10th factory floors. A reporter at the tragedy would go on to say, “I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture – the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk”.

The findings of the Commission that investigated this tragedy led to 38 new labour laws, including those regulating fire safety and broader issues of injury risks in the factory environment. These laws significantly improved working conditions for millions of workers, and they, and many more subsequent ones, saved countless lives. As terrible an event as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was, something catastrophic needed to shake the public’s attention; otherwise, poor working conditions would have continued.

Catastrophic events focus the mind, they remove dithering, procrastination, bureaucracy and force things to get done. There’s no better example of this than war. According to Housel, “Militaries are engines of innovation because they occasionally deal with problems so important, so urgent, so vital that money and manpower are removed as obstacles, and those involved collaborate in ways that are hard to emulate during calm times. You cannot compare the incentives of Silicon Valley coders trying to get you to click on ads to Manhattan Project physicists trying to end a war that threatened the country's existence. You can't even compare their capabilities.”

Time and time again there’s evidence of destruction (eventually) bringing about positive change, whether that’s a destructive forest fire returning nutrients to the soil so new plant life can begin, a plague, a depression or the most violent explosion possible in the universe — a supernova — so life could begin.

And this is what Pablo Picasso meant when he said, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

You need bad things to happen

Think back to bad events in your life, things that were shocking and consumed you for days, weeks or months afterwards. Now think of the things that came about as a consequence of those bad events — did anything good happen?

We all want a life where nothing goes wrong. The problem is that the biggest changes only happen when things do go wrong. If nothing went wrong then life would be like strolling on a moving walkway (like you get in the airport) — smooth and easy and going on forever — in the early stages it would be fun but after a while, you’d realise that you’re unclear on where you’re going or if you’re going anywhere at all. Now and again you need to be shoved off, the walkway needs to break down and you need to reevaluate and make big changes before getting back on.

Decades ago, when I was bullied at school, it was a terrible experience. I moved to a new school and it ended up being a hugely positive change. The new friends that I met shaped where and who I am today. You might argue that my life could have ended up better without the bullying, but I wouldn’t bet on it based on the better school environment and people I met as a consequence.

Later in my adult life, I unexpectedly lost my job on three occasions which brought with it stress and upheaval at the time but positive changes in the long run; better salaries, relocating to new countries, having an important operation that required a lot of time off work (and wouldn’t have been possible otherwise) and more recently making me leave a job that was making me numb inside and retire early — something I’d been considering but procrastinating over.

My most recent life shock was the passing away of my mum, I lived with her for the last year of her life and still live in her house today — it’s been our family home for 50+ years and will now be sold. In an imaginary world where there were no problems and my mum lived forever, what would happen? I wouldn’t be looking to relocate somewhere new anytime soon. Instead, I’m forced to encounter resistance and decide on what new town, city or country to move to. This big change will take me in a new direction, a new path and with it, new opportunities — some good and some bad. It’s a natural human behaviour to continue down the path of least resistance. But it’s change that makes life interesting.

The Fourth Turning

William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote an entire book that roughly translates to Morgan Housel’s lesson on destruction leading to creation called The Fourth Turning. The book is about a recurring pattern of chaos that has happened throughout thousands of years of human history. Approximately every 80-100 years there’s a great reset, an end to a cycle called a “Forth Turning”. The Fourth Turning is an era of destruction that washes away debris, inefficiencies, and excess decadence and eventually leads to a new beginning. According to the authors, we are currently living through a Fourth Turning which began in 2008 and will continue until around 2030.

Unfair systems, governments, inequality, megalomaniacs, and dictators won’t fall without things getting so unbearable that there is a tipping point that brings destruction — once things are destroyed, things can start again.

The next time something awful happens to you — there’s a good chance that some sort of change will be forced upon you and maybe something positive — and if not, at least you’re experiencing something new and living life. A “perfect life” where nothing goes wrong, with very little change isn’t living.

If it wasn’t for a destructive meteorite colliding with planet Earth, then the dinosaurs would still be ruling. Catastrophic events bring catastrophic change. And it’s not to say the dinosaurs being eradicated and humans taking over was a good thing, or any massively destructive event for that matter being good or bad. Things just happen. They are neither good nor bad. It’s what Shakespeare’s Hamlet meant when he said, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”.

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are reported by about 17% of those who nearly die. NDEs have been reported by children, adults, scientists, physicians, priests, ministers, among the religious and atheists, and from countries throughout the world.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information

After a near-death experience, it’s not uncommon to hear how someone reevaluates and makes profound changes to their life.

Dr. Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, studies near-death experiences and has interviewed thousands of people who’ve had them, in an NPR interview he says, “I've got story after story of people who couldn’t go back to the same profession, people who were, say, career police officers who couldn’t shoot after a near-death experience, of people who were in competitive businesses who no longer felt it was meaningful to get ahead at someone else’s expense”. Greyson says these people often change their careers, or make other dramatic lifestyle changes. Sometimes the changes are so drastic that their family members “don't have the same values in common anymore”.

It begs the question, what is it about nearly dying that influences profound life change?

I believe Dr. Greyson answers this when in the same interview he says, “a decreased fear of death [is a] consistent pattern [that] follows a near-death experience”. Based on that point, it’s possible to speculate that for those who made changes to their life after a near-death experience: it was the fear of death that was stopping them from being true to themselves.

Losing your fear of death must be liberating. I do not doubt that it would change how you make decisions and influence your overall outlook on life. By that, I don’t mean you’d be drawn to unnecessary risk-taking or death-defying feats. I mean many of your important life decisions would probably be different going forward.

Our DNA still “wants” the same two things it did thousands of years ago which are reproduction and survival. All of our emotions are there to encourage or discourage behaviour to keep us alive or reproduce. At a subconscious level, this forms the nucleus of all of our decisions today. It’s the bedrock of our emotions. It’s not evident at a conscious level because it’s drowned out by our overwhelming sense of free will — it might not feel like you’re being drawn to one thing over another because of your DNA programming but you are, we all are.

Public speaking, money & the unknown

There’s an adage that I’m sure you’ve heard, that goes along the lines of “People fear public speaking more than death.” It may be an exaggeration but it’s fair to say that on the whole people don’t like it and many fear it. I was petrified of public speaking. I remember when I had to do it for my previous employer — it was the only thing I could think about for days before speaking at a conference. I found it debilitating. Needless to say, when you analyse it rationally, it doesn’t make sense. Our lives aren’t in danger when speaking in front of an audience. It’s our pesky outdated DNA causing us problems in today’s modern world.

The common evolutionary explanation behind why we fear public speaking is that we’re used to living in tribes and rejection from a tribe would hamper our survival chances, so speaking to an audience (and messing up) would make us vulnerable to rejection. The other theory is that for most of our existence, having lots of eyes watching us would have been an existential threat. It’s possibly a combination of the two which for many of us means it’s an all-around unpleasant experience.

Maybe you’re not afraid of public speaking but instead of heights, flying or spiders. We all have irrational fears that stem from a fear of dying. It’s not just irrational fears though, it’s everything else. Everything you fear or are nervous about or have anxiety over relates to death. Whenever we fear something, it’s an attempt by our DNA to steer us in a direction and keep us alive when thousands of years ago most of our decisions were related to survival.

The lure of money (resources) can be seen as a proxy for survival when for most of our existence a lack of resources would have meant probable death. Today the likelihood of dying from starvation is close to zero, but we still have that fear ingrained in us when we become slaves to our careers, irrationally hoard money or are fearful about quitting a job — we’re hard-wired to be fearful of anything that affects the accumulation of resources. But just like a fear of public speaking, it’s irrational.

I have a friend who has more money than you can imagine, but he still can’t stop the pursuit of accumulating more wealth. On one occasion, he stopped work to retire, but it wasn’t for long as he felt that he needed a bit more to make retirement that bit more comfortable. This isn’t a particularly original story, as the saying goes “greed can never be satisfied”. I speculate that people like this have a strong fear of death and this explains their perpetual desire to accumulate more resources. If my friend had a near-death experience, then there’s no doubt in my mind that he would stop his irrational hoarding and start living a different life.

Another example of how our behaviour is dictated by how we lived thousands of years ago is the fear of the unknown. When we foraged in unknown grasslands or unfamiliar territory, there would have been a higher probability of death, so being fearful of the unknown was an invaluable tool for survival. Being fearful made us extra sensitive and hyper-alert to what could be hiding in unfamiliar surroundings — a snake, a lion or an unfriendly tribe ready to punch, capture and kill us. So being hesitant and unsure about the unfamiliar was a good thing — those that were blasé wouldn’t have lasted long and nor would their DNA. A fear of the unknown was once a life saver, but now it stops us from changing jobs, moving town, leaving a partner or trying something new. When we fear the unfamiliar or change, it boils down to a fear of death.

Fear was an exceptionally useful emotion (a valuable tool) that kept us alive. When we were afraid of something, it meant our lives were in danger. Today, it’s an emotion that rarely serves us well. Our fear that originates from preventing death can stop us from living a better life.

Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty is a sci-fi cartoon about crazy inter-dimensional adventures with a nihilistic mad scientist called Rick and his good-natured grandson, Morty.

There’s an episode where they visit a futuristic amusement arcade with a virtual reality life simulator game called Roy: A Life Well Lived. To play the game, you put on a headset and begin with no previous memories — once in the game, players aren’t aware that it’s a simulation and time passes at a one-second to one-month speed ratio, so the game feels like a lifetime but in reality, it’s about 10-15 minutes. Just like any arcade game, there’s a monitor screen so others can stand around and see how well or poorly you’re playing — the goal is to guide Roy through life, from childhood to death.

Morty has the virtual reality headset put on his head and the next moment he wakes up in bed as Roy. We see him begin at school, become a football player, get married, and give up his dream of being a professional football player to work at his father-in-law’s carpet store, be diagnosed with terminal cancer, beat cancer, go back to work at the carpet store after a full recovery, and falling to his death when climbing a ladder to get a Persian rug for a carpet sale at the age of 55. GAME OVER.

Now that the game is over, Morty’s disoriented and confused in the amusement arcade and shouts, “What the hell! Where am I?” His grandfather, Rick says, “You were just playing a game. It’s called Roy. Snap out of it, come on.” Once Morty is fully conscious and aware of what’s going on, Rick exclaims, “You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Booo!!”

Rick puts on the headset and tells Morty, “Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to thrash your Roy score […] the difference between you and me, Morty. I never go back to the carpet store.” Rick then proceeds to take an unorthodox approach to playing Roy by taking him “off the grid”.

Once the scene has ended (which can be watched on YouTube), you can’t help but think about your own life and whether you’re “playing it well”. If your life ended and it turned out to be a video game, is there anything you regret or is there anything you would change the next time you play? There were a few people who wrote their thoughts in the comments section below the clip:

Right now... somewhere out there... my buddies are standing around my arcade game yelling “Dude, you're so boring!”

—@merisonola

If I die and wake up from this game I will be so happy. I get to try again and do better the next time!

—@eyescreamcake

Man whoever is playing my life is not doing it right.

—@ghfd6821

This video game thought experiment of how well you’re living your life is a version of the deathbed test — which is when you assess your life from the viewpoint of a future version of you lying on your deathbed.

Imagine you’re dying

Imagine for a minute that you are lying on your deathbed and looking back on your life — what do you wish you had done differently? Or maybe you have an important life decision that you’ve been mulling for a while — does this deathbed version of you decide or think differently compared to you?

I’m sure some of you would agree that an imagined dying version of you thinks differently compared to your “current you”. Your future self (with little time left) wants you to have lived a full life without regret whereas your current self is often lured by whatever seems safe, predictable and expected.

An imagined future, dying version of you doesn’t have fear for the current you and wants you to live the best life possible — so this imagined version of you can be an excellent source for advice, a mentor — a shield from our malfunctioning DNA that is trying to stop us from dying in a world that has very few threats. It can be used as a peephole into the minds of those who have had near-death experiences and lost their fear of dying.

Fear is the most primal of emotions, which time and time again makes us choose incorrectly, makes us stick to a well-trodden path, and makes us fearful or anxious over things that have a zero probability of death. All of which can lead to regret when we look back on our life from our deathbed.

Poet, mathematician, photographer, priest and author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll, summarised it well when saying, “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make.”

There’s an episode in the comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Deep Thought (an aptly named supercomputer) is asked the meaning of life. After 7 million years of computation and much anticipation, Deep Thought returns a concise and arbitrary answer of “42”. For those who had been patiently waiting, it was a deeply disappointing response to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.

It’s not only Deep Thought that has tried to answer this question, there are many philosophies and even more religions that offer their best guess to the reason for life — you can choose whatever sounds best.

Humans strive for meaning and while it’s unlikely (or at least there’s no evidence) that there’s a divine meaning to life, a concept that’s a lot easier to grapple with is, What’s our purpose in life? Now that’s a lot easier to understand. Or at least it was.

For most of human existence, our primary purpose on any given day was simple: survival (no different to any living organism today).

Back in our hunter-gather days, there wouldn’t have been many choices on how to spend free time, what to have for lunch or selecting a career. Everyday life didn’t require too much thinking — it was clear what needed doing: find food, stay warm and try not to die.

While that doesn’t sound like much fun versus how we live today, Anna Lembke (psychiatrist and best-selling author) argues in an interview (below) that since life has become so much easier it has actually become tougher in a “really weird way”.  

I think that life for humans has always been hard, but now it's harder in unprecedented ways. And I think that the way that life is really hard now is that it’s actually really boring. And the reason that it's boring is because all of our survival needs are met.

I mean, we don't even have to leave our homes to meet every single physical need, you know, as long as you're of a certain level of financial wellbeing, which frankly, you know, we talk so much about, you know, the income gap, and certainly there is this enormous gap between rich and poor.

But that gap is smaller than it's ever been in like the history of humans. Even the poorest of the poor have more excess income to spend on leisure goods,
than they ever have before in human history.

So my point here is that life is hard now in this really weird way, in that we don't really have anything that we have to do.

So we're all forced to make stuff up, you know, whether it's being a scientist or being a doctor, or being an Olympic athlete, or, you know, climbing Mount Everest.

And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.

And if they don't have it, they're really, really unhappy.

The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions have created a void in the human psyche. Now that our survival needs are taken care of — it’s not clear what we are waking up for so we need to invent a purpose which nearly always means finding a career. Our job becomes our main purpose in life.

The first question that nearly always crops up at a social gathering is, “What do you do?”. Oftentimes we identify as being our job, “I’m an accountant” or “I’m a hairdresser”. I think this is quite telling, in a world where we have to invent a purpose — we identify (or become) the thing we do.

We’re the middle children of history

In the film Fight Club there’s a scene where Tyler Durden says, “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

What Tyler Durden and Anna Lembke are saying is essentially the same — we live in a time where there’s no driving force, no obvious reason for what we are supposed to be doing. We live in a time that’s comparable to a poorly run meeting with no agenda. Everyone is sitting there and thinking, Why am I here? And, what’s the point of this?

If you don’t love your job, then you’re made to feel like something is wrong. It’s easy to become brainwashed by the proliferation of fake gurus who appear motivational but ultimately get our hopes up for no good reason. “Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” A big problem is that society doesn’t generate many interesting jobs — look for yourself on any job site — very few vacancies are jobs you’d feel lucky waking up for on a Monday morning.

I’m not saying no one enjoys their work — we all know someone who does, but I’m confident they’re the lucky few. Statistically speaking, there's an overwhelmingly good chance you’ll end up doing a job you’re not passionate about.

When I look back to when I was stuck in an office, I’m convinced the unchallenging environment was what made it so unbearable; sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, going to meetings — it’s the same day after day. So how are we supposed to feel fulfilled and to have purpose when in all likelihood our work won’t do it for us?

Making life more challenging

Last week on a windy and rainy UK “summer’s day” I was feeling somewhat bored and downbeat. I had originally planned to go to the beach with my surfboard to practice some paddling, but the uninspiring weather was telling me to stay indoors. In the end, I pushed myself to go outside. It was what I expected — the sea was rough, it was windy and cold. I came out after 45 minutes, got showered using the cold shower by the public toilets and with a mild shiver got changed on the pebbled beach.

From when I was at home thinking about whether to go outside to being fully dressed after being in the ocean, there was a stark contrast in my mood. I went from melancholic to energised and enthusiastic. If there was a pill that had this effect — everyone would take it. What I am describing isn’t anything groundbreaking or particularly interesting, I’m sure you’ve had experiences where your mood has improved after doing something or other.

Some of my improved mood can be explained by doing exercise, but this only explains part of the picture — my “sea adventure” was a 3x, 4x or maybe 5x multiplier compared to when I go for a run. So what explains the incremental mood improvement?

I believe the reason is that we feel good (maybe even great) after doing something challenging. Living as a hunter-gatherer would have been tough, the more challenges we undertook, the more we would have learnt, achieved and progressed. So it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to be neurologically rewarded for undertaking experiences that push our boundaries. The problem most of us have today is that we rarely face real challenges. On the surface, it feels like an unchallenging and risk-free life would surely make us happy. But it doesn’t. It’s one of life’s paradoxes.

Rooftopping

Rooftopping is an activity that involves illegally scaling tall buildings (the taller the better) with no safety equipment. Losing your life is a not-too-uncommon occurrence. It’s a great example of how unchallenging everyday life has become and the extreme lengths humans go to to add “friction” to their lives. Free solo climbing, free diving, and wingsuit flying are just a few other examples of this. Before humans were able to take their survival for granted, I doubt anyone gave much thought to how they could add danger and excitement to their lives for no good reason.

There’s a Netflix documentary called Skywalking about a couple who’ve made a career from rooftopping. If you’ve been putting something off because of fear or mild anxiety then I’d encourage you to watch it. It’s not going to make you want to start scaling buildings, but if you’ve been putting off a dentist appointment (or anything else for that matter) it’s going to seem irrational in comparison.

Needless to say, we don’t need to be risking our lives to be enjoying ourselves. But I’m convinced that we all need to have something that makes us excited, and puts us into (as the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes) a “flow state”.

What is that something though? That’s the million-dollar question.

Instead of asking for Deep Thought’s help, we can try asking the Japanese.

Ikigai

The Japanese believe we all have something that gives us a sense of purpose (a reason for living). They call this ikigai, which roughly translates to a reason for being. If you have a job that you’re passionate about, then you may already know what your ikigai is, maybe it’s teaching, helping others or producing artwork. Or maybe it’s something you do in your spare time like playing an instrument, gardening, or playing a favourite sport.

According to the book Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life, “Our ikigai is hidden deep inside each of us, and finding it requires a patient search”. And if you don’t know what your ikigai is (many people don’t) “…then keep searching by going deeper into what you like by spending more of your time in the activities that make you flow. Also, try new things that are not on the list of what makes you flow but are similar and that you are curious about. For example, if photography is something that drives you into flow, you could also try painting; you might even like it more! Or if you love snowboarding and have never tried surfing … Flow is mysterious. It is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more you will flow, and the closer you will be to your ikigai.”

Trust fund kids

If living an unchallenging life brings joy then trust fund kids are the luckiest people on earth. From an early age, they know everything has been set for them — there’s no need to worry or exert much effort. Life is set. The thing is, humans have an innate desire for purpose. Much more than money.

If I try and imagine what living like a rich kid feels like — it doesn’t seem particularly appealing. I enjoy scrimping, saving and earning money — it gives me (and everyone else) a sense of accomplishment. Being born into tons of money would give you few challenges in life. Trust fund kids are on the extreme spectrum of purposeless living. It’s no surprise to me that substance abuse, anxiety and depression are all issues with children of affluence.

Many of us aspire to live like trust fund kids when we retire. We look forward to retirement age when our pension kicks in — now sit back, do nothing and spend money …“living the dream”.

After a certain amount of time, probably a few months and certainly less than a year, that retirement dream is over. Very few people can live like that because an unchallenging life is boring. A contrarian approach would be to retire with slightly less than you think you need so that you continue to be challenged, to have desire and purpose. I’ve recently been selling bits and bobs on eBay and claiming cash-back offers from banks which all feel somewhat satisfying. A feeling I wouldn’t have if I didn’t need to be doing it.

Living purposefully

Hell Jumper is an extraordinary BBC documentary about volunteers from all over the world who risk their lives in Ukraine by going to the frontline (with no military support) to save stranded civilians. Most of the documentary is told through first-hand video footage taken in incredibly perilous situations and from surviving volunteers.

After returning home from volunteering in Ukraine, Daniel, a carpenter from Canada says in one scene, “It’s kind of hard to care about…whatever, going for a bike ride or putting sod down in my yard. Like who really gives a shit about these things when I know that people are getting killed right now?” Other volunteers who speak in the film include Brogan, a retail worker from Scotland, and Christian, a personal trainer from the US. It’s evident through the director’s storytelling that the volunteers are heroes, but at the same time, doing this for themselves for a sense of purpose that’s most likely missing from home life.

It’s probably fair to say that many of us suffer from a lack of purpose, what the documentary film Hell Jumper demonstrates is how far some brave individuals are prepared to go to resolve this.

Our mood, our emotions — all of the reasons we feel good and bad can be explained by our evolutionary past. I believe that undertaking challenges that provide a sense of accomplishment (and a degree of risk) is an essential ingredient for well-being based on how we lived thousands of years ago. If you don’t have a passion (an ikigai) then taking up whatever you feel is challenging will probably help by giving you a sense of achievement. Without being challenged, an easy life, one that’s analogous to sitting by the pool sipping cocktails — may sound nice but it’s purposeless and a surefire way to be unsatisfied.

Viktor Frankl, a well-renowned neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, Holocaust survivor and bestselling author said, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

How on earth am I only finding out about this now? That is what I thought when I learned about the term “boreout” recently.

According to an article on the BBC, “While burnout is linked to long hours, poor work-life balance and our glamourisation of overwork, boreout happens when we are bored by our work to the point that we feel it is totally meaningless. Our job seems pointless, our tasks devoid of value”.

Lotta Harju (an assistant professor of organisational behaviour) goes on to say, “Boreout is different from burnout in the sense that bored-out employees rarely collapse out of exhaustion. Bored-out people may be present physically but not in spirit, and people can keep doing this for a good while”.

According to the article, there are health consequences of being bored-out too, “A 2021 study showed that 186 government workers in Turkey who suffered from boreout also dealt with depression and high rates of stress and anxiety. Studies show depression from boreout can follow workers outside the office, and lead to physical ailments from insomnia to headaches”. Another study cited (of 11K participants) found that boreout also increased the likelihood of employees wanting to retire early.

There is no doubt in my mind that I was suffering from boreout for a large part of my office-working existence, and it’s certainly the reason I wanted to retire early — who wouldn’t when working a meaningless and boring job?

“The fundamental experience of boreout is meaninglessness”

— Lotta Harju

It’s not just meaninglessness though, retail workers and taxi drivers (waiting for hours for their next job) get a mention in that article too. Driving a taxi or working in a shop has meaning, however, doing the same thing, day after day is undoubtedly boring. My job was the worst of both worlds; meaningless and boring.

It was in the last 6 years of my career that I reached “peak boreout” working for a huge conglomerate. It was terrible. I remember trying to convince myself that it wasn’t that bad. I’d have a recurring conversation with a work colleague where we’d try and persuade ourselves that we were lucky to have undemanding jobs that paid well. On the surface the logic made sense; being rewarded for little effort — what’s not to like? However, it didn’t matter how many times we told ourselves this — we still felt empty, unenthusiastic and in no way fortunate.

Trying to fix boreout

The quarterly staff engagement survey results were always terrible at my previous employer. There was always a “fire drill” after the awful results — senior management claimed that they would fix it — but no one ever believed them. Being an anonymous survey, it was the one time employees could stop the pretence and be honest about what it was like working there.

If satisfaction could be gained from needlessly pushing a boulder up a hill then we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. Being neurologically rewarded to accomplish a purposeful task (finding food, building shelter etc) kept us alive. So it doesn’t matter how much you get paid, you won’t feel good about spending a large chunk of your life doing something that lacks purpose. Pointlessness is punishment. The Victorias knew that and it was the reason they punished prisoners by giving them “pointless hard labour”.

It doesn’t matter what’s done, how many offsite meetings are held, or how much an external consultancy is paid. You can’t change the fact that many of today’s jobs are “pointless soft labour”. Any attempt to fix it is lipstick on a pig.

Boreout from life

If you can get boreout from work, then you can get it from everyday life too.

I recently returned from 5 weeks in Portugal, 2 weeks of those were with a friend who retired a couple of years ago. He has boreout from life. As much as he didn’t enjoy his job before retiring, at least it gave him some structure. Now he has none. So he watches TV and drinks (excessively). It is a sad existence. He wakes up (normally past midday) and clock-watches until it’s (somewhat) socially acceptable to start drinking. This way of living doesn’t seem too uncommon for Brits who retire in the sun.

Since returning from Portugal I’ve had a bunch of repairs to do around my mum’s house. As unglamorous as the work is — when I get to see what I’ve accomplished, whether that’s painting a wall or clearing the garden — there’s a sense of satisfaction — something I never felt when bored-out from a pointless meeting or producing another PowerPoint deck.

Having things to do in retirement is essential. Everyone obsesses about the money side of retirement but forgets the most important side: what are you going to do? If you don’t have a plan then you may as well continue working. As much as you may hate your bored-out life from working, retirement could easily be worse.

"Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need"

— Voltaire

That BBC article concludes on somewhat of a positive point: “Boreout can mark a transition into something else: a different career entirely […] If people only take its cue.” It’s the taking the cue part that many of us need to get better at.

Imagine for a minute that you have a strange disposition and don’t feel boredom. You’d potentially just sit there doing nothing and be fine with that. That’s why omnipresent media and technology can ruin so many lives with its small doses of gratification — just enough to keep us going — it stops us from being bored out of our minds. But being bored-out can lead to a big change, something impactful, something significant.

As well as taking the cue from boredom we need to be conscious of our fear of change. As humans we don’t seem to like it — our pre-historic DNA wants to protect us from danger by keeping us on a well-trodden path. Whereas before that may have saved us from a saber-toothed tiger mauling, today it keeps us in a boring job or a boring life. It can make us bored-out but too frighted to do anything about it.

As the saying goes (or some variation of it) “Don't be afraid of dying, be afraid of not living”.

Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”. Seneca’s quote shouldn’t need much explaining — we’re all experts at using our imagination to make ourselves suffer.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s easy to understand why mental suffering is useful. Being worried about not having enough food is a good thing. If we were relaxed about life-threatening situations then we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species.

Fast-forward to the present day and all our survival needs are taken care of — our worrying that once kept us alive now raises our blood pressure for no good reason.

I’m conscious that many people struggle to make ends meet or have other genuine problems to contend with. With that being said, many of us don’t have a good reason to regularly subject ourselves to mental suffering — I’d put myself into that category.

What is suffering?

When looking up the definition of suffering in the Oxford Dictionary three themes recur: pain, distress, and hardship.

More often than not, when we subject ourselves to mental anguish, it’s not a distressing event, and the worry we undertake doesn’t help us evade pain or hardship. Compared to our ancestors, life is a cakewalk. Ever since our survival needs were taken care of, none of us have anything “real” to do, which is probably why so many of us search for purpose in life.

With no real problems we “move the goalposts” and torture ourselves for no good reason. In psychology, this is a phenomenon called “prevalence-induced concept change”. According to Harvard researcher, Daniel Gilbert “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems. Our studies suggest that when the world gets better, we become harsher critics of it”. This means however rich or easy your life becomes — you will likely worry just as much or possibly even more.

I spoke with a neighbour recently who was distressed by the fact her window cleaner had “missed a spot”. She wouldn’t stop talking about it and was clearly agitated. Likewise, I know someone who’s incredibly wealthy but is constantly stressed about money. His latest “problem” concerns a tenant who hasn’t paid him rent. Needless to say, this doesn’t affect his lifestyle in the slightest but he channels all of his “worrying energy” into this one concern as it’s his only problem right now.

When did you last suffer?

Ask yourself this — when was the last time you suffered? I don’t mean modern-day suffering such as being stuck in traffic, receiving no “likes”, or an Amazon delivery turning up late. I mean real suffering.

I reflected on this question after my mum passed away earlier in the year. This distressing event made me realise that this was the only real suffering I had encountered which means there is a major asymmetry in the amount of worrying I do compared to distressing events I have encountered. Most of my other worries have been memeable “first world problems”. Or put another way: prevalence-induced concept change (the psychological phenomenon we all suffer from) has me confused about what’s worth worrying about.

Suffering at work

The stress from the jobs we do must be the biggest cause of our imaginary suffering. If you’re a doctor, soldier or airline pilot then stress can be useful for focusing the mind on the task at hand.

Many of us don’t have “real jobs” though — many modern-day jobs don’t serve much (if any) purpose. You would think that these unproductive “paper shuffling“ jobs are stress-free, however, the irony is that they’re laden with mental suffering. My experience suggests that more pointlessness comes with more stress; a respondent from the book Bullshit Jobs highlights this with an example that I’m sure many can relate to.

I know two people who had heart attacks from the company where I previously worked. Both of them put it down to work-related stress. I can say with 100% certainty that the work they did was meaningless. They certainly weren’t saving lives — I doubt the PowerPoint reports they slaved over were even being read.

When I was working there, I rarely had much to do and managed to avoid most of the “fire drills”. Even so, there was underlying stress caused by doing something I didn’t enjoy, not being free and the terrible daily commute.

One noticeable difference I’ve observed since being fired is how much better I sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no Zen master — I continue to subject myself to imaginary suffering but it’s significantly less compared to when I did pointless work in an office. My days feel somewhat more meaningful now, and life no longer feels like it’s being wasted away.

Now that I think about it: the mental suffering I encountered when working in an office was useful — without it, I wouldn’t have made a change.

Would you rather live until 100 and feel like you've not lived long enough or 80 and feel like you've lived a long life? At the end of the day isn't the sense of time more important than the amount of it?

Time perception is studied by neuroscientists and they know that it's subjective, so for you; one week, one month, a year or a lifetime can feel much longer or shorter than for me. I’m sure I'm not alone when I sit back and reflect on how quickly another year has passed. Or being confused and thinking something happened not that long ago but it turned out to be one, two, or three years ago.

The quote “The days are long, but the years are short" is the idea that time can drag in the short term but over the long term go quickly. I experienced this sensation over the Covid pandemic. It certainly wasn't the case that time was going quickly each day stuck at home in lockdown, however, after a year had passed it was hard to believe that time had gone so quickly. The reason for this is simple; very few memories were being created or put another way: I was bored.

As we age it's common to feel that time moves quicker compared to when we were young (when things were more eventful and less routine). This feeling of time slippage when getting older can undoubtedly lead to regret. The well-known expression "Time flies when you are having fun" is a misnomer. It's the reverse: time flies when there's not much going on in your life. Or put another way: "Routine life makes the days long, but the years short".

The holiday paradox

A few years ago when I holidayed in Thailand, I remembered thinking to myself at the end of my trip that I had been there for ages -- it felt significantly longer than 14 days (the reverse of my Covid experience). I put this down to an eventful 2 weeks which created many new memories.

BBC broadcaster and academic psychologist, Claudia Hammond calls this the "holiday paradox". She told the British Psychological Society’s conference that our lives are normally so mundane that only six to nine experiences a fortnight are worth committing to memory compared to six to nine memories per day when we are on holiday. The renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses this topic in the five-minute clip below which is well worth watching.

How to waste life

If you can't remember much from last year (or any year for that matter) then was that year a waste of life?

As we age life becomes more routine; financial and family commitments mean we're required to become sensible and sacrifice our best and healthy remaining years to our careers.

I can think of many years (probably decades) that are empty of memories. Not because I'm forgetful but because nothing noteworthy happened other than the usual slog: go to work, go to the supermarket, occasional night out + a couple of holidays.

"Where has the week gone?" and "I can't believe it's Friday already" are phrases we hear at work all the time. The person saying this is sometimes sending a veiled message about how busy or in demand they are. I could never be bothered to play stupid status games in the office, however, I never had reason to disbelieve their claim that their week from a time perception perspective had gone quickly. From my experience, all weeks working in the office or WFH went quickly and those weeks quickly turned into months and then years.

Living an uneventful life is a surefire way of creating a chasm, a void, a black hole of emptiness in your mind, which may feel like a few years but can turn into a few decades.

Making a change

That feeling of time slowing when in Thailand stayed with me ever since. It made me conscious of how time was slipping away from me when I was back home doing the daily grind.

Since then I've escaped working in an office and I try to live a life that warrants forging more memories. I recently returned from a long stay in Sri Lanka where I experienced the "holiday paradox" once again. It really did feel like I'd been there for several months after I'd only been there for a few weeks. I was creating many new memories and meeting lots of new people which caused the same perception of time slowing as I had in Thailand.

I used to desire more money but now I desire more memories and relationships -- something I have neglected for too long. Although more money creates more comfort and security, it can come at the higher cost of not living your life. And I'm confident that the continued pursuit of money, comfort and security will lead to a life that wasn't long enough.

I’m confident that humans aren't wired for routine. Routine irks us. My opinion is based on observations of previous coworkers, many people I know and personal experience. And I'm willing to bet that you struggle with routine too.

I don't mean good routines like brushing your teeth or meeting your friends for a coffee or a morning run. I'm referring to the unchanging routine of our general existence. Once something becomes routine our consciousness shuts down then our subconscious takes the reins as we move into autopilot and boredom begins.

Ask yourself this: why do you become bored? The idea that you (or "the self") decide what's boring is nonsensical when you think about it. I like the logical theories evolution generates and although we can never be 100% certain as to why we feel a certain way, the best one I uncovered as to why we feel boredom is the following:

"Like hunger, thirst and loneliness, boredom is a negative feeling that drives us to change our behaviour. Natural selection has favoured individuals with the capacity to feel bored because they are more likely to discover or create things that improve their survival chances, or to look for a new partner and so spread their genes more widely. Contentment leads to complacency, and that’s a dangerous evolutionary strategy. "

BBC Science Focus

Just as our bodies have not evolved to eat a diet full of high-fructose corn syrup, our minds have not evolved to be subjected to unchanging routine which is what the modern world requires of us.

Offices are the factories of the 21st Century

Manufacturing used to make up 40% of the UK economy following World War II, it's now 8%. There's been a huge shift to the service industry which has happened across most of the developed world. In addition, the majority of work on factory assembly lines has been replaced by machines. Perhaps this is why society created so many office jobs: office work is so meaningless and abstract it's too hard for machines (regardless of how intelligent they become) to ever understand!

On the surface, working in an office seems to be an improvement compared to working in a factory and while that might be true from a physical standpoint, the pointless and routine nature of office work makes it a psychological slog; the same (terrible) everyday commute on packed public transport or stuck in traffic on congested roads, sitting at the same desk, writing email all-day, going to meeting after meeting (about nothing in particular) ... rinse and repeat every day ... forever.

The jobs created by society are truly terrible. I'm sure most people (like me) enjoy work when it gives them a sense of purpose, however, the terrible brain-numbing jobs that we are expected to do are mental torture.

What do you do?

It always makes me smile when someone asks "What do you do?". This question used to make sense when we had distinguishable jobs such as being a butcher, baker or candle stick maker. Now it doesn't matter what field you work in because the chances are your job is email and meetings. Even if you have a "real job" there's a good chance your day is filled with email and meeting drudgery.

I was speaking to a Swedish paediatrician recently while travelling in Portugal. As most conversations go, after a little small talk it got around to the usual "What do you do?". I explained that I used to have a meaningless job in marketing but couldn't tolerate the pointless nature anymore. When he told me that he was a paediatrician, my immediate response was "Oh, you have a real job". His response surprised me though. He went on to say that he sits at a desk all day working on a computer and rarely meets patients. He said that being a paediatrician wasn't what he expected.

It seems that regardless of what your occupation is, you are confined to the factories of the 21st century: sitting at a desk and staring at a screen. If a factory worker from the Victorian era could see us today they would say how fortunate we are, and from a safety perspective, they would be right. (I've never heard of anyone being injured while working on a PowerPoint presentation.) But I doubt whether being stuck in an office is any less tedious than being stuck in a cotton mill.

Anything becomes routine

It's not just routine work that makes us feel bored and numb inside -- it's everything else too.

On the whole many of us are bad predicators of what will make us happy. This attempt of predicting how we'll feel in the future has a name, it's called "affective forecasting". Our minds are used as time travel devices that go into the future and imagine what it will be like if we do this thing or that thing or live somewhere new. However, unlike Doctor Who or Marty McFly, we can't experience things for ourselves firsthand. Instead, our minds make a best guess based on very limited (and often biased) information.

A common trap we seem to fall for is to believe that permanent happiness will ensue when we stop working, or when we move to an exotic location, or when we buy a new [whatever]. However, when we achieve our said goal, the improvement in our mood eventually dissipates. I put this down to our prehistoric DNA (we need variety) and therefore our happiness is temporary. How long the effect of happiness lasts may depend on how big a change has been made but eventually our mood improvement disappears and we're back to where we began.

Portugal ☀️

I'm currently in Portugal staying at a friend's house having been here for nearly three months. At the beginning of my trip when everything was new and exciting my levels of joy were extremely high, but nearly three months later those levels of joy have reduced significantly. Everything is now normal and I'm now looking forward to a change in scenery and returning to the UK.

On the whole, I believe that many people who relocate overseas to escape the drudgery of their home country are swapping one routine for another. There are hard to disputable benefits of living somewhere like Portugal such as sunny weather, and lower cost of living, however, my friend who's living here doesn't seem any happier -- he still complains as much as when he lived in the UK.

Moving to Portugal, the South of France or [insert your favourite destination] will (after enough time) probably not live up to expectations. And before you know it, you'll be complaining about the food that you can't get (from back home), the slow internet speed and poor customer service.

In my opinion, the key to increased well-being is not to permanently escape a particular routine or place, it's to increase variety so that no one thing feels like it's never-ending. Whenever we leave our home or escape a routine and return to it later it feels somewhat enjoyable again (for an amount of time) before feeling routine again.

Variety makes life interesting. Variety is the spice of life.

I was doing an excellent job of falling off my surfboard recently while practising on a sandy beach break. A goal of mine since escaping 9-5 drudgery has been to learn how to surf which is the main reason I'm spending a few months in Portugal.

While practising there was a point in time when I looked up to where the sun dwellers lounged and all of a sudden felt self-conscious. I thought to myself I bet they're looking at me. All of a sudden I went from being "in the zone" to worrying about how (poorly) I was performing.

I realised these feelings of concern were illogical. Not only were my self-conscious thoughts likely to be a figment of my imagination but I didn't know anyone on the beach and everyone was so far away that they looked more like ants than humans.

Worrying about what other people think is something we all suffer from. The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius once said “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” As truthful as these words may be it doesn't explain the reason why we worry about what other people think of us. The Romans weren't aware of natural selection, DNA and evolutionary psychology so as insightful as proverbs can be, I find the underlying evolutionary explanation a better remedy for undesirable emotions.

Our "internal software" still thinks we're living in prehistoric times and most of our emotional triggers are trying to aid with our survival or propagate our DNA. Many emotions we feel today can be seen as "glitches" as they no longer help with keeping us alive or aiding with reproduction.

The best explanation that I can come up with as to why I felt embarrassed falling off my surfboard falls into both reproduction and survival.

While hunter-gatherers probably didn't do much surfing they would have hunted, made tools, built shelters and generally engaged in activities that demonstrated their skills and competence. It would have been critical to be a valuable member of a hunter-gatherer group. If you were a terrible hunter, made crap tools and all the shelter you built blew away with the first gust of wind, then you'd probably find yourself on borrowed time before being ousted. So it makes sense to feel uncomfortable with underperformance -- our DNA "thinks" we are part of a hunter-gatherer group and we risk being abandoned.

Another key reason and maybe the primary one is our DNA "wants" to reproduce. Being competent would have been a good way to attract mates as it would translate into being a good provider. If you could barely rub two sticks together then it's unlikely you'd be attracting many mating partners.

As Richard Dawkins said "DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music." So the next time you are feeling embarrassed or self-conscious: remind yourself that it's most likely for two reasons. Either to attract a mate or stay alive.

Then ask yourself, is this applicable in the current situation? Nearly 100% of the time it won't be. The chances are that whatever it is that's making you feel self-conscious isn't putting your life at risk or diminishing your odds of having (more) children. By thinking about the irrationality, I find that it helps to dampen the emotion. Or put another way: it quietens the music our DNA is playing.

Now back to falling off my surfboard.

Back in 2013, Alex Lewis had symptoms of the common cold which he dismissed as "man flu". It turned out he had septicaemia, strep A and necrotising fasciitis which are life-threatening. The only way to stop the illness from spreading and keep Alex alive was to amputate both his arms and legs. Following surgery, Alex was left without limbs and permanently disfigured from where the disease had spread to his face.

Alex's remarkable story was captured in a Channel4 documentary which was originally aired in 2016 -- it's now free to watch on Youtube and has racked up over 78 million views.

What struck me most about Alex's story was how he became grateful for how this terrible disease changed his life. In Alex's words: "Losing my limbs made me realise what I had". Before Alex became ill he was a self-confessed alcoholic and "Wasn't very happy". Alex's wife, Lucy (who's a pub manager) described how Alex lived his life: "Alex loved drinking. He was in one of our pubs all day and he would drink too much. Where I'd come in from work every day and been working and Alex would have been having a drink at the bar. I just felt like he was taking the piss".

After getting sick, Alex never went back to his alcohol-fuelled way of living. With no limbs and no way of taking care of himself, he had a burning desire to regain his independence and get back what he had previously taken for granted. The Guardian Newspaper when reviewing the documentary described Alex as: “[A] feckless, directionless young man [who] suddenly found an inner strength and purpose.”

I can't relate to the extreme example of what Alex went through, however, I can relate to his purposeless way of living before his illness. I know exactly what that directionless feeling is like. When you lack purpose, you lack motivation, it's an empty feeling inside.

You have no purpose when life is easy

Nothing makes you feel more alive than when you're trying to stay alive.

I can only imagine what it was like living as a hunter-gather. One thing I'm sure of is that it was more interesting than the drudgery of 9-5 or with nothing to do other than aimlessly scrolling social media.

For most of human history, every human had a purpose: find food, find water, stay warm; in general, try and stay alive. No one was pondering their purpose in life. Nowadays, close to no one has their basic survival needs to worry about. It's incredibly rare to die from a lack of food or being mauled by a tiger. We no longer wake up with a burning desire to do anything. In prehistoric times it would have been a death sentence to lounge around all day and do nothing, today it really doesn't matter.

Many of us try and find a purpose in an effort to make ourselves feel motivated like we once were. Some of us try and find it in our work, religion, or bringing up a family, others through a hobby or interest. And of course, there are many that choose moneymaking as their purpose.

Too much money makes you useless

As you obtain more wealth you become less useful, that's my belief. You no longer need to do things yourself so you pay someone else to do it. Those with a lot of money might pay for a driver, a chef, or a maid. Those that can't afford a chauffeur can buy the latest car with self-parking, pre-prepared food from the supermarket, or access the abundant home delivery services that cover everything from a cleaner to a masseuse. And regardless of where you sit on the economic ladder, nearly everyone is paying someone else for the most basic of DIY tasks.

Being a useful/capable individual allows you to act with purpose. It makes you resourceful. For most of human existence, we had to be resourceful otherwise we wouldn't survive. We would have been the equivalent of a polymath in resourcefulness: making tools, catching food, and building shelter. There must be something innate in all of us that gives us a sense of satisfaction (reward) for accomplishing tasks ourselves. Without a desire to become more skilled, we would have perished.

I receive a small bit of satisfaction whenever I see my clean car knowing that I washed it but none after paying for a carwash. The same holds true for any cleaning vs paying a cleaner or eating food I cooked vs buying a takeaway. These micro feelings of accomplishment boost our mood whenever we complete purposeful tasks. This is especially pertinent when the concept of modern-day (office) work has become meaningless. Without purpose, we feel useless.

Animals in captivity

I was watching a documentary recently about gated communities. One of the wealthy American residents being interviewed described living there, which for her meant making regular use of the onsite fitness facilities. Other facilities included a restaurant, a bar and playgrounds for the children. There were also ground staff that took care of all the gardens -- so no need to mow your own lawn. Needless to say, security was tight so living there was incredibly safe. She went on to say that there aren't too many reasons to leave the development. At the end of it, I wasn't sure if she was trying to convince the audience or herself that it was a nice place to live.

I see modern-day human life as an analogue of animals living in a zoo. Zoo animals have all their survival needs taken care of; they are given food and don't need to worry about predators. Because of this, animals in captivity live longer. It's the same for humans -- we live in a safe environment and no longer need to worry about food or predators which has a positive effect on our mortality rate.

A question worth asking yourself is whether you think zoo animals are happier than their wild counterparts. On the surface, you could argue that a life without needing to hunt for food or worry about predators is a better one. However, if I were to bet, I'd say animals in captivity are bored.

It's easy to forget that we are animals too (and domesticated ones at that). As far as our DNA is concerned, we are in captivity too. We have hardwired desires that can't be satisfied by sitting at home or in an office. If our prehistoric ancestors were told how we are living today it would probably sound like paradise to them. Linear thinking suggests that a life without hunting for food and worrying about predators is surely a better one.

However, linear thinking is often wrong. The side effects of modern-day convenience are; the omnipresent stress caused by technology and the media, a breakdown of community and no real purpose for the overwhelming majority of us.

As yourself: how much of a difference is there between a zookeeper hurling a hunk of red meat into a lion's cage and a human ordering food on a smartphone? When life's not challenging us it becomes a malaise. Alex found purpose when recovering from his illness. While Alex's example is extreme we can take something from it and ask ourselves how can we can put some struggle/challenge back into our own lives.

As alluring as it may be, the constant push for making life more convenient is fool's gold that ends in dissimulation.

From soothsayers in the 1st century CE to modern-day TV pundits making forecasts about the future, over the centuries it's obvious that our enthusiasm for wanting to see into the future hasn't waned.

However, if there’s one thing we can be sure about humans, it’s this: we are terrible at predicting the future. Our predictive powers are no better than random. Yet that doesn't curb our enthusiasm for listening to the thousands of experts who tell us what's going to happen. We can't wait for things to happen so we're enthralled by the barrage of speculation that fills our screens and airwaves. We obsess about knowing the future.

We rarely consume what has happened and instead consume what "coulds" and what "ifs" or depending on how good the expert believes their supernatural powers to be, they often tell us what "wills".

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the financial media. Guests being interviewed will be asked: "What's your prediction for the Bitcoin price?" or "Where's the oil price heading?". These attempts at predicting the future are understandable as it's how money can be made. The problem is -- close to no one is any good at it.

The butterfly effect

The problem with our attempts at predicting the future is that our logic is often linear: "If this happens then that happens" but the world rarely works like that. We're only capable of considering the known knowns -- it's only crystal gazers that can see the unknown knows. Another reason why predicting the future is so difficult is because of the butterfly effect or chaos theory. Most of us are familiar with the former which tells us how tiny changes (the flapping of a butterfly's wings) can compound and cause something massive (like a tornado).

In chaos theory, this is referred to as "the sensitivity of initial conditions" where a system's behaviour can diverge massively (causing extreme unpredictability) from minuscule differences in the starting conditions.

There's no better example (that I can think of) of how a tiny change can have a massive effect than when a driver took a wrong turn and caused World War I. Some history buffs may argue that WW1 was inevitable regardless, but it's hard to dispute that Ferdinand's driver taking a wrong turn which lead to Ferdinand's assassination created a colossal chain reaction.

So when you consider the unknown knows and tiny changes causing massive effects, it's easy to see why attempting to predict the future for a simple system let alone a complex one like the economy, your love life, or what you'll be doing in 12 months time is futile.

With that being said, it doesn't stop me, you and everyone else from doing it on a daily basis.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

Niels Bohr

Seinfeld

Before doing something or when thinking about a big decision, I often use my mind to travel into the future and put myself into a certain situation to see what happens. Maybe I encounter something wrong or it doesn't feel right, so I decide not to do it or maybe the opposite so I decide to go ahead and do it.

The problem is, things nearly always turn out differently from how I had expected. I'm nearly always wrong.

My thinking is nearly always linear which gives me an outcome of x but it ends up being y. It happens time and again. Seinfeld fans may remember an episode where George Costanza decides to do the opposite of whatever his instincts tell him. According to George, every decision in his entire life has been wrong so the opposite must be right.

Science is filled with examples where the opposite answer would have been correct -- the expansion of the universe being one of them. Cosmologists had assumed the expanding universe was slowing which for most people is a rational idea, however, observations later showed that the opposite was true and the universe's expansion is actually accelerating. So who knows ... maybe George was on to something.

How could you make your life worse?

In an effort to combat linear thinking when problem-solving, there's a technique that sounds like George Costanza's philosophy called opposite thinking (or reverse thinking). It's exactly what you think it is. For example, instead of trying to come up with ideas on how to improve a situation, come up with ideas on how to make the situation worse.

Most of use linear thinking when we give thought to what makes us happy -- if you want to escape this then use opposite thinking. Try thinking about what would make you unhappy (how could you make your life worse?). Some examples might be: having less money, living in a smaller home, moving here or there, doing this or that job role, having/not having children, being/not being in a relationship ... etc.

Hype trains & the mainstream

The opposite of opposite thinking has to be mainstream thinking. According to the Collins Dictionary, "If someone or something is mainstreamed, they become part of the most typical, normal, or conventional ideas or activities.". Mainstream (or consensus) opinions are often socially acceptable and feel fathomable which could be a sign that they are based on linear logic. For example, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the popular belief was that machines would dispel workers and instead there was an increase in the supply of jobs and overall wages.

The media we consume inundates us with mainstream views of how the future will pan out, however, the next time the media's hyping something up -- remind yourself of their appalling record of hype not living up to expectations.

Just ask yourself, whatever happened to blockchain? Wasn't that supposed to be the latest disrupting technology? Maybe it will disrupt and I just need to be patient. My bet is it was another fad that has come and gone. I've attended conferences and watched numerous Youtube videos and not once has anyone explained in a convincing manner why this technology is worth all the attention.

I still remember the Y2K bug hype and all the doomsday scenarios which included planes dropping out of the sky. Maybe all the consultants charging astronomical day rates fixed all the bugs, or maybe it was another mainstream view that was wrong.

How about crypto? The feverish enthusiasm seems to have waned, however, it's still bubbling beneath the surface (maybe not for NFTs). Bitcoin's been around for over 13 years but you still can't use it to pay for your groceries.

Humans will be eradicated by AI if you believe half of the hype of the latest hype train. I've used ChatGBT a couple of times, and while the conversational responses are impressive, more often than not -- the answers it gave me were wrong. Are we really on the precipice of an AI revolution? If you believe Elon Musk then you'd think so, however, I struggle to take him seriously (having previously done so) as it's clear he has a problem with telling the truth. I'm still waiting for the driverless cars we were promised some time ago.

Will AI be influential? Sure. Will it live up to the hype? History would suggest not.

Believing the opposite

There seems to be a growing part of the population that doesn't believe anything the mainstream media tells them (I know a couple of people like that). If the media says this then it must be the opposite. They may classify themselves as freethinkers but you're not free if you're taking an opposing view for the sake of it, or because you don't like the opposition party. While I certainly don't believe everything I'm being told, it's a slippery slope to assume everything is part of a conspiracy. If I was to guess, I'd say that the poor track record of governments and the news media with telling the truth is at least partially to blame for Flat Earthers who are taking the opposite of the mainstream view to an extreme.

Aside from whether the earth is flat, where I believe it's healthy to be sceptical or to hold a contrarian view is with any prediction of the future. I remember (not that long ago) that low-interest rates were here to stay and inflation was a thing of the past. Whenever we are told what's going to happen, it's not unwise to assume it's wrong. The same can be said about our own predictions -- however we think our life will end up, we'll most probably be wrong about it.

My favourite opposite thought

The term "bungalow legs" was coined to describe the decline in muscle mass brought on by living in stairless homes. A Japanese study involving 6,000 people aged 65 and over showed that stairs in the home held back age-related decline. It's logical to think that living without stairs would be safer for the elderly, however, it's another example of linear thinking gone wrong.

Something many of us aspire towards (especially in retirement) is living a comfortable (easy) life. A comfortable lifestyle with few challenges sounds perfect. The common/mainstream view is that this will yield happiness, however, I am confident it doesn't and in fact is a boring (and possibly a miserable) existence.

Anyone that has worked from home for a prolonged period of time will know what I mean. On the surface WFH sounds luxurious -- you literally don't step outside of your front door, in fact you don't need to get changed after waking up. This extreme form of convenience should make us happy, so why doesn't it?

For most of human existence, we've lived in a world where we've struggled and needed to adapt. Our DNA is still drawn to the path of least resistance (an easy life) because it's concerned about energy conservation. But with abundant food supplies, this is no longer a concern, in fact, the opposite is now an issue (we're not expelling enough energy).

Opposite thinking tells us that a comfortable life is a flawed aspiration. I have a higher conviction towards this idea after recently listening to a podcast with Anna Lembke about addiction (Lembke is a psychiatrist and appeared in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and is the author of Dopamine Nation). In the transcript below, Lembke talks about how boring modern life has become since all of our survival needs have been met. Lembke argues that because life has become so easy, it's actually harder than it's ever been before.

[Transcript from Huberman Lab Podcast #33]

[Anna Lembke:]

I think that life for humans has always been hard, but I think that now it's harder in unprecedented ways.

And I think that the way that life is really hard now is that it actually is really boring.

And the reason that it's boring is because all of our survival needs are met, right?

I mean, we don't even have to leave our homes to meet every single physical need, you know, as long as you're of a certain level of financial wellbeing, which frankly, you know, we talk so much about, you know, the income gap, and certainly there is this enormous gap between rich and poor.

But that gap is smaller than it's ever been in like the history of humans. Even the poorest of the poor have more excess income to spend on leisure goods,
than they ever have before in human history.

If you look at leisure time, for example, so people without a high school education have 42% more leisure time than people with a college degree. So my point here is that life is hard now in this really weird way, in that we don't really have anything that we have to do.

So we're all forced to make stuff up, you know, whether it's being a scientist or being a doctor, or being an Olympic athlete, or, you know, climbing Mount Everest.

And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.

And if they don't have it, they're really, really unhappy. And I do think that a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction.

I touched on this topic when I wrote "Life has become too easy", however, after listening to Lembke, a more apt title would have been: "Life is hard because it's too easy".

Nearly everyone wants more money so they can have an easier, more comfortable life. The belief is: we'll be living more contently. It's the consensus view. Which means it's probably wrong.

That's my favourite opposite thought.

Did you eat the marshmallow or did you abstain?

There's a well-known psychological experiment that's often cited in books about delayed gratification. The experiment offered children a choice of eating a marshmallow immediately or waiting and receiving double the reward later. Children were then left alone in a room with a marshmallow on the table to see who could resist temptation. The children were monitored for several years afterwards -- the results of the study showed that those who resisted immediate temptation had better life outcomes, for example; better educational scores and lower BMI compared to those that couldn’t wait and woofed down the marshmallow.

The predictive power of this experiment (which happened in 1972) has more recently been put into question. So we can't be 100% sure whether marshmallow resistance is a useful skill, however, one thing we can be sure of is that generally speaking, we believe that delaying gratification is a good thing.

Defining delayed gratification

If you had to summarise what delayed gratification is, it's this: resisting the temptation of an immediate reward for a greater reward in the future.

We've all heard about the benefits of delayed gratification. The two we're most familiar with relate to money and health: save money for retirement instead of spending it now (pain) so that when you retire you're not poor (gain) and don't eat that delicious cake that's in front of you (pain) so you stay slim and healthy in the future (gain).

When googling "delayed gratification" it's not difficult to find supporting information on the benefits -- one first-page result goes on to say "delayed gratification is one of the most effective personal traits of successful people".

The question I have is whether the delayed future reward is guaranteed and are those that don't delay gratification living a less fulfilling life.

Being present vs living in the future

I have a friend (we all know someone like this) who doesn't give much thought to the future -- he lives 100% for today. Any money he earns he spends on holidays, good food, wine and anything that piques his fancy. Needless to say, there's always something more appealing to do than exercise, dessert is too delicious to turn down, and who doesn't want a glass (or three) of wine after finishing work? On the surface, it sounds great. The side effect is that he's morbidly obese, he smokes, he's a borderline alcoholic, has a mild gambling addiction, and has dangerously high blood pressure.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's me. I exercise, eat healthily, save money, and limit my drinking. I'm living a life for my future self. While I don't envy my friend's health issues, I do envy his carefree existence. He seems unfazed by most things that life throws at him. While there are undeniable benefits to being a planner, there are also drawbacks. It’s possible to think and plan too much and live too much in the future and hardly at all in the present.

I speculate (I'm not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt) that those who score higher in the neuroticism personality trait are more likely to worry about the future. We (I bucket myself into this category) certainly don't live a carefree existence -- we worry about what would happen if we don't have enough savings or if this happens or that happens. We're good at delaying gratification.

Like many things in life, if you gain in one thing, you lose in something else. People who are great at maths are typically terrible at art and vice versa. It's the same with the sensible cohort who are good at delaying gratification. We save money and worry about the future but possibly at the cost of living life today.

Somewhere in the middle gratification

Going too far with anything can be physically or psychologically unhealthy. The same can be said about politics, as an apolitical bystander, the far right and left appear equally as insane. The middle ground is often where the truth can be found.

I'm prepared to bet that anyone who obsesses about exercise and healthy eating probably isn't as happy as they could be. It's almost cult-like what many health influencers are peddling. It's taking things too far.

A happy balance is probably somewhere between indulgence and abstinence. For example: unless you don't like the taste, or have religious/medical reasons for not consuming alcohol -- I don't know why you would abstain -- it's a wonderful social lubricant (especially for us reserved Brits) and is the core ingredient for many enjoyable evenings.

The same goes for saving money. I believe there's a risk of saving too much which becomes a habit that's hard to break -- it's possible to become too frugal and lose sight of what life/money is about -- which ultimately is enjoyment.

Recently I found myself falling into this trap when weighing up whether to go away for a weekend or not, my "delayed gratification-self" was saying: don't do it and you'll save a few hundred quid. This "self" only thinks about keeping a healthy balance sheet and delaying gratification instead of living life. I can imagine how this "self" could become too dominant and how living life could be put on hold by creating a permanent delay in gratification.

It's not often that we reflect on our own mortality but it's worth doing as dropping dead isn't out of the realm of possibility.

The end

Rarely a month goes by without me hearing about someone's health that's deteriorating. I was thinking recently about the number of people I know who have died prematurely, I counted five (I probably know an average number of people). One from suicide, one murdered, two from accidents, and one health-related. The morbid point is: we're not immune to having our health or life suddenly cut short. So while planning for the future is important so is living life for today as we don't know how many tomorrows there will be. And even if we live a long healthy life, that life is surely better with some indulgence thrown in along the way.

I don't know about you but sometimes I like it when decisions are made for me, or when there's only one choice: a Hobson's choice. It prevents over-analysis and regret. It means change versus never-ending pondering.

I've worked in an office for longer than I can remember, with the last six years spent working for a large multinational company in a Marketing department. In my current (and soon-to-be previous) role I've mostly done (very close) to nothing. I've argued in previous posts that anyone with an office job is most likely producing nothing of value and while that's certainly been true for me, in parallel, I have been doing nothing. My only weekly tasks have been a 121 with my boss and a group team call where I (and everyone else) pretend we're "swamped" with work.

I've been planning my escape from office life drudgery (in spreadsheets) for a while now. Pre-pandemic I'd regularly have discussions with equally disgruntled work colleagues about the unbearable nature of our pointless existence -- I was on the cusp of quitting. Then Covid struck and ever since then, I (and many others) have never properly gone back to the office which has meant working (I use the term loosely) even less than before.

Over that period I've learnt it's hard to quit when you're being paid to do very little. Don't get me wrong it's boring and ultimately you're not free, however, with no office commute, no stress and no more sitting in meeting rooms or having to pretend you're busy while sitting at a desk -- it's tolerable.

Though tolerable, there's a side effect which is getting stuck in a trap of thinking; I'll just work x more months, or I'll wait until I get that bonus payment and then I'll quit (yes, for some peculiar reason I was still being paid a bonus despite my lack of effort).

"The hardest but most important financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving"

The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel

Stopping your financial goalposts from moving is the most important skill according to Morgan Housel in his book The Psychology of Money. Although I've had firsthand experience of my goalposts moving, it's useful to receive confirmation that it's a common problem. I know two people who are older and (significantly) wealthier than me -- they frequently talk about retiring but never seem to do so. One retired for about 3 months, and then started work again to "earn just a bit more", the other is just about to start another consultancy gig "for a few months". Needless to say, like many other people -- they are saving up to become the richest person in the cemetery.

In part, this is because there's never enough money one can have. But as importantly (and maybe more so) it's easy to become bored without work -- even if you don't like the work you're doing. This reminds me of that well-known psychological experiment that demonstrated people would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts. Just swap out "be electrically shocked" with "work a job they hate".

Quiet Quitting

The phrase quiet quitting emerged as a trend on social media in 2022 which means working the bare minimum; so no extra hours, no enthusiasm, and doing just enough to keep the lights on while collecting a salary. Needless to say, it's probably not a new phenomenon -- my hunch is that it was office work that created "quiet quitters". I don't see how you could have done it before the Industrial Revolution. Maybe some farm workers tried to "quiet quit" but I doubt their ruse would have lasted long.

My ruse on the other hand has been going on for several years and in that time I've somehow been receiving a full bonus with my boss commenting on my last appraisal form: "Keep up the hard work". This is more anecdotal evidence supporting the absurdity of the work I and millions of other office workers do. It got to the point where I was starting to think my slacking was putting me at risk of a promotion. That is until recently.

My promotion concerns were put to bed when "working" remotely from the Caribbean, or what I call Holidaying From Work (HFW). It was announced to me on a Zoom call that my employment was coming to an end. It wasn't a shock, in fact, more of a relief. Finally, it happened. It's a Hobson's choice: the only choice is to leave the job I hate and start living differently. It means living with less and being more resourceful. Something I look forward to as I believe that abundance is the enemy of appreciation. It means putting an end to endlessly saving to try and gain more and more security, and giving priority to living life more.

Based on many measures this is the best time in human history to be alive. We have better healthcare, increased life expectancy, and significantly less famine and violence compared to prior generations. Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and Hans Rosling (Factfulness) both wrote books packed with statistics to illustrate this point. The author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari summarised how fortunate we are when he said: “For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.”

It's not just the reduction in starvation, disease, and violence we should be grateful for, it's also the technology that makes our life absurdly easy.

Do you remember driving without satnav? Or spending half of your Saturday queuing in the bank or post office to pay your bills? And how about travel? In the last 50 years, getting on a plane has become as common as getting on a train (in the US it's more so). I can leave my UK home in the morning where it's often cold and cloudy, and before lunchtime arrive in sunny Portugal for less than a train fare.

Arguably one of the greatest inventions of all time is anaesthetic. Imagine for a moment how unbearable it was to have surgery while fully conscious. According to The Lancet: before anaesthesia, patients experienced surgery in full consciousness, often as active participants in the operation. They had to hold their body in certain positions or perform particular movements.

When we reflect it's hard not to feel fortunate for what we have compared to prior generations. We know we should be grateful so why don't we feel that way? It's quite simple. In parallel with improved standards of living, healthcare, and longevity, there has been an explosion in media consumption.

I've previously used the chart below to represent how differently we live our lives compared to the previous generations. While I can't attest to the accuracy or how it was calculated, it's safe to say the trend is to be believed. We have become media-obsessed junkies.

The massive amount of media we consume isn't the cause of ungratefulness -- it's the type of media. Unfortunately, much of what we consume makes us feel unfortunate, angry, and fearful -- the polar opposite of gratitude.

The benefits of being grateful

There are plenty of ingredients that make up happiness: having good friends and family, enjoying good food, having good health, and enjoying experiences, however, if you're not grateful for what you've got then you're not happy. Let's say I have twice the money, twice the friends, and better health than you, but you're twice as grateful -- clearly, you're the winner.

"Because gratitude is the key to happiness, anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. There is an inverse relationship between expectations and gratitude: The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have."

Dennis Prager

Media that makes you ungrateful

Just as there's good and bad food you can put in your stomach, there's good and bad information you can put in your mind. Bad information affects your personality in a few ways:

1. It makes you ungrateful: imagery of people (whether you know them or not) living a better life than you makes you feel inferior and discontent with what you have.

2. It makes you fearful: war, terrorism, murder, rape, and child abductions; are examples of information that make you fearful.

3. It makes you angry: the media does an incredible job at making you annoyed; culture wars, politicians, immigration. How would you know what to be angry about if it wasn't for our media overlords?

The problem with consuming bad information is that it severely warps your sense of reality, and while your conscious self may disagree and think it doesn't -- you have no control over your subconscious (which ultimately controls "you"). When you bombard yourself with hours of imagery of overachievers, perfect bodies, smiley happy friends and family, it makes you feel like you're missing out. Now pile on top of that, the news media with its doom and gloom, and you're left believing the world is significantly worse and more dangerous than it actually is where everyone is doing better than you. You certainly don't feel grateful.

I appreciate there are some useful aspects to social media -- I've recently created a Facebook account (using a pseudo name and email) so I can use the marketplace and join interest groups without the negative side effects of social media. However, on the whole, I see social media as being the equivalent of highly processed food. If you wouldn't eat at Mcdonald's for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then consuming garbage information on a daily basis should be frowned upon too.

To become more grateful -- cutting down or eliminating poor information is the obvious improvement to be made. Outside of removing Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, there are other less obvious changes too. YouTube is my media of choice because of its informative content, however, some of this material can subtly have an impact on gratefulness levels. I watch a lot of interviews, and where I used to go along with the belief that listening to super-achievers was inspirational and motivational. I now don't. We're made to believe that their success is achievable if we just work harder. But it's not. Quite often these people are a one in a million or a one in a hundred million outlier. And most of it comes down to luck -- no different to winning the lottery. And these are the people we make unhealthy subconscious comparisons to. It's a surefire way to feel ungrateful.

How to feel small

If you ever want to feel short then visit the Netherlands where the average height for a man is 183 cm and for a woman 167 cm. Imagine for a moment what it's like being the shortest person most of the time. It doesn't matter if you're the average (or above average) height of your home country -- you're going to feel short. And it's not just height; surround yourself with people much younger than you if you want to feel older, or imagine visiting a country where everyone is a cover-magazine-beautiful if you want to feel less attractive.

If we think about living in these imaginary environments of taller, younger and more beautiful people -- it's easy to grasp why this wouldn't be good for our ego. Yet for some reason, we think the digital content we consume doesn't have this same effect -- and we're wrong.

Status

An evolutionary explanation for why we feel worse for consuming media of people doing better than us is status. The author Will Storr in his book The Status Game argues that it's our craving for status that ultimately defines who we are. "From the era of the hunter-gatherer to today, when we exist as workers in the globalised economy and citizens of online worlds, the need for status has always been wired into us. A wealth of research shows that how much of it we possess dramatically affects not only our happiness and wellbeing but also our physical health". Having lower status would have meant fewer resources, less food and less sex. With so much media imagery being that of people doing better than us -- it's going to negatively impact where we sit in our imaginary social pecking order.

It's why we loathe hearing someone bragging about their wealth or how "amazing" their life is (our status is being lowered). And conversely, it's why we love self-deprecating characters (our status being increased).

Social and advertising media make us compare ourselves to those enjoying life more, those who are more attractive, those achieving more, and those with more money than us. So while abstinence from poor information choices will undoubtedly help, in parallel, consuming healthy information can turbocharge our levels of gratefulness. What I recommend is an about-turn on the information we feed ourselves.

It's as simple as consuming information that makes us feel fortunate instead of unfortunate. Or put another way (according to Will Storr's book), we consume information that increases our status vs decreasing it.

Healthy media

The Stoics teach voluntary discomfort to give you an appreciation of what you have and to quieten the mind for desiring more. An example would be living as if you were homeless for a day, sleeping on the floor or going a day without food. What I'm advocating has the same aim while being more accessible. Instead of brainwashing yourself with media that makes you feel unfortunate. Brainwash yourself with media that makes you realise how fortunate you are.

Here are some examples of things I've watched recently that aren't considered "feel-good" but give you a deep sense of gratitude and are therefore healthy for your mind and mood. I have an unproven theory that much of the content that's classified as "feel good" has the opposite effect as it often involves people that are living a better existence than us. My view is that we should consume more media that's reality-based (not the news media) that makes us appreciate how fortunate we really are.

Greatest Events of WW2 in Colour
Watching the footage, listening to firsthand accounts, and imagining the bravery is incredibly grounding. How can you not feel grateful for what you have when you think about what so many people went through; the fighter pilots caught in dogfights, the persecution of the Jews, and civilians being bombed in their homes.

Edge of Life - Louis Theroux
Louis Theroux meets young patients battling for their lives against serious illnesses. Listening to terminally ill patients although saddening can't help but make you feel fortunate -- in one example one of the patients still manages to make light-hearted jokes about his situation -- it puts anything you might be worrying about into perspective.

WWII in Colour: Road to Victory
A fantastic series about World War Two that can't help but make you feel grateful for those that fought, and how lucky we are today in comparison. Listening to survivors of the Dunkirk evacuations, and watching footage from the Battle of the Atlantic is incredible.

The Life-Changing Journey Of Being Selected As A Gurkha
After watching the documentary 14 Peaks, and the incredible story of former Gurkha Nimsdai Purja, I was intrigued to learn more about this branch of the UK military and I came across a 20-minute video on Youtube. It's fascinating how young Nepalese men dream of joining the Gurkhas, whereas here in the UK the overwhelming majority of the population would see it as a punishment to join the armed forces. Your life is put into perspective when you see how ecstatic the successfully selected candidates are -- for them, it's like winning the lottery.

The Victorian Slum
This series recreates how the poor lived in the Victorian era which in relative terms wasn't that long ago. It's shocking to see the conditions so many people lived in and how fortunate we are today. Trying to stay alive was a daily challenge back then. It's evident from the contestants in the show that they are putting themselves through the challenge of living as the poor Victorians did to become more grateful for what they have today. Several of the show's contestants become tearful at the conditions that so many Victorians lived through from experiencing it firsthand themselves.

Regularly consuming media that makes you reflect on how fortunate you are, it will undoubtedly improve your well-being. An alternative is to eliminate all media from your life -- something only the extreme minority can do. It's a thought experiment worth pondering though: what would the world be like if everything was identical as it is today other than there being no media? So no internet, no TV, no radio, and certainly no newspapers. I struggle to believe that the world's population wouldn't be happier. We'd certainly all get on a lot better.

Having too much money

One easy way to be ungrateful is by having too much money. And by "too much" I don't mean mega wealth, I just mean more money than you reasonably need. I'm finally leaving my job after many years of being paid an above-average salary -- as soon as I realised that my employment was coming to an end, my consumption habits changed immediately. Whereas before I would mindlessly shop in Waitrose and not think about cost, now I appreciate shopping frugally, finding bargains, consuming fewer "luxuries" and appreciating them more when I do.

Fightclub

Annoyed by his whining, the Narrator's doctor in the film Fight Club tells him to gain a greater perspective on life by going to a testicular cancer therapy group to see real problems worth stressing about. After attending, the Narrator becomes hooked and starts attending more therapy groups including those for sickle cell and brain parasites.

Before meeting his doctor, the audience gets to experience the Narrator's dull office life and consumer-obsessed existence. In one scene the Narrator is browsing a shopping catalogue and asks himself "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?".

This is a great representation of where many of us are today: stressing about nothing-problems, and ungrateful for what we have until we see what real problems are. We're cocooned in a media and consumption-obsessed bubble which causes misery and misplaced values.

We continue to consume more media which makes us worry more and want more. We feel like there's something missing, there's always "more" of something to be had; more security, more friends, more money, more house ..more everything. It's the key to being ungrateful and unhappy.

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."

Socrates

Donald Winnicott is considered to be one of the greatest thinkers from the 19th century in the field of psychoanalysis. Winnicott came up with the concept of the true self and the false self. I'm sure without it being explained, you know who the true and false self are: you have a real you and a fake version, we all do.

Winnicott's work of true self vs false self was expanded upon by many psychologists and was particularly useful when studying narcissism. That isn't to say that only narcissists have a false self, everyone does, however, some of us "live" in our false version longer than others. And some of us have worse, more ridiculous false selves than others do. While definitions vary amongst psychologists, it's agreed that the false self is a facade, and therefore a deceptive outward appearance. While the true self, is well, self-explanatory. It's the real you.

The fact is, you know when you are being true and when you are not. Being false takes effort while being true doesn't. The real you, just flows.

I don't think it's useful trying to analyse the semantics of how various psychologists and philosophers defined the true self vs false self. However, what is useful to think about is: why do you have a false self, when are you your false self, and do you want to be your false self.

Who is your false self?

Think for a minute and ask yourself when did your false self last appear? Maybe when recording a video for social media in an effort to gain attention. Or perhaps you work in the service sector which means 5 days a week pretending to be cheery, when in fact you're not and hate your job.

For me, it was a few days ago when attending my weekly one-to-one meeting with my boss. My false self appeared for 30 minutes (the duration of our meeting), and in that time I pretended to be enthusiastic about my work, and the amount I'd accomplished. If my true self had shown up by mistake, it would have been a disaster. Our chat would have been me telling my boss that I can't stand my job, that I've been doing the bare minimum, and that my main accomplishment was installing a piece of freeware Windows software that moves my mouse every 5 minutes.

Watching a bad film

Everyone has watched a bad film where the acting is terrible. You can't get into the plot because it's hard to take the characters seriously. Here's the thing, when you are your false self, everyone knows it. It's like watching a bad film. With you playing the lead role with abominable acting skills.

What's strange is that we're so used to seeing people as their false self we don't find it unusual. Think back to the last time someone gave you a false smile, maybe on an aeroplane, or a fake laugh in the workplace. You know it's fake -- they are not happy to see you and they certainly didn't find your joke funny.

We're genetically programmed to be able to read body language. We look for facial and behavioural cues and quickly evaluate their meaning. We know instantly when something is off -- how you speak, the tone of your voice and facial expressions are different. How we act when we're genuinely happy comes subconsciously, and when we try to fake it, it's like watching a bad film. Just like the example below taken from the Instagram Reality subreddit of someone filming themselves for social media.

It's comical when we see the "fake happy" content creator being filmed but her video becomes less ridiculous when she hits upload and it appears on social media timelines. Her fake acting blends in with all the other fake content being published on social media. Just as we've become desensitised to ludicrous politics and politicians, the same can be said about fake personas, we've become so overexposed to people being fake -- it's become normalised.

Watching a good film

Whenever I watch someone on TV or Youtube, I take an instant dislike (despite not knowing them), when they are not being themselves (their fake version). Many celebrities have created a fake persona that comes to life whenever a camera is pointed at them -- they are trying to convince an audience that this is their true self, however, that true person lives hidden behind the scenes.

Some celebrities flip-flop between their true and false self. The world heavyweight boxing champion, Tyson Fury springs to my mind. In some interviews, he comes across as incredibly likeable when he's being true and on other occasions, he comes across as idiotic and dislikable. The latter often occurs when a fight is being sold, so his deceptive outward appearance is called upon. The truth is, we often see someone's false self when we are being sold something.

Conversely, and I don't think I'm unique here, I take an instant liking to those that are being true. Just as it's easy to spot when someone is being their false version, the same applies when someone is being true. You instinctively know the person is being honest, which makes them engaging -- it's like watching a good film.

I've always thought that if politicians broke the mould of being fake all the time, and were radically honest, owned up when they were wrong, didn't avoid questions and apologised when they messed up that they would be significantly more popular and electable. People see you as human when you are being honest, and alien when you are not.

False self platforms

The fact that we have two personas is nothing new; our grandparents and their parents had false selves too. What is new, however, is that we live in a time where our false self gets to exist as long, if not longer than our true version. Facebook, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok ..you name it, even WhatsApp 😂 -- all encourage fakeness. It's a place for our false selves to hang out.

Being your fake self at work is understandable, especially if you are customer-facing. The office is one big charade where everyone is expected to be fake too. So putting on a fake face 9-5 is to be expected. We all know that's not the real you. Being fake in your spare time is a different kettle of fish though.

"The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels"

David Brooks, The Road to Character

In The Road to Character, the author David Brooks documents how our culture has lost the value of humility and has moved to one of self-promotion and self-preoccupation. I'm sure deep down most people when given a choice would rather live an authentic life, however, we live in a time where inauthenticity is encouraged and authenticity is in scarce supply.

Hierarchies

Why do we have false selves? The best answer I can come up with is because of hierarchies. Many anthropologists believe that we spent most of human existence as part of egalitarian hunter-gather societies. Therefore, there wasn't a single leader or alpha male that ran the tribe.

In an equal environment there are far fewer people to impress so there's less of a reason for a false self to appear. However, following the Agricultural Revolution, this all changed. In a world with land owners, employers, and wheat fields, it meant hierarchies naturally evolved.

Fast-forward in time and we're now in the third (going on the fourth) phase of the Industrial Revolution. Hierarchies are omnipresent and everyone is trying to "get ahead".

In its most obvious form, people are their false selves in careers in an effort to impress the hierarchy and get paid more. On social media, people are false in an effort to accrue more social currency (likes, views, and followers) which puts them further up the social ladder.

Being false is an attempt to accumulate more resources, appear more attractive, or increase social status. At its root, all human behaviour can be explained by two things: sex and survival. It's these two genetic "needs" that manifest themselves into all kinds of peculiar activities and behaviours. Nothing else explains our hunger for attention that only social media can satisfy.

It's not clear who first said "Do one thing every day that scares you". The Internet would have you believe it was Eleanor Roosevelt, however, there's no supporting evidence. As with "an apple a day keeps the doctor away", the general sentiment of doing one thing every day that scares you is a good one. But it's worth defining what "scares" means. The thought of jumping off a ten-storey building is scary but isn't an advisable thing to do. There's clearly good and bad fear. There's good fear that keeps you alive and there's bad fear that stops you from living your life.

Emotions

There are between 9 and 12 core emotions according to discrete emotion theory. One of those emotions being fear. Within this core emotion, there are eight types with varying degrees of intensity according to an article published on Simply Psychology. The eight types of fear (starting from least to most intense) are trepidation, nervousness, anxiety, dread, desperation, panic, horror, & terror.

Clearly, we don't want to fill our lives with terror, panic, and anxiety, however, a certain amount of trepidation and nervousness can be good as it normally precedes something we're not used to doing. It means we're changing our routine and leaving our comfort zone.

The good thing about this type of fear is it vanishes after we've done the thing we were nervous about and it's replaced with a positive sense of achievement. This is very different from how lingering anxiety behaves caused by a stressful job, depression, social/news media, or an unhappy relationship. This is arguably the worst type of fear to have in our life.

Living in fear

I work with someone who hasn't left her home since the covid pandemic began. She's always been risk averse and somewhat of a germaphobe, and the pandemic (but more aptly, the news media) sent her into panic-overdrive. She's now suffering from various ailments that are preventing her from going outside, how many of these are psychological or not, I couldn't say.

Doing one thing every day that scares you and living in fear are two very different things. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling both wrote books about how we are living in the safest time in human history. The likelihood of dying at birth, in an accident, of disease, or from war has plummeted. This means we live nearly twice as long compared to only 100 years ago.

There was reason to be worried about dying from tuberculosis or many other incurable diseases if you were born just a few generations ago. In comparison, today, the current global panic is around energy prices and not being able to switch the heating on. For those with more money, the biggest worry is their stock portfolio, interest rates, or home going down in value.

In comparative terms, it's absurd how much easier life has become. People of the past aren't the only ones we should make comparisons with -- the chances are you don't live in one of the most dangerous countries in the world many of which are mired in war and terrorism, however, hundreds of millions do.

The Channel 4 documentary series Inside the Real Narcos interviews many characters like "Pepe" (not his real name). Pepe works as a cartel hitman in Columbia. He lives in constant fear and tells the interviewer "I don't sleep well" which is evident from his murky, bloodshot eyes. The last person he was ordered to kill was a woman who was slow in paying money she owed.

It's evident Pepe doesn't want to be killing people for a living, "it makes me cry" he says. But if you want to feed your family there are few opportunities for making money, and changing job isn't an option. If Pepe was to leave the cartel, he'd be a "traitor" and he "would lose" (a euphemism used by Pepe for being murdered).

Pepe's story is that of a man stuck in a living hell. Kill or be killed. It's people like Pepe we should compare ourselves to, and know how lucky we are instead of fictional social media characters that make us feel inferior.

Good fear vs bad fear

I enjoy reading about extreme examples of what we're capable of. It puts fear into perspective. If there's anything I'm nervous about, it seems stupid after reading about a soldier caught in a firefight, or stories from combat engineers whose job it is to find unexploded IEDs.

If you're fighting on a battlefield then there's good reason to be fearful -- a certain amount of (good) fear can make you cautious which keeps you alive. Most of us have never, and will never experience such life-threatening situations. Instead, most of us have abstract fears, like climate change, crime, or the economy. It's the worst type of fear to have because you can't do anything about it, and worse still, it doesn't go away. It's what I would classify as bad fear.

The media fill our lives with bad fear. It degrades our mood, and negatively alters our behaviour. We should try and eliminate this type of fear, and replace it with good fear. The type of fear that comes from personal development.

Near death experience

What's the closest you've come to dying?

Most of us can think about a time when we averted danger in a risky situation. Maybe it was crossing the road and you weren't looking, or when you were driving and had a near miss. For a split second or two, there was a rush of fear. Here's the thing though, almost as quickly as that injection of terror came into your system it disappeared. There's no remanence of lingering stress for the rest of the day, you quickly went back to normal. This is good fear and we've experienced fear for most of human existence.

We're hardwired to be afraid of situations that are happening here and now. Our bodies pump us with adrenaline and cortisol to make us alert and energetic to escape that sabre-toothed tiger. For most of human existence, fear has been a useful emotion to help with actual situations. A lot changed in the 15th century thanks to Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press.

Word of mouth was the primary news source before print. I sometimes wonder, what a great experience that must have been. Needless to say, there would have been a lot of nonsense and gossip being spread verbally, but we would have been significantly less brainwashed compared to the media-addicted junkies we are today.

It didn't take long for the print media to realise that fear increased profit and it has perpetuated ever since. From Gutenberg to Zukerberg, the media in all its shapes and forms fill our minds with abstract fearful information. We're not wired to handle this and we're left with low-level anxiety from thinking there's terror hiding behind every corner.

Generation fear

In the book The Fear Bubble, Ant Middleton writes how overprotective parenting and the media is creating a fearful generation. For those of us that escaped an overprotective childhood, we still have a panic-mongering society to contend with. Mollycoddling has become part of our culture, even my iPhone weather app is frequently warning me of "severe" weather conditions, but when I look out the window, I think really?

We live in a world where we're being convinced that everything is extreme. Every situation at work is "urgent". Every breaking news alert is about another "crisis". The English dictionary needs new words to describe situations that are literally urgent and severe as we've become accustomed to everything and everyone being in a state of constant emergency.

The best way the English language can accommodate this is by prepending "really". But even that doesn't work as now everyone has "really urgent" requests and the media talks about "really explosive" events. In a digital world where it's easy to test content, media outlets know through experimentation that more extreme content equals more ad revenue.

In all of human history, we have never consumed the amount of media that we do today. In the beginning, we only consumed media, now we consume it, and create it. The next phase (if Zuckerberg has his way) is for us to consume it, create it, and become part of it in the Metaverse.

It's fair to say that most of us realise that we're being duped by the media, we know why they focus on sensationalism. But we're still allured by the clickbait. Considering the number of negative media forces we have to contend with today, I would say that we're better off doing fewer things that scare us, by not clicking on terrifying news headlines, or pressing play on YouTube. Instead, I would advocate for doing things (often) that make us nervous. Being nervous normally precedes an event that will pass, and once it has we feel accomplished. On the flip side, the more media we consume, the less we want to do with our lives -- which is a genuine reason to be terrified.