Some speedy sketched ellies, although he does look a bit like he'’ll eat your soul.

I went for a walk through Karura forest on Sunday. I think Karura is my favourite place in the world. The light is almost ridiculous. I’ve seen the banded sorts of light that you only ever see underwater, literal chopped strands coming through the trees. Trees that are old, and towering, and there’s patches of straight leg pines, eagles up overhead, monkeys. Other places are open and low, and as you walk you come across lakes and marshes.

The rains have been heavy here, near flooding, and some of the pathways were almost impassable, requiring balancing on logs, or wending your way over patches of sod. And on Sunday, it seemed like everything - everything - was in pairs. Every butterfly I saw came in a two, electric blue, spotted yellow, small and white. Dragonflies - twos too. I even saw a dikdik, hurtling through, quacking. Dikdik mate for life. When one of them dies, the other pines to death. Dikdik are very romantic, despite the phallic name.

And - lame - but I kept thinking that I do really want someone to share this with. I want to share Karura with someone! And not a friend! I want to make cringey references to dikdiks with someone, and think we’re being original when we’re really, really not! I want to go to the River Café, and share a boda-boda, and see all these beautiful, wonderful things with someone!

But then when I got out of my tradge-single-wallow, I thought about what I was really asking for. And it’s not just any someone (standards are intact). It’s someone, specifically, that I can go to Karura forest with.

Which means it’s not someone who wouldn’t live in Kenya.

And this made me think of one of my friends in primary school who broke up with her Year 1 boyfriend because he didn’t like fruit.

Breaking up with someone because they don’t like fruit is, ostensibly, a very stupid reason to break up with someone.

“What do you mean, you broke up with the Nobel Peace Prize winning astronaut, who was kind, funny, honest, a fundamentally excellent person, who adopted stray kittens and cooked a phenomenal pasta arrabbiata… because he didn’t like fruit?”

Breaking up with someone should be because of Bigger Things. Can you really justify breaking up with a good, decent person, maybe even someone you’re in love with, because they don’t like fruit?

I increasingly think you can, and you should. Because most people are very good. They are respectful, and funny, and honest, and kind. Lots of people are very good, and lots of people are worth and worthy of being loved. You could easily fall completely in love with someone who doesn’t like fruit. But if fruit is a big part of your life - or less stupidly, you have another strong preference - nights out over nights in, theatre over football, books over plays - then it’s worth holding out onto that preference. Because there are lots of great people out there who do like fruit. Or, in my case, that it’s okay to break up with someone because they wouldn’t want to be in Karura forest. Because there’s someone brilliant out there, who does.

I have been lucky enough to date some truly excellent people in the last year - funny, kind, solid-ray-of-sunshine-type people, who I really, really admire, and yet I’ve broken things off. And sometimes I want to go “Lauren! What are you doing! They’re really, really excellent! And they really like you!” And I really mean genuinely, truly, wholly excellent - people I have refused not to stay friends with after we have stopped dating. It feels stupid to want to shut those things down for a preference - because they wouldn’t want to go to Karura forest, or similar - when they’re really utterly brilliant in all the important ways.

But I want more acknowledgement that it is okay to break up with someone because they don’t like fruit. These people are wonderful. The reason things are being broken off is because I have a - ultimately trivial - preference that they don’t. You are not a bad person if you do not like Karura forest, just as you’re not a bad person if you prefer Adidas to Nike, Ant to Dec or whatever it may be. This preference does not matter. It is trivial, it is not some Big Deep Thing that reflects on them - it is just something I like, and they may like less, and that’s a very trivial, very arbitrary preference - but also a sufficient reason to break up with someone.

Because these preferences do, ultimately, make up your life. I don’t care if my friends prefer nights out or nights in; if they are a sun or snow baby; if they like to walk or would rather take a bus. But I do care for my partner. Because those preferences will, eventually, be whether we can go on holiday together, whether one of us ends up walking when they hate it; what our Saturday evenings looks like. And so I recognise they’re stupid - they’re certainly not something I care about when I think of my friends. But they are things I care about in my partner. And so, despite their triviality, despite the fact that they have absolutely no bearing on anything that matters, really, about that person, I think they’re an okay reason to break things off with someone.

It feels like better language around Trivial Breakups would take so much of the heat out of a break up, out of rejection. If we could say that it is right, and good, to break up with someone because of different preferences, whilst acknowledging that just because I happen to like what I like, it is not important in the grand scheme of things. It is arbitrary, as arbitrary as a preference for wide over skinny jeans. It is not big, or heavy, or deep, and yet it can also be enough of a reason to not want to commit or carry on dating.

The tricky thing about it is when you do have a preference for something, you do say it is better. That is part of having a preference. I do genuinely think the theatre is better than sport; I do think looking at paintings is preferable to listening to music; I do prefer the idea of living in Nairobi to living in London. It’s hard for another person not to interpret that I think people-who-like-theatre are better than people-who-like-sport. To do so requires an appeal to an invisible observer, a level beyond - that my better-to-me is the same as your better-to-you, and that neither of us has any bigger claim than the other - which is quite a hard thing to articulate in the maelstrom of a breakup. (I don’t doubt people have come up with better ways of saying exactly this, and it is not the most original of thoughts - but this is what I’ve been thinking about.)

I’ve (separately) been thinking a lot about love because some of my friends have started getting engaged and it turns out I love it. I love all of it. Maybe it’s because it’s only the first two, but I don’t think I will ever get bored of this feeling. It is just excellent.

I surprised myself a little, for the better. I’d expected to feel at smidge of jealousy, or bit woe-is-me-ey, but I really haven’t (I should have given myself more credit). Maybe the Karura-wallow was stimulated by those engagements, but they certainly didn’t consciously cross my mind. Instead, my feeling about them has been a very pure, very total happiness. Honestly, it is just the coolest, coolest thing - pairs of people you love, who make each other happy, and that being fitted and right and settled. So the biggest of big congrats - you know who you are.

Some of the oddness of love today is that there has never been so many narratives, so many different ways to love. There are no truths universally acknowledged anymore. As we have become more literate, as dialogue has opened and widened, there is a dizzying array of templates for how to experience and expect to love.

So love has been cracked open, and made malleable. I don’t have to be a spinster, maid or mother. We are caught in a middle, in a world of both feminist narratives and the old ways-to-be-a-woman, two utterly contrasting perspectives that remain very, very salient, both contributing to this profusion of stories.

And in some ways the more stories the better, because they allow people to follow their own path, to find the story that fits best. But my goodness me, it can be confusing, hard to find the one that fits - and choosing one now occurs with this new awareness of the volume of stories you leave behind, whichever path you choose. I wonder what will happen, if we end up coalescing and realigning on a few new stories, or if we simply abandon the narratives all together. Who knows.

I have been learning Swahili. New words added to the vernacular: mushikana (busy), malisa malisa (hurry, hurry), babayangu (my dad), shookran (ta), tooliv (calm), kokosamilelieko (I am chaotic), and ninacheka (laughing) (note - these are my phonetic Whatsapp notes, do not use in spelling tests).

My goodness me is this pleasing. Every day I add a few more blocks - a sherre (party) here, a kitoongu (onions) there, and each taxi ride I can get further and further along in the journey before I hit up against the limits of what I am able to say. I feel like I’m building up my knowledge of the language, one brick at a time. One day I’ll have an indestructibly solid castle, Levine’s Eternal Palace of Swahili-Fluency, and will be able to yammer away in Kiswahili forever more.

Except… I’ve also at points in my life been able to speak Spanish. And a little French. I’ve had a rudiment of Italian; a smidge of Swedish; the smallest smattering of Ethiopian. The Spanish is now dusty, the French near-non-existent, and the others have disappeared all together. Which makes my current faith in the Eternal Palace of Swahili Fluency seem a little … optimistic.

Over time, the knowledge of all those other languages eroded. Even as I learn more and more Swahili, those other languages are being forgotten, slipping out unnoticed and unremarked upon (because you don’t notice what you are forgetting). Which makes me think this knowledge is a little more like building a palace on a cliff edge, subject to heavy winds. Even as every block is being put into place, the rest of the edifice erodes, leaks away into the sea. You can spend your day building up one wall, or fixing a patch, and feel you have accomplished something - but the building has remained the same size, simply weathering away elsewhere.

I’ve been reading ‘How to End A Story’ by Helen Garner, and it seems she has swallowed this Eternal Palace hook line and sinker. The book is littered with phrases like: “My intellectual equipment has gone rusty. And has never developed to its full strength in the first place. I get frightened when I think it may be too late.” She’s constantly terrified that she has peaked, that had her shot at brilliance, and - through rest, or frittery - it has left her.

I can see she follows the Eternal Palace line - because for the first part of our life, the rate at which we learn new information exceeds the rate at which we forget it. We do, almost inarguably, know more at 16 than we did at 12, more at 12 than we did at 8. But I also think there’s a point where the rate at which we’re learning new information, and the rate at which we forget it are roughly level. The Eternal Palace model works(ish) for the first part of our life, but the Eroded Palace works for the second.

And I think there’s a lot of benefits to adopting this. One is it’s more egalitarian. I don’t, really, think I know more than a 21 year old, or that a 30 year old knows more than me (having an oddly wise baby sister may have contributed to that…). Stuff falls in and out of our heads, and we both have one full brain.

The second is it’s a lot less frenetic. When I read Garner write of ‘All that knowledge I once had, dissipated for lack of use', I wanted to say ‘But of COURSE! It’s been swapped for other things! That’s just LIFE.’ You get the sense she is terrified she is falling behind, that there is always someone with more knowledge, more books, opinions, skills, facts. That if she’s not building as quickly as her compatriots, she’ll fall away from them. She’s putting so much pressure on herself - that what she chooses to think and focus on now determines what she’ll have access to for ever more.

But if the palace is falling away anyway, it becomes more a matter of choosing what you wish to build. There comes a point where you’re just swapping - some knowledge is falling out of your head, other knowledge is falling into it, and it’s happening about the same rate. You can’t fall behind - you just choose what you want to focus on. And so we’re all on a pretty level playing field. If you wanted to become really, really expert at … military strategy, you’re never at an insurmountable disadvantage for not swallowing ‘The Art of War’ age 3. You’ve just got to spend a decent chunk of time filling your head up with that information.

Right now, I’ve forgotten a lot of things. I can’t read Kant like I did, my Spanish is clunky and slow, my maths is far, far worse than when I was younger, and my knowledge of politics has never been lower. Instead, there’s a bit more Swahili, some basic coding, Garner’s diaries, a ton of Love Island All Stars, a little bit of poetry, and elephants. And that mix is all good with me. If - later on - I want to dust off Spanish or re-alive the Italian instead, I can do that - and I’ll have to swap it in for something else. Something else will fall out instead.

If everything does fall out of our heads, artefacts become much more important. It isn’t just being able to think brilliant ideas, but being able to evidence what you think right at the moment when a lot of what was in their head related to a particular topic. Think of a professor. When that Professor knew absolutely everything there was about the Argentinian economy, or the US expansion into Alaska, they evidence it. They write down those thoughts, and then refer back to them, see the conclusion they drew without having to reacquaint themselves with the premises. In this way, they can build up via their own set or web of different ideas (more in ‘On Ignorance), and construct up from them - trusting in the knowledge of their former self, even if the original information isn’t available to them anymore. So skill is not just thinking, it’s recording, and finding the best way to do this.

I noticed as I read Garner’s writing that I wanted to note down what I thought - my own loose epigrams, phrases, fragments (a credit to the book). I’ve come back and my handwriting is UTTERLY illegible. I have genuinely no idea what I’ve written. And it seems odd that this inability to write will have a bigger impact, long term, than how much I focused as I read the book, or even how many thoughts I had - because it’ll be impossible to come back to them. I wonder how the Eroded Model shifts the emphasis - suggesting we need more of a focus on coursework, systems of record, notetaking and so on - how to build artefacts, not just being able to conjure up thoughts on demand.

Any ideas?

There were a lot of gems in How to End A Story (and a good thing to, given it was EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES and not in Big Fonts). Garner is brilliant at using italics and punctuation to give her writing a real sense of voice - describing how her daughter ‘actually sat on my knee and leaned against me for at least ten minutes’ You can hear her! It makes for a slight artifice at points - for instance, she occasionally writes as if she is thinking (‘Ayers Rock? It could be a novel. Oh, calm down.) - which isn’t possible, because no one writes as fast as they think - and I found this bothersome - it undermined the authenticity of the diaries.

Regardless, there’s some fabulous terms of phrases - describing a book as ‘full of depths if not widths', ‘a voice almost oily with the desire to appear cooperative’, of how ‘ideas come to you. Connections strike off each other with rinign blows or slot together like carpenters joints’, of an ocean that was ‘chirping with light’, a sky ‘stained, tipped, scaled, looped, and daubed’, a sunset ‘a long pink cloud, ridged as neat and fine as salmon flesh.’

It struck me how curated writing in general is. At one point she quotes Handke’s diary ‘The Weight of the World’, saying ‘It was a bright, pure, friendly night, reasonable through and through’. Now the feeling of this night got picked out by Handke from his day to write down in his diary. When the diary got edited, it survived again. It then got picked out from his diary Garner to quote in her diary. It survived another edit. And then the exact same thing has happened here. So Ivhope you enjoyed the description of that ‘reasonable through and through’ night! Because it’s gone through an awful lot of triaging to get here. I realised she had picked out things, and out of her picking-out-of-things, I was picking out more things, and of those I’d picked out, you may pick out another again.

It’s interesting too, how I look through my copy and there are bursts where tons of things are underlined - when she is at her best - and pages when there’s nothing of note. She has whole years where I felt like everything was dross, only to come up to a few months where entry after entry makes me feel something. And it shows something that everyone knows - people have periods of the best and lesser work - but it seems fine observing that in someone else, utterly intolerable to think of yourself as having a whole year, writing every day, where nothing was any good. Something not to think about too much.

I am going to write more about this - about if this model is really egalitarian and if not how, and how to square this with the fact we clearly do value expertise - so, under the Eroded Model, what it is it we actually value when we do so. I wonder if the reality is that instead we spin and spin, but build up a layer sediment over time. I want to (basic but true) also think about implications for AI. I also have a ton of things I ought to read (CS Lewis On Criticism; Emerson On Self Reliance; The Shallows). But I have been sat on this for a week, and thought it was worth ripping the plaster off.

Last up - great words I stole: neurasthenic, fossicking, Künstlerroman (bildungsroman but focused on an artists development), gasbagging, splendiferous

Quick Summary: Some 2026 delights, a whistle-stop tour of recent cultural visits and a smidge of creative writing. I have been on a flight booked by a travel company who have managed to transform the 2 hour flight to Sweden into a multi-stage odyssey (getting to Uppsala via: Brussels, Gothenburg and Stockholm), which I’ve actually found quite enjoyable.

Catching a flight when I didn’t deserve to. An old school friend inviting me to a party unexpectedly. Realising hangovers hurt my head more but my heart less than they used to. Seeing Gothenburg sari-spread, orange threads, the moon stretched out and moving across the frozen lake as we come into land. Thinking of fragments of meteorites, and just how much love my mum has. Old friends turning up. A thumb ring from Belize, just the right size, miraculously still unlost. A card from an aunt. Problems getting solved.

Fizz-witty dinners. The words scandalmonger, ruffiany, chiffrephile (a number lover), whirligig, pharmacopeia. Being drafted in to pour wine at a kiddush, being thanked. A morning after a really good sleep, veins golden-yellow, the world suffused with whoknowsness and adventure. Tiny silver backgammon pieces, the size of a fingernail. Shots of green parakeets. A much loved friend pulling off an event spectacularly, and the vicarious, reflected joy of her joy. West Ham scoring, twice (?!?), in front of a gloriously cynical 4 year old spectator.

A couple hand in hand just making it through the Tube doors. A book literally hitting me over the head (a microwaveable metaphor). The six chump-chumpfz of a loyalty card quickly stamped. Lying flat to unhook an Irish woman’s trousers from her Lime bike. Stretches of pink cloud cutting into St Pauls.

Getting fit again, a thrash-crawl, confidence. Thinking of landing a plane on the Hudson river, and of birds flying underwater. A photo of Morpurgo and the single bed he writes in, imagining the writer curled up and cosy, not quite believing his luck. Finding out Queen Elizabeth I had whales, and seals, and seahorses embroidered all over her gowns. Some glorious, glorious, glorious news received literally 2 minutes ago, that has made me sparklingly happy - good things happening to good people.

Biscoff eggs. Freshly shaved legs. That Dr Seuss rhyme, dadahda dadahda dadah.

Lots of exhibitions recently. Standouts that you can still see: National Portrait Gallery main collection. Realised (ridiculously) I’d never seen the main collection - just exhibitions. I only did the contemporary section (there is only so much gallery I can stomach), but I really enjoyed. Standouts included:

• The Final Submission in Fire on Ice - Shaw 1974. Tiny gold acrylic lines made, and then he pours enamel paint - meaning it was one that rewarded getting close and shifting about.

• David - David Beckham, filmed asleep in his Real Madrid era. Interesting given the recent Beckham-gate. First thought is wowza (I’m only human). Second thought is how vulnerable he looked, snuffling and small. Third is remembering this was filmed, this is staged, and if so - how odd to be able to sleep, to do this centimetres away from a camera, to trust you won’t sleep talk or murmur

• Priestley (of Inspector Calls, GCSE fame) - who described himself as a grumbler in the caption - ‘I am designed for the part for I have a sagging face a weighty underlip... money could not buy a better grumbling outfit’. Turning to the sculpture, I saw him proved absolutely right.

Tate Modern Nigerian Modernism. I thought the curation a little flat - a dry run through of Nigeria’s history missed a trick to reflect on the works themselves - but I loved the sheer variety of faces on offer. Highlight was Ben Enwonwu Seven Wooden Sculptures in 1961 - each strange, angel-shaped forms, rapt, afraid, enraged, immersed, and his Agboho Mmuo.

The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey is great for anyone who is a Vinted/ DIY seamstress, who are currently showing Costume Couture - a series of lavishly beautiful outfits from the archive of master costumers Cosprop. I also spent a morning exploring the silver room of the V&A museum. I can find the V&A a bit overwhelming - so much to see, all packed into one space - and actually found limiting time to a single room, but looking and appreciating everything in it was a much more satisfying experience.

Creative writing. Idea here would be to carry on with each plague. Fun and slightly camp to write - I enjoyed!

It was the month of blood. For the whole of January, blood rained down relentlessly. It stuck and clogged up drain pipes, it . There was a photo of Hreek town, in Greece, and the white buildings had been stained the browneyrust of blood in plaster.

A new case was coming through the courts, alleging that the Protilife subscription service had failed in its contractual obligation to deliver promised water to a small village in Kent. No one had died, but a pensioners renal problem had worsened. It was settled out of court for £2.3 million, and those that could afford it began to take out additional subscriptions. The companies themselves bought insurance to cover themselves from Acts of God, whilst failing to notice the irony.

The stickiness stuck at feet, and in Marylebone a new approach was trialled, huge retractable ceilings that folded out at the first increase of iron in the atmosphere. Residents could maximise vitamin D. The rest bought supplements, and the cost of plasticy shelters that sprung up over the month. In the Turbine Hall, a Finnish artist introduced a new installation, where 64 dancers in white stood eight by eight for three days and allowed the blood fall on them. It was given four stars, and the consensus was that it was very moving.

She was stuck in a conversation of the ‘oooh do you like weather? I like oxygen too’ variety, and her nails seemed to be wilting in the tedium.

Quick Summary: In this Substack, I ask: what role should empathy play when we make moral decisions? I suggest that when we’re making laws or rules, empathy shouldn’t play a significant role. In our day to day, it should. Extra miscellany at the end. Thanks to many uncredited - but much appreciated - contributors.

A rough satire of a conversation I watched last week, which ran something like this:

“I don’t think social media should be banned.”

“I think social media should be banned.”

“WELL. You just can’t think of the poor isolated teenager, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, tears in eyes,*, favourite jumper shrunk in the wash, 7/10 toes-stubbed, and [insert life’s many and varied indignities here]. I can picture this person whose greatest joy in their otherwise dejected life is their Instagram friends. You can’t. I have more empathy than you. So I know more than you. So I’m right. Social media should not be banned”

I found the interesting bit was what I took to be the last piece of the argument:

“I have more empathy than you. So I know more than you. So I’m right. Social media should not be banned.”

Does this work? And if not, why?

I’m going to think of empathy as the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. More empathy = more shoes (and also better-putting-self-in-shoes - tying up the laces etc. etc.) Let’s be as charitable as possible to the Empath and allow the first part of this argument. They really do have more empathy than the other person.

Now each pair of shoes offers - all else equal - more knowledge. If you only know what it feels like to wear Dr Martens, and I know what it is like to wear Dr Martens AND these purple fluffy clogs (still obsessed) - I know more than you. I have two experiences of shoes in my locker, and you only have one.** So it seems that the second part - I know more than you - we can grant.

Next - final part - we use our first two building blocks to make a general claim - in this case about social media. The Empath has access to more possible lives than their interlocutor, so they are better placed to come to a verdict about what the right or wrong thing to do is. And this is where things get a bit squiffy.

Because when we make a general claim, we talk about loads of lives. In this instance it’s a social media ban. This would impact lots of people - including our sackcloth-and-ashes figure above, but also another sackcloth-and-ashes who is (conversely) tormented by Instagram, and also you, and me, and Sandi Toskvig, and Cat Burns, and Julian Barnes.

Let’s imagine we try and use empathy to figure out if we should ban social media. I sit for an hour, and put myself in lots of peoples shoes, and get through a midsize closet in the end. My loadsaempathy friend does the same, and gets through a Selling-Sunset style walk-in wardrobe. She has a lot more shoes than me. But it remains the case that - big picture - neither of us really have a clue. Because the number of shoes we’re considering is 50 to 60 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth. And neither me nor even my most empathetic friends will get anywhere close to that number. We don’t get a decent sample size from empathy.

So (controversial) but to me it seems like for any prescriptive moral decision - laws, general rules or norms of conduct - for a lot of these cases, empathy is much of a muchness. We don’t have the capacity to go through and empath our way into anywhere near the number of shoes we need to make an informed judgement. Our sample is - even if we are dazzlingly adept at empathy - going to be way too small. And I think all of the shoes on offer are so different (shoes being a wickedly subtle and non-obvious METAPHOR for lives here) that we can’t assume the shoes we have tried are really representative.

What is needed is maths. With millions of people, there’s always loads of narratives that support one side or the other. But when we’re figuring out the rules to live by, we need at least a rough way of figuring out the net goodness or badness - which requires an abstraction across multiple lives, rather than the zeroing-in on particular ones in the way that empathy does.

I don’t think empathy has no role to play. It may play second fiddle to maths - because empathy can make us aware of the possibility of a set of narratives or stories that we might otherwise miss - that should figure in our calculation. I went to a party with some animal rights activists - and I think they’re able to get the maths right (trillions of animals are suffering) because they have the capacity to empathise with creatures and animals in a way most of us fail to.

But the empathy required for rule-making is quite small. You need enough empathy to be aware of lives and beings, and aware of the rough contours of their experience (like animals suffering grievously) - to make the decision they do. But beyond that, you don’t need the nooks and crevices of exactly what it feels like to be a battery chicken. Instead you need the mathematical ability to grasp the magnitude of that suffering, and figure out what’s the most effective rules to tackle this. The empathy required is just enough to raise the salience of certain stories so they at least figure on the scales.

So I’m pro a tiny bit of empathy for lawmaking. But it’s an empathy of types, not tokens, and it’s of a very limited kind.

However, most moral claims we make aren’t of the ‘should we ban social media variety’. Instead they’re personal. ‘Is it right to stop my teenager being on social media?’ or ‘Is it right to stop social media myself?’

The moral decisions we make here aren’t intended as rules. I can stop my teenager being on social media, whilst keeping online myself, because we’re two different, people, and can recognise a whole host of reasons which may mean the same rule wouldn’t work for the both of us. Moral decisions in our day to day tend to be one person speaking to another in situations that are unique (exactly those two people - with all the history, life, mess, qualms and other considerations - haven’t made this decision before) and not susceptible to general claims. We may talk about rules in the abstract, but in our day to day, we’re not making rules - we’re making decisions.

In this grittier, personal space, empathy is often important. Misunderstandings are cleared up faster if you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes. One friend described empathy’s role in this case as “when it works, it works; like when you pull on a string and a knot just slips away”. Which is lovely.

Empathy also facilitates toleration. I like (although need to think more about) the idea that toleration is the ability to regard people as a collection of causes when required - to forgive people because you are willing to see them as a product of things beyond their control. Empathy helps us do this, to discover and consider those causes.

And empathy avoids a particularly unique pain. Confronting a lack of empathy can be maddeningly frustrating. You feel trapped by the inadequacy of your words to express how something feels, and the inadequacy of others ears to hear it, and you’re left with an inability to make an argument - because there’s a knowledge gap to what-this-was-like-for-me which you don’t have the tools to surfeit. Having empathy has a value, if only to avoid that harm for other people. (It is funny - it is easy to be so aware of the limits of empathy for other people, but so difficult to be aware of your own.)

But even then, there is another risk of empathy. It requires the offering up of a story or of information to allow another to empathise . But the giving of information should not be a prerequisite for kindness or for the right conduct. Ideally we would want the behaviour that would result from empathy, from behaving as if you had an awareness of whatever people have going on, without requiring the awareness itself - whilst maintaining a respect for privacy, without demanding the details or the causes that help us to be tolerant. But maybe that asks too much of us.

Miscellany

There’s an arbitrariness to empathy that scares me. I wrote about an assault years ago, and people were so kind. Other girls did not have the same kindness. I wonder how much of this was because I was able to elicit empathy in how I wrote. It seems so odd, so obvious, but still so unfair, that the way the world reacted to this depended not only on what had happened but on how and who was saying it.

The over-valuation of empathy in moral decisions makes me so nervy. Because if empathy plays a significant role, the outcome of decisions become contingent on the ability to elicit empathy. And that is product of the capacity to tell a story - independently of the rightness or wrongness of the case. I find something truly, truly grim about the need - particularly in the US - to set up GoFundMe’s for medical treatment. Your ability to get cancer treated depends on “captivating content” and “a relatable, detailed story”.

I used to wonder, when I was little, if - when you died - you watched your life. And then you watch the life of everyone you’ve ever interacted with, the whole way through - exactly what led up to the moment they treated you one way or another, and everything beyond that. Heaven was knowing everything. And it was odd, thinking of that, because I could only imagine their moment of discovery - when they were suddenly able to understand that X or Y or Z had been going on with me that day.

But it was much harder to imagine the shocking clarity that I would feel, when I would suddenly understand the X’s and the Y’s and the Z’s going on for other people. It is not an original thought, but it is still a whelming one, the idea that every action is done to an agent with a life, and a day, or a week behind them, the madness that everyone else has a constant tickertape of life running all the time.

Regardless, I realised this week that this world, this watching would be a heaven of perfect empathy.

A final fun fact: MDMA was originally called Empathy.

*stolen from Amos Wollen, but the best way I can think of describing someone in a wretched situation without actually satirising someone in a wretched situation which i don’t really want to do.

** Really it should also include a measure of not only the number of shoes, but how ‘correctly’ you wear them - if I know what it’s like to wear Dr Martens with the laces done up and undone, I also have more experiences of shoes in my locker.

Some nice trees.

Quick Summary: My annual wrap up. A bit of a challenge this one. I write about losing my grandmother first, and then a few other bits and bobs from the year, before finishing with my resolutions for 2026.

A few caveats. One is that it’s really hard to write about grief in a way that (1) does justice to the person (2) doesn’t speak for other people (3) is true (4) is readable and (5) doesn’t sound trite/ clichéd/ or overly solemn. I’ve certainly failed on multiple counts, and apologise in advance.

I’m also aware that the world is... not in a great way. This column is not about the world. It is very much MY year, all about ME with additional doses of Myself and I. Me-me-me-me-me-me. And added me. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the events of my life don’t track the broader geopolitical or macroeconomic climate. So this definitely isn’t representative of the world in general, nor do I pretend it is. (I’m quite - but not that - narcissistic.)

Annual wrap-up time. Writing this, I realised there’s a bit of a difference to my 2023 and 2024 columns. 2023 and 2024 were very much a celebration of presences - the presence of joy, of awe, of elephants and love.

I’d been very lucky to have two years where nothing big went wrong - and I was super conscious of this. Life is not always structured, ordered, kind or fair - and the good thing that had come out of my first rocky period was that I learnt to be grateful for the structure, order, kindness and fairness in 2023-4 in a way that I simply hadn’t been before.

In 2025, things went wrong. I lost my grandmother at the beginning of the year. This was enormous. She was a uniquely kind, gentle, generous woman and it’s been strange adjusting to the world without her. I miss her a lot, and I think we all do. I miss her, and I also miss her way of loving - a very uncomplicated, very whole way of loving, of someone who took it as beyond question that you are both worthy and deserving of love. So I miss her, and it, a lot.

But she passed away at home, surrounded by family, having lived a life that was so incredibly dense in good, loving, beautiful things. So there are things there to be grateful for - the absence of pain for her, an absence of bitterness for and from the family she left behind, and the absence of any anger or regret about how she lived her life.

For me, this has also been the first grief I’ve had that hasn’t been complicated by my own fear of death and dying - and that absence has meant being able to focus just on her, and on things that remember her better - paintings, silliness, family, light and love. It’s been a less complicated, much more fitting type of grief, and I am grateful for the absences that have allowed that.

So 2025 is a celebration of some absences. This was a year where things went wrong, but went wrong in much better ways than they would have done in the past.

***

And (a tone shift coming up) I can see this hold true even for the much, much littler things that also happened this year. It feels odd even putting these on a page together, but these were all things that formed part of my 2025.

So. I went viral on TikTok, which was weird but didn’t majorly rattle me. I broke a bone, which was annoying, but not excessively so. My phone got snatched - but thrown back on the ground (the perks of a beaten-up Samsung). I probably over-stretched myself (new job, masters, paper, London-ing), but put enough guardrails in place to stop a descent into total frazzledom (drugs, time off when needed, walking, submitting a paper at ‘good-enough’ rather than ‘best-it-could-be’, and letting myself off on this Substack).

Bigger things. I saw the person who assaulted me in a photo in a dating app, and it’s been odd being back in the same city as them. I know this is totally irrational in a city of 9 million, but the world has a strange way of being smaller than you expect, and this does worry me. I also got ill. This was strange - I felt out of control of my body again, and I was surprised at the violence of my reaction to that illness. For both of those things though, I was fortunate enough to have a really good therapist to talk through them with. I know that’s not a given, and I’m really grateful to have her.

Love-life wise, we managed not one but two major romantic disentanglements - both a break-up and (so Gen Z), the ending of a situationship with someone very dear to me.

The first threw me. It left me feeling like an irredeemably-unloveable-gremlin-potato for a big chunk of 2025. What made things even worse was I was meant to have SOLVED this! Despite Nora Ephron, multiple Substacks AND a meditation course - it turned out I still suck at breakups. So lots of crying in the rain, much rumination, and a really-not-insignificant-amount of whining (sorry and thank you friends).

But… good things did come out of it. I did get over it, slower than the average person, but far faster than I would have done a couple of years ago. I felt pretty proud of myself and how I behaved in the relationship, and (almost all) the breakup. I have an even deeper appreciation for a friend who is classier than a… very-classy-thing, and navigated a tricky situation with wisdom and grace.

And the ending of the situationship was oddly lovely. Mature, respectful, grown-up - a simple recognising that, despite an awful lot of affection, we didn’t work relationship-wise. We spotted this early, it all stayed kind, there’s a lot of (platonic) love there still, it was very decent, so all in all - a bit of a win? It was another place where things could have been bad, but they ended up a lot less so than they might have been.

When I think back to 2022, where I found myself experiencing a (weirdly similar) constellation of events, I’m really pleased with how much better I’ve been able to navigate things this time around, and grateful to my friends, family and job who have helped me do so. So that’s a win of 2025.

***

I normally do 25 learnings each year, but most of my learnings this year have been of the ‘basic-professional-competencies’ variety, so I’ll spare you the minutiae of the fastest way to align a Google Slide.

Instead - some resolutions.

Looking back to last year, a mixed bag on the resolutions count. Continuing with a weekly Substack? Not so much. The All Souls Challenge. Also not so much. The triathlon? Sacrificed on the altar of good intentions. The second meditation course? Postponed to 2026. Or 2027. Or after-er. Learning cool stuff? If I’m being charitable, I’d say my paper gobbled up a lot of the spare time and energy for this, and if I’m being honest, I’d admit that Instagram was also a significant contributing factor.

But… I did learn a lot about music (especially jazz). My average steps are 15,000+ a day. I’m getting there with a new job. I finished my masters, and have worked on a paper. I saw a lot of friends, casually, without it needing to be a whirlwind-back-in-the-country-for-20-minutes-can-we-get-a-coffee-and-catch-up. I read an okay amount. I learnt front crawl. I moved into my first Nice Adult Flat (we have flowers! and rugs! and an armchair!). I started going to the synagogue, and began a course of anti-depressants. So lots of hits and misses in 2025.

What are we hoping for in 2026? I have some general, loose-ish, floating about resolutions, and I’m under no illusions that I will probably have a similar 50% hit rate.

But - for accountability - my resolutions are:

1. More Empathy. I’ve spent a lot of time this year with a really empathetic friend, and realised - in contrast - I’m really not good at empathy. I often do the right thing because I’m following a set of rules about what I think right conduct is - not because I spend a lot of time thinking about how other people feel. I’ve noticed this, and it’s something I want to get better at.
   
   My lack of empathy bubbles up in a few behaviours I don’t love - not awful, but things I want to do better. I assume people have a similar background to me; I’m bad at birthdays and I frequently fail to modulate my behaviour when other people have stuff going on. There’ll be more on how I want to achieve this in another column.
   

2. Less Men. One reaction to being dumped unexpectedly was caring way more about romantic male validation (“Please Tell Me I’m Not An Unloveable Gremlin Potato!!”), which is a pretty big self-ick, and something Vogue would almost certainly disapprove of. I’m not going so far as a 2023-complete-year-off dating, but I am going to put way less energy into thinking about men and how/ if men think about me. Ultimately, this is just vanity at one-remove, and there’s way bigger things to think about.
   

3. More Faith. Started going to shul this year and have really enjoyed it. Celebrating Rosh Hashanah was one of the highlights of my year - it completely filled my cup. I have no idea about where I’ll end up with Judaism, but I’ve enjoyed having the space to think, to learn about new ideas, and to make time for old concepts - justice, grace, faith, mercy - that I like having a dedicated space to consider directly.
   
   My 2026 commitment? To have started the year long conversion course by the end of the year. I want to give myself more information to figure out just how much space I want to give to Judaism in my life.
   

4. More Galleries. Started strong on this, but dropped off the bandwagon over the past few months. Then I went to see the Turner and Constable exhibition and it was brilliant (go, go, go!). There was a constant question running through of just how dramatic you should let yourself be, Constable singing when he loosened the reins, Turner only when he applied them. I’d forgotten how much joy a really good painting can give you - and need to do more of this in 2026.
   

5. Less Instagram. Reels have stealthily taken up more of my time, which is such a self-ick. I don’t want to go for the full account-delete - but think I will try only charging my iPad on weekends and see how I go with that. (I put the odds of me doing this successfully at about 3/10, but there we are.)
   

6. More Kenya: Heading back in February and March (HOORAY!!!). Old friends, big skies, new places, elephants (elephants!!). I didn’t travel much this year, and I’ve missed it - so looking forward to returning to a place that brings out the best in me. I’m excited to be going back.
   

7. More Running: A mid-twenties classic. I’m intending to be a basic half marathon girlie. One has been booked in for Autumn 2026. If anyone needs a run buddy, please shout. Help me stop this going the way of the triathlon.
   

8. More Volunteering: I spoke to a friend who volunteers at the Oxfam every week, and I’ve realised that this is something that has completely passed me by. In 2025 I mentored a few people with Oxbridge admissions advice, but it wasn’t really a lot. So - in 2026 - I’m going to do more volunteering. Any thoughts/ causes/ advice or suggestions welcome - I’ve been to the Felix Project before, and really enjoyed, but very open to other ideas.

Happy holidays all - much love xxx

21

I have a postcard from the Tate. 3 swim-capped old women, breaking the ice on Hampstead Heath, no wetsuits, their black costumes and pink hats stark against the snow. It reminds me of my great-grandmother - one of the year-rounders, out in the Heath whatever the weather. A proto-Wim-Hoffer.

I’m 21, and I’ve gone to the Heath to follow in her footsteps (breaststrokes?).

But there is one problem. I have forgotten how to swim.

I know how to swim. I’m sure of it. I have spent a lot of time swimming - lessons as a child, laps round pools of family holidays - I am absolutely certain that I could swim, that I have swum - and yet here I am in the Heath, and I find that I have absolutely no muscle memory of how to swim. Which - given I am now a good few metres from the bank - is less than ideal.

So I am now working out what I should be doing from first principles and a half-memory of a long ago RNLI lesson. At first I’m a thrash of arms and limbs, later sculling my way round like a pulsating jellyfish - and eventually I graduate to a backcrawl, that is more a back-stumble. I manage 6 halting laps round Hampstead’s Ladies Pond.

I leave swimming for a couple of years after.

23

When I go to Kenya, the exercise options are limited if you do not want to run into an elephant. I can do a HIIT or yoga workout in my room, or run the same 500m 56 times - but really my only option is to swim.

So I start swimming. 20, then 30 minutes, graduating all the way up to an hour in the morning. I discover I can open my eyes under the water, and watch my arms blur into white horns in the pool. When I breathe, I can see the smudges bubble up into my eyeline. I see my eyelashes as a feathered border, the dashes of blackness above me. I can hear that odd music of breath in water as my own air streams past my ear. The pool is almost always empty, and I love this hour on my own.

So I start to swim, properly this time, a slow plodding breaststroke. All I want to do is swim until I am tired, swim until I have had enough, swim only until I want to stop swimming.

25

Now I am swimming again, regularly. It has become the exercise for when I don’t fancy exercise, because by the time you’ve changed, and showered, and all the other palaver, you’re committed to doing something.

So I have graduated - after two years - to front crawl. Although a sleek and stylish front crawl this is not. It’s less ‘Aston Martin’, more ‘Morris Minor’. There’s constant desperate gasps for air, an absurd amounts of water sprayed, and each limb sets its own, syncopated rhythm. I’m also still in a bikini, as if - despite the fact that I have swim at least once a week for months - I can’t quite commit to the level of ‘swimmer’ a Speedo one-piece might suggest.

My goodness, I love my swims. I love the simplicity - no sound, no music, just chipping down for a particular amount of time. I like the carving out of an hour for my body, no multitasking possible, and the whole, full-bodied tiredness that sneaks up on you after, where you realise you can barely keep your eyes open.

I like, oddly, the fact that it’s exercise that messes with your hair, and dries out your skin, and leaves me with eyes that are bright red and veined. It was what I hated about school swimming, trudging out of the Chesham Leisure Centre, bedraggled, knotted, mascara tracks under my eyes, a borrowed Tangle Teezer failing to combat the lethal combination of chlorine and curly hair. But now that very grizzlification affirms this is something done just for me, because I like it and it makes me feel well, regardless of how I look.

I like swimming with friends. The pool offers a space for silliness. There’s something pleasing about doing a front flip, or a back flip, or a handstand, or just diving down and running your hand along the bottom of a pool. I like that, when you get a group of people in a pool, they inevitably end up mucking around, catapulting each other into the water. It makes me think of Hockney’s ‘The Splash’ - a painting that is all square rectangle buildings, but then bisected by a joyous slash of paint, the live-ness of diving in a pool.

There’s also the delicious feeling of being right at the very beginning of a learning curve. I’ve started as a woeful swimmer, so the jump to ‘slightly-less-woeful’ represents a dizzying increase in capabilities. It’s the opposite of the marginal gains of the elite - this is the considerable gains of the incompetent.

——

I reread Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ recently. It was a school book, one of the ones that you chop into the nth degree in sixth form, but are left with a little bit of love forever after. Swimming here is used to show her liberation from her husband, a distinct, seperate place where the norms taken for granted on land dissolve and flux.

It makes sense. Here is this world that you can dive into, where things sound different, and look different, where you move in a completely different way to on land. To be under the water is an experience so alien to most of our day to day - in almost every way - and yet is far more accessible than anything else that offers the same level of strangeness. Another thing to like.

——

(Good short story here about a swimmer too if anyone’s looking for a Tube read). Have a charming week everyone!

Lessons, 1982, Paula Rego

Quick Summary: In the first part of this Substack, I set out Judith Shklar’s argument that - in a liberal democracy - we may have to tolerate a degree of hypocrisy, snobbery and other vices. In the second, I look at Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Screwtape Letters’, and how charity to ourselves allows us to fall into vice. In the third, I wrap up with some quick thoughts on Lolita.

We take a ‘Whack-A-Mole’ approach to vice in politics. When we see it, we want to get rid of it. When Cummings hypocritically breaks his own COVID rules, we want to get rid of him. Whack! If we perceive condescension or snobbery in Sunak’s ‘I have friends who are working class... well, not working class’, again - Whack! If we see betrayal in the breaking of manifesto commitments - Whack! And if we see a touch of misanthropy (hatred of the rest of mankind) in Reform, we want to get rid of that too - Whack again!

So it’s an uphill battle if a philosopher is trying to argue that we might need to stop Whacking, and permit a degree of these vices in our political life. But that’s the take of Judith Shklar in ‘Ordinary Vices’. She gives us a ‘tour of perplexities’, pointing out the tensions between our Whack-a-Vice approach and the requirements of liberal democracy.

Shklar’s mainly worried about cruelty. She suggests that cruelty - the infliction of pain on a weaker person by a stronger one - is the worst of all the vices. There’s something revolting about a child with a magnifying glass, frying ants; or tyrannical bullying by an elder sibling; or punitive nastiness by a sadistic boss. And Shklar suggests we put cruelty first - we look to avoid it wherever possible, even if this means we have to tolerate a degree of hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal or misanthropy as a result. We have to avoid whacking those vices if doing so leads us to be cruel.

Often when we Whack, when we try to get rid of vices, we’re trying to be instructive. We’re looking to shape people to be better, by pointing out their flaws, often by subjecting them to ridicule - there’s a hope that this will lead to some kind of self-improvement. But this very easily allows us to slip into a kind of instructive cruelty - the cruelty of the Christians ‘civilising’ natives in the New World. If we put cruelty first, we sometimes have to restrain our impulse to correct the other vices.

Take hypocrisy. Everyone hates hypocrisy, but Shklar argues that there’s always going to be a level of hypocrisy in a liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is based on compromise, on trying to convince other people - and this involves adopting positions that might not be your own. We demand too much if we demand that people are completely open, and in our pursuit of rooting out hypocrisy, we (1) may be cruel (think of the viciousness of a witch hunt) and (2) create the conditions where people are more and more inclined to dissemble and hide their own motives, breeding yet more hypocrisy. So we may be better off tolerating a degree of hypocrisy, and removing our demands for total sincerity and openness at all points - we’ll end up with less cruelty and less hypocrisy overall. We have to resist the impulse to Whack.

Similarly, betrayal. Being betrayed feels awful. We hate feeling like someone has failed to do something we expected of them. And yet - we always betray! We’re constantly stuck between conflicting obligations to our friends, family, principles, religion, state and more - and so we are constantly betraying and being betrayed. If you’re going to tolerate a plurality of religions, the demands of which won’t always line up with the demands of the state, you have to accept that your citizens will at some point have to betray something. So again, we need to accept a degree of betrayal in a liberal state.

Even snobbery has its place. Snobbery can lead to support for the arts, for literature, for orange-wine-and-small-plates and so on. And a degree of snobbery is also inevitable - if you live in a society that permits some people to be excluded from groups, you will always end up with people who feel slighted, and perceive a degree of snobbery. Unless you end up in an enormously class-conscious society - where you’re immediately aware of the social status and background of everyone you speak to - a degree of accidental snobbery is inevitable as a result of confusion or exclusion.

After cruelty, Shklar’s most worried about misanthropy - hatred or perpetual disappointment in your fellow man. She’s conscious that hyper-awareness of cruelty and other vices that surround us can very easily lead to a deep disappointment, and a wish to ‘fix’ everyone else, even if this prompts monstrously cruel behaviour (Shklar’s writing after WW2). But even then - misanthropy can act as a spur to encourage us to find solutions, which is itself can be a good thing - so it can be a ‘vice we ought to cultivate under certain political circumstances’.

Ultimately, Shklar advocates for a ‘liberalism of fear’ - one where we’re very conscious of the opportunity for cruelty that any sort of political power opens up, and where we temper our expectations and behaviour accordingly. The role of the state isn’t to shape us into better people, but to give us the freedom and space to shape our own dispositions if we wish to. Government cannot make us good, but it can leave us the conditions and the freedom where we can make ourselves good. In that type of liberal government, we may have to tolerate a degree of these lesser vices to avoid the greatest evil of cruelty.

It’s a grown-up philosophy - one that recognises ‘liberalism imposes extraordinary ethical difficulties on us: to live with contradictions, unresolvable conflicts, and a balancing between public and private imperatives which are neither opposed to nor at one with each other.’ - and this means accepting some things we might not like. There’s a humility in this type of view - a giving up, a rejection of going for a perfect world where we’ve whacked every vice - substituting it for a recognition we’re imperfect, and we’re better off looking to manage those imperfections realistically and kindly*.

***

Moving from the public to the personal - I had a read of The Screwtape Letters are by CS Lewis (of Narnia fame). They’re the attempt of a Senior Demon Administrator (Screwtape) to instruct his nephew protégée (Wormwood) about how to tempt his charge into vice. It’s basically a morality guide (here’s how you can fall into vice), but far more fun because it includes the phrases ‘casserole of adulterers’, ‘deplorable milk sops’ and ‘scoffers and wordlings’.

You see Screwtape encouraging different beliefs because they allow vice to sneak in by the backdoor - like the idea our time is our own. It’s easy to assume we own 24 hours in a day, we spend as we wish. Screwtape tells his nephew to encourage this belief - because it’s a breeding ground for resentment whenever people ‘intrude’ on our 24 hours, when they ask things of us - because they’re taking what we own. And this is Carroll’s way of gently pointing out the ridiculousness of that belief. Our time is not only our own. It’s not just for us to spend as we wish. We have obligations to others, and that’s simply part of what it is to live in the world - we don’t have our 24 hours, and assuming we do is wrong and simply breeds resentment.

Another thing Screwtape talks a lot about pace. If the nephew keeps his little victim whirring, keeps him churning through thoughts quick enough, makes him ‘become accustomed to holding XYZ philosophies in his head’, it will be far easier for him to fall to vice. This is because it becomes possible for him to pull and select out whichever fragment is most convenient to justify what they wished to do already. We simply pull out whatever beliefs we already think of as right. We’re incredibly charitable towards ourselves, and the more moral models we have in our head, the easier it is to pick the one that allows us to do… whatever we wanted to do already.

***

And this is very obvious in the last of my tour-de-Vice… Lolita. Gahhhhh! Crikey this gives you the heebie-jeebies. Has there ever been a creepier word than ‘nymphet’? Humbert Humbert’s guilty of exactly the moral flexibility that Screwtape describes. We see him mentally flex and tease out models of ancient Greek philosophy, describe different kinds of aesthetic love - any grounding he can give to the fact he’s abducted a twelve year old. We think along with him, and can see him stop thinking just at the point where he may have to reckon with the evil of what he is actually doing.

Reading the book was an interesting experience. I’ve noticed in my book club, I’m guilty of a ‘fallacy of empathy’. If something presented to me as the view of the main character, I presume it is right. In contrast to the other Book Clubbers, I’m almost always nodding along to anything a main character says - if the character is happy, I’m happy, if they’re annoyed, I’m annoyed - and rarely step out of their head to think if their behaviour is warranted. Lolita forces you to do this - you simply can’t uncritically absorb the thoughts and feelings of Humbert Humbert. If you think you’re also guilty of the ‘fallacy of empathy’ (assuming anything in first person must be right), it’s worth taking a look. I’d also recommend ‘A Debt To Pleasure’. Clearly Lawrence owes a debt to Nabokov, and it has the same deranged justification of mad, bad behaviour via aesthetics and art - but without the paedophilic subject matter.

If you’re interested, Shklar’s book is available for free here: https://archive.org/details/ordinaryvices0000shkl/page/2/mode/2up

*I’ve been wondering what this looks like when you apply it to a life. We have a negativity bias - we remember harms much more than helps - and so I wonder if instead of trying to maximise the joy or happiness you bring about, you simply try to avoid cruelty or wrongdoing. But this seems to lead to locking yourself away from everyone and everything, retreating into a tower - leaving people entirely so as not to commit any harms (as Montaigne did)?

(Also - I don’t think Shklar would tolerate e.g. the hypocrisy of Cummings I mention in the beginning. She describes her book as ‘a tour of perplexities, not a guide for the perplexed’ - spotting the tensions between each of the vices, not telling us exactly what we should do).

Two whole weeks to sort my life out too. I’ve kicked off my annual leave with washing, hoovering, emptying the fridge, dropping off a clothes order, cancelling a subscription, and cleaning my bathroom (the glamour). I’m on a ‘Sort-Shit-Out-A-Thon’, a Big Admin Blitz. And one of the things on my list is getting myself booked in to take antidepressants (this was a clickbait title - sorry. This Substack is not about the fun kind of drugs.)

I’ve thought about this a lot this year. In some ways, it’s a no-brainer. Returning to work, I’ve realised the Princess-and-the-Pea nature of keeping myself happy. With meal prep/ sleep/ exercise/ manageable work/ freedom to run off to other countries on a whim/ ample sunlight/ endless-streams-of-love-and-affection/ sleep (again) - then yes I can be consistently happy. But this is the happiness of a truculent Monstera, or a particularly fernickity boiler. Theoretically it can exist - but in practice, this is an unmanageably brittle form of happiness, disappearing at the smallest move away from optimum conditions.

The tiniest thing happens (think ‘a misplaced apostrophe’ or ‘broken shoe heel’) and - Cha-Pow - my world is transformed to an Endless Abyss of Misery and Woe. Given this is now getting in the way of my work and relationships, I do think anti-depressants are the right call. And I reckon this is probably a product of how I’m wired rather than how the world is, and maybe fiddling with that wiring could help me fix it.

But goodness gracious, I am NERVOUS.

****

I think it is fair enough to be nervous. This is not something to do lightly. These drugs are designed to change your consciousness. Your literal brain! How you experience life! All of your knowledge of the world around you! That is a HUGE thing. A very big thing to tinker with. There’s something so, so weird about making this decision - a very deliberate, very conscious choice to manipulate my own perception of the world.

It will almost certainly be good for me - but there’s a bunch of irrational What Ifs. What if it goes wrong? What if I’m left permanently seeing the colour purple? What if I’m plagued by the weird feeling when you pick up an empty bottle you thought was full? What if - and this is the actual what-if - I end up with even worse spells than I have at the moment?

So there’s a baseline level of nervousness that is both normal and understandable. But I’ve realised there’s a couple other, less rational sources of nervousness, that I started thinking about when I saw this poem on the tube:

I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold
I am toppled by the world
a creation of ladders, pianos, stairs cut into the rock
a devouring world of teeth where even the common snail
eats the heart out of a forest
as you and I do, who are human, at night

yet still I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold

I love the sentiment, the idea of being ‘toppled by the world’, of continuing to embrace a place as it devours you, of looking to get all the ‘whelm’ you can. I love the commitment to openness to those guzzling, boggling, dizzying moments, those moments where it seems unbelievable that this, this is what the world can be.

I still so want to be toppled by the world. I want to be overcome and overjoyed - and I’m scared this might go away. I don’t want to remain balanced in the face of joy. The idea of turning away from joy, of not running fully with it, seems so… metallic.

One of the side-effects of SSRI’s can be a broader emotional numbing, and I worry that in dulling my nasty-spiky-urchin moments, they will take those moments of world-toppling too. I worry that, in moving to anti-depressants, I might become less alive to the beautiful parts of the world. There are any number of very small things that give me a very pure, and very whole sense of joy. I love that joy, and I’ve always seen that as the silver lining I get from those big crashing lows. I’m scared to lose it.

***

There’s an even deeper bit in what is already a pretty heavy Substack (coming back in your inbox with All The Feelings). I think the real reason I’m scared of this concept of numbing my emotions is because I’ve experienced it once before.

The few months after I was assaulted, I felt like a lot of my emotions shut down. As someone who has always had this Big Technicolor Experience of feeling, this was the oddest thing. I felt so much less than I’d ever done before. I found some writing from that period about how I felt that “a part of the emotional spectrum has been cut off. I’m missing out mainly on the primary colours, and to a lesser extent the jewel tones. I’ve been left with pastels and watercolours”. It is a little pretentious - but I’m going to forgive that very confused 19-year-old - because I remember those odd few months, and it did feel exactly like that. Like things had all been washed out, like I was watching my face and my body react, even as I felt very, very little.

I can’t help but feel that - in taking drugs - I’m choosing to go back into that muzzling world, and that seems like a very odd place to voluntarily enter into. And I know that it’s irrational to feel that way. They’re not the same thing. That summer’s numbness was involuntary, probably a lot starker, and not something I had control over. The SSRI’s are something I’m choosing to take, and may not have that effect at all, just knock the spiky-urchin-sad moments on their head. But, irrationally, I do feel that they are similar, and this does make me nervous.

***

But on the positive side - this could genuinely change my life. I’ve been hearing about people on Ozempic not having to worry about food noise, and I wonder if this will do something similar - stop all the vigilance and monitoring, alongside all the time feeling sad. It’ll save so much time. All the time spent feeling sad, or doing things to avoid feeling sad, or trying to check in, or keep myself level - all that time back.

Maybe I’ll become a grade 3485 flautist, an accomplished commentator on Proust, and start a new line of innovatively painted ceramics. Or maybe I’ll chill out exactly as I am, but have a little more time to mooch contentedly. Who knows.

So we’ll see how it goes. Bring On The Drugs!

big important clarification: these are my worries. these are not rational, or right, or scientific fact - they are just what is in my head. Loads of people take anti-depressants, there should be no stigma, they work for the overwhelming majority of people, there’s no scientific or evidential grounding for my worries - I’m just showing the thought process of someone figuring out what to do.

Snapped this at the Royal Astronomical Society + I like this photo

An interesting money-where-mouth-is-moment. Quite literally.

I got stopped on Brick Lane and asked, on camera, how much I have in savings.

Reasons to answer this:

1. It’s right to tell the truth.

2. It’s interesting.

Reasons to not answer this:

1. It’s ‘not the done thing’

2. I am very privileged, and this outs me as so.

3. It’s scary

So what did I do? And why?

***

There’s an idea in philosophy about what you take as ‘primitive’. When we do philosophy, we’re often trying to break things down. In a philosophical analysis, we split things into smaller and smaller fragments. But eventually, this has to stop. You can’t break down concepts forever-and-ever-amen (although, obviously, some philosopher somewhere will have answered to the contrary).

And this is where we arrive at primitives.

Primitives are things where the philosopher holds their hands up and says ‘Let’s stop there’. In metaphysics, you might take causality, or time, or modality as primitive and say you can set out all the other concepts in these terms. In logic, you might have some basic operators that you try and build out the rest of them from. And in ethics, there can be some things you just take as basic. They’re axioms that you build up the rest of your ethical belief system around.

Telling the truth is something I take as primitive. My therapist asked me why I think telling the truth is the right thing. I could give her a causal explanation - a spiel of biography about why I think telling the truth is so important - but I couldn’t give her a moral explanation - another, underlying moral reason that makes telling the truth the right thing. To me, it just is. This is a very basic belief that I build up all the rest of them from. And so that puts a very big weight on the scales to tell the truth. (And I’d be lying if I said (2) - the fact that it seemed like something a little different to experience - didn’t factor in as well. It seems weird to see a chance for something interesting to happen and not do it.)

The reasons on the no side didn’t seem very compelling. Of course, it’s ‘not the done thing’ - but this is really, really bad (more on this later). As for the others - not doing something because it is scary is a rubbish reason not to, and not outing myself as privileged seemed to be a combination of that fear, and a desire to allow me to hide my privilege in future - which struck me as a little too close to lying.

So I told them. I have inherited some money (and locked myself out of my savings). This has been watched - at last count - 1.3M times (gahh). There has been 60,000 likes, and about 192 comments along the lines of ‘Rah, where’s my baccy’ (my voice - which gives Lettuce Robotham - certainly doesn’t help). I have found this weird, wondered if this was a really stupid idea, and concluded this was the right thing to do - because I think not doing so would be something like lying.

***

What is a lie? A classic definition is that a ‘lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it’. There’s a term right at the beginning there that’s doing a fair bit of work. When we lie we make a statement. We say something.

So on this definition, if I had decided not to reveal my financial situation to the world I wouldn’t have lied. I hadn’t said ‘No, I have not a penny to my name.’ I just wouldn’t have said anything - no statement made.

But something still seems a bit fishy. To borrow a distinction from that philosophical treatise, Drake and Josh:

Not saying anything wouldn’t make me a liar. But I don’t think it would make me a truther either.

What seems fishy? Well… I can tell all and only the truth, and yet still allow things to be a bit dodgy. Imagine you have a good friend called Pollyanna. Every time you speak to Pollyanna she tells you whatever she has found to be glad about. (Pollyanna is, at times, fucking annoying). You speak with Pollyanna often, and only ever hear about sunshines, rainbows and unicorns.

Over time, you try to think about what Pollyanna’s life is like. You extrapolate from those glad-ments that hers is a life of sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. But Pollyanna’s life is not only one of sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. It is also one of tax audits, and unexpectedly stale sandwiches, and the heels of shoes snapping off at inopportune moments.

Now Pollyanna has only told the truth. Amidst all of the audit and sandwiches, there is the occasional unicorn, and that is what she has told you about. What she has said is true. But it’s also led you to a false belief. It’s pretty reasonable that you have ended up extrapolating to believe that hers is a life of sunshine, rainbows and unicorns - that’s all the data you have to go on, and it’s the natural story to make sense of what you’ve been given.

So … has Pollyanna done something wrong? I think she - sort of - has. We make assumptions about the rationality of other people. We know what is reasonable to do with the data we’ve been given - as rational agents, we all share in the same ‘rules of the game’ - and one of those is assume that the data you have (the anecdotes on the fragments of her life) is representative of the whole. This is particularly the case if Pollyanna is your friend. She knows you are a rational agent, she knows that you will arrive at this conclusion about what her life looks like - and (unless you are very, very, immune to the tendency to compare yourself), knows (or could reasonably know) that this would make you feel a bit crap.

So I don’t know if Pollyanna is lying per se (and I feel like you could do a long dull semantic argument about whether it does or does not count as a lie). But I do think she has done something wrong. She’s knowingly created a situation where you could - rationally - form a very incorrect induction based on the data she’s given you.

***

And so back to Brick Lane - why do I think this means there is an obligation to talk honestly about money when asked? Because things are really really unequal in the UK. Really unequal.

I have friends from Oxford who are a right wing politicians dream. They are the definition of the kind of people who have “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, who have done everything ‘right’. They’ve worked incredibly hard, got a great degree, continue working incredibly hard in steady and safe careers - and realistically will find it incredibly difficult to buy a house.

The average house price in London is £663,000. Let’s imagine you graduate Oxford with an Economics degree, and take a job as a management consultant at, say, Accenture. Pretty plausible. First year, you’re an Associate Consultant, earning £42,000 (well above the median salary). After tax, National Insurance, pension, and student loan repayments, you’re looking at £31,000. After renting (in a flatshare), you’re probably looking at £19,000 annually. £182 is an average monthly food spend, which takes you down to £16,800. Even being really conservative when we consider utilities (£2148 is the UK average, but we’ll assume £1,500), transport (£4,173, but we’ll assume £500), clothes (£920; £300), council tax (£1,726; £1,000).

With all of these really really conservative assumptions about your spending - and no spending at all on any kind of life - holidays, frivolities, pub etc. - you end up being able to save… £13,500 (without those conservative assumptions it’s £7,800). The average first time deposit? £68,154. In London? £138,500. Generation Rent estimates the average time to buy a house is 9 years, and more like 18 years in London. By my maths, even staying in the flatshare, living the frugal life, securing promotions as quickly as possible, and keeping all those ridiculously over-conservative assumptions, our Accenture consultant is probably hardcore saving for about 6 or 7 years.

This is mad. It’s mad that - if you don’t come from a wealthy background - you have to go into crazy high salary careers to even have a chance at buying a home. It’s mad that you can do everything right - get good grades, work hard, take the steady, safe, possibly-a-career-you-don’t-love, earn more than the median UK income straight out of university - and still probably not be able to buy your own place to live without years of real, acute scrimping. This is so, so mad. This to get to the point to get the really, really massive mortgage that only then do you start paying off.*

And the main reason lots of my peer group don’t spend all their time talking about how utterly mad this is? Because lots of people - like me - will inherit some chunk of money at some point. The average expected inheritance in the US is $320,000. So we look at the inflated house prices, the difficulty of buying, and offset that against the home inflation (morbid though it may be) experienced by our parents or our grandparents. It nets out. "We’re alright Jack.”

But that is so wrong. It’s so unbelievably wrong that your ability to buy a house is more of a product of where you are born, than your own ability. That someone can do all the tick-box by-the-book things as it is possible to do - ignoring the fact that maybe they don’t want to go on a very intense career path, that not everyone can, ignoring a gazillion other things - that even in the very best of best scenarios - you will still be far less likely to be able to buy a home than someone who has dropped out of everything, but happens to be from a wealthy background.

And - long tangential rant over - this is where the lying-from-omission comes in. Because I’ve thought a lot about why there is not so much more uproar about this, and part of it is that people aren’t honest about what’s going on. People don’t mention, or stay quiet when people ask them about what they will inherit and what they have. And this means the fragments that are on offer are skewed, and inducted from and used to build up a picture that is so, so far from the truth.

This leads to (1) people feeling like they’re behind because of their own efforts, (2) people feeling less pressure to do good or charitable things with the money they have come into and (3) there’s less impetus and visibility to change the system that makes this the case - champagne socialist, but true. So I think people should be far more honest about this - and that maybe we introduce a Norway+ system and publish all salaries and assets in a quickly-look-upable online platform.

***
A lighter note to finish. I’ve been thinking about the Pollyanna case, and realised there is a distinction between two types of relationship, and a different role for each (with thanks, and a shout out, to my Mancunian interlocutor).

When someone asks you how your day was, do you say:

1. The three most important things - good, bad or ugly

2. Three good things - even if most of your day was rubbish.

When you say the three most important things you are truthful, and authentic - but you also risk bringing someone else down, and making them feel worse. When you say three good things, you don’t run that risk - but you do run the risk of Pollyanna-ing, and ending up with relationships that feel a little insubstantial.

There’s not hard and fast rule to always do one or the other. For acquaintances, you may not need the authenticity piece, and you may just want to tick off the good. thing. Let’s assume most of the time, in our friendships, we want our friends to feel good. That will require some important-thing-thinking - to make sure we’re not exerting the Pollyanna-harm, to reassure them we’re being honest, and also (reciprocally) to show this is a space where you can share the good, bad and ugly. But it’ll also require some judgement - sometimes people aren’t ready for all the bad and ugly, and just want the empathy not to add another thing to their plate.
***

Please let me know if I sound like a prat. I’m not trying to be braggy, and I get that I’m writing this from inside a bubble and in a place of privilege, and there may well be an sense of ‘who are you to talk’. This has been on my mind a lot, but I could be completely off with this or just sound like a knob. Drop me a message if so.

*obviously not everyone in the world can/ is/ wants to be a management consultant. I’m taking such an extreme example to take away anything a right wing politician could say people should have done. The point is that even if you do everything right by their lights, you will still struggle to get on the property ladder.

It feels like there are three things required to make a meaningful, informed comparison between A and B. You need to have enough knowledge of A and enough knowledge of B, and some sort of judgement relating the two.

I can make a meaningful, informed comparison between the vast quantity of brie I ate today and the vast quantity of cheddar. I can remember the taste of both of them well, and I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the brie was superior.

But if you asked me whether I preferred the brie, or cheddar on a cheeseboard I had a month ago, I don’t think I could make a meaningful, informed comparison. If I didn’t compare the two at the time (if there was no point in the meal where I thought about which of the two was better), I can’t make the comparison based on my memory. I won’t have good enough data. I’d need to go out, buy the brie or cheddar, and make the comparison then.

But… imagine if we had a particularly old brie. The flavour profile of this brie is so nuanced, so devastatingly complex that you have to consume it over the course of a long time. A really long time. Say… a month. And you have a similarly nuanced, complex cheddar that also takes a month to appreciate.

Would you ever be able to make a meaningful informed comparison between the cheddar and the brie?

It seems like not. In the course of consuming one cheese, your memory of the other would always have decayed too much to be able to make the comparison.

This is a silly example. But it draws out one kind of case - instances where (1) you can only experience one of A and B at a time and (2) the time taken to have an experience of A or B is sufficiently long that you can no longer access a memory of A or B to draw a comparison between the two. And I think these cases crop up elsewhere - in slightly different ways when we try to talk about ageing.

For ageing, can I really make a meaningful comparison of what it is like to be 25 vs. 15? (I’ve spoken about broader themes of forgetting everything before, but this is an application of this claim). I can’t know what it’s like to be 15 anymore and even if I could (in some kind of Freaky Friday situation), I wouldn’t be able to retain the memory of being 25 long enough to make the comparison.* So it seems like - at least to me - it’s difficult for claims like ‘I loved my 20’s’ or ‘my 50’s were the highlight’ to have much weight.

***

I’ve been thinking about age because I turned 25 this week. Q2 begins! I am officially out the early twenties (which I’ve stretched out as long as humanly possible). And I’m feeling even olderer because I have fractured my wrist (I have received ample attention and sympathy, don’t worry.) It means my right hand is wrapped up in plaster, and out of action for the next 4 weeks at least. I am not saying I have any real knowledge of what it is to be old. But I also have more knowledge about being old than I have done at any point in the past.

Fracturing my wrist has brought me in contact with a whole bunch of concepts we tend to associate with elderly people that I haven’t had to think much about before. A little dramatic, but I feel vulnerable - I’m conscious anyone could knock into me and prompt a large quantity of pain. I’ve experienced acts of charity in the kindness of strangers, who have fixed my undone shoelaces, opened doors for me, given up seats and even free foccaccia’s. Awake and aching at night, I have been thinking about peace, and grace, and mercy - all these acts of kindness that I need from people who do not owe me this kindness.

If this is all sounding a little God Squad - that could be because I have been experimenting with the synagogue. I’ve been interested in Judaism for a long, long time and one of the things I wanted to do back in London is explore this properly. Not very original (it seems like every other day there’s a story about Gen Z’s turn towards God), but I have really enjoyed having a space to think and hear about these concepts, somewhere apart from the dry space of academia.

No idea what I think, but I’m enjoying the finding out. There’s something wise and hefty about these ideas, and I’ve been wondering if those concepts are from being old, or if there is something instead about dependency - a kind of knowledge that is made salient when you are made aware of living in a community, and if so, how I can hold onto it.

***

I had a reread of Atul Gawande’s ‘Being Mortal’ for this. It’s a great reflection on ageing, and how to navigate it well, filled with astute observations - like how we ignore what we would want for ourselves when we infantilise the elderly (‘we want autonomy for ourselves and safety for the ones we love’).

There’s a cool study in there from Carstensen looking at the reason why we tend to get happier as we get older. Carstensen shows our preferences shift as we age, and we start to value family and community over professional success or ticking off milestones. But he shows the source of this change in preference - it’s determined by how finite we perceive the time we have to be.

Older people are happy because they are more aware of how fleeting time is - so aren't willing to delay gratification to the same extent - they want to spend time with their family now. But Carstensen shows young people with terminal illnesses show the same shift in preferences. So the change is not the accumulation of wisdom over time, but the extent to which someone is 'contending with life's fragility' - it’s accessible now, rather than requiring the build up of time. And this is interesting because it means that by reflecting on life’s fragility we can make the same kinds of choices, orient our lives toward what matters.

***

Plan for the next however-many-Substacks-until-I-lose-interest - I’m going to have a go at answering one a week. Why not? I’ll keep it chatty (so hopefully it’s still a nice read), and give myself a couple of hours to answer. My sleep has been all over the shop recently, so this feels like a better use of my Sunday Witching Hours than most. (Although weekend essays for fun? Nerd.)

This week, I look at whether changes in fashion matter morally. First I try and work out what a change in fashion actually is, and then see if it follows whether it’s the sort of thing we can praise or criticise as morally good or bad. At the bottom of this post will be the question I’m going to try and answer next week so people can brew on their own ideas (and send me any thoughts).

Let’s see how we go!

***

Question 1: Can changes in fashion have normative significance?

In 2014, my dads navy blue pair of fleece-lined Crocs was a source of genuine physical pain to my teen self. In 2024, Crocs were seen on the red carpet in London Fashion Week - and I’ve even debated buying a pair.

What changed between 2014 and 2024? Pretty obvious, but Crocs became fashionable. They gained the property of ‘being on trend’.

What did it mean for Crocs to gain the property of ‘being on trend’? People now liked crocs - whereas before, they didn’t. This made them ‘on trend’. There was a shift in preferences, with Crocs being ‘in’ where they had been ‘out’. So a ‘change in fashion’ seems to involve a change in the preferences of a (particular*) group.

But we see lots of changes in the preferences of groups that don’t seem to count as a “change in fashion”. In 2020, we all developed a strong preference for wearing a thin piece of blue material over the lower half of our face. But mask-wearing in the face of a pandemic doesn’t seem to be a ‘change in fashion’ but rather a ‘pretty vital necessity’.

So… a change in fashion seems to involve the changes in the preferences of a group for a particular kind of reason. These reasons need to be independent of survival (as in the COVID case) or legal and material incentives (if Virgin Airlines go on a hiring spree, we wouldn’t say there was a ‘change in fashion’ for red neckties).

Let’s go back to the Crocs example.

What sort of reasons meant that people liked Crocs in 2024, when they didn’t in 2014? What reasons caused the ‘change in fashion’?

The Crocs themselves hadn’t changed. They were still their same weird rubbery selves. The reason people liked Crocs now was because they seemed cool. They were - all of a sudden - fashionable. People liked Crocs because they were fashionable. So…

1. A ‘change in fashion’ is a change in preferences.

2. This change in preferences comes about because of… a change in fashion?

Some immediate alarm bells for any first year philosophy student out there. (“bUt iT’s a cIrCuLAR aRguMenT.”) Can we save this if we take a closer look at what we mean in each of those two cases by a ‘change in fashion’?

At the moment, our definition of a change in fashion is ‘a change in preferences of a particular group for a reason that is independent of legal, survival or material incentives’. I’m trying to use this to explain what happened when Crocs became cool. I want to refine this definition to see if I can find a difference between (1) and (2), and stop my argument being circular.

Let’s see if the following works:

A strong understanding: A change in fashion is where there’s a perceptible change in the preference of a group towards an object**.
A weak understanding: A change in fashion is where there is any change in the preferences of those within the group towards an object.

The 2014 - 2024 change in the status of crocs fulfils the strong definition. Crocs weren’t cool, and then they were. We could see it. The revenue of crocs sky-rocketed, Justin Bieber had a yellow pair and the phrase ‘jibbitz’ entered our vernacular. We perceived it as a property of our group. We noticed that people now seemed to like crocs.

But that 2014 - 2024 change came about because of a change in fashion in the weak sense - and this is what’s referred to in part B. Changes in fashion work like an epidemic. One person shifts preferences, and maybe it causes someone else nearby to shift their preferences and so on and so forth.

1. A ‘change in fashion’ is a perceptible change in the preferences of a group.

2. This perceptible change comes about because of a series of smaller changes in the preferences of individuals. Some of these may be because of an awareness of changes in the preferences of others, but some may be independently of them.

Changes in the preferences of individuals occur all the time, but rarely qualify as a ‘change in fashion’ in the strong sense. I woke up this morning admiring this pair of Swedish yellow clogs. Unless I’m a bigger influencer than I thought, I doubt you noticed that Swedish yellow clogs had suddenly become cool. (As an entirely unrelated aside, my birthday is in 19 days, and clog-buyers get FREE PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP to Lauren’s Substack. Yours for one pair of extortionately over-priced clogs.) Though all changes in fashion involve a shift of preferences, not all shifts in preferences entail a perceptible change in fashion. When we talk about a change in fashion, I think we tend to talk about it in this stronger, perceptible sense.

So…

A change in fashion is: where there’s a perceptible change in the preference of a group towards an object for reasons that are independent of legal, survival or material incentives

Right. That’s (marginally) clearer.

Moving to the second part of this question - can a change in fashion have normative significance? First up, what does it mean for something to have normative significance? This could take a million and more essays, so - roughly - I think something has normative significance if it is worth it taking up time in our moral discussions. Can we condemn it or praise it - and is it worth the bother of doing so?

My instinct is it’s unlikely the weak understanding can have normative significance if we want ‘significance’ to bear any relation to ‘importance’. If we understand the weak ‘change in fashion’ as ‘any change in the preferences of those within the group towards an object’, well… these are happening all the time and loads. There’s simply too much going on for this to be able to count as important. (I’m sure there’s a way you could argue that they do, but I feel like it makes the relationship of significance to ‘being something we can feasibly care about as humans with limited brain capacity’ pretty tenuous.)

So… taking a look at the strong definition. There’s a perceptible change in the preference of a group towards an object for non-material reasons.

Well. Some obvious yes’s.

If there is suddenly a trend for ‘sweatshop labour trousers’ or ‘coats made from the skin of dead Dalmatian puppies’ - a perceptible change in preference towards these objects - that seems to have normative significance. A trend for fashion items by a well-known anti-Semite seems something that warrants moral condemnation. There’s a whole debate here about whether a preference can have normative significance if it can’t be acted upon (does it matter if someone has paedophilic preferences if they are locked on a desert island forever) which I don’t think is worth going into - for the sake of finding the more interesting arguments/ topics, we’ll assume they can.

What is a challenge is whether the moral condemnation for the Cruella De Vil trend comes from because it’s a change in fashion - rather than simply because there’s higher demand for Dalmatian coats. What work is the change being a fashion-type change doing to warrant our moral condemnation?

Imagine that, instead of a change in fashion for Dalmatian puppy coats, the changes comes about for one of our two ‘not-allowed’ reasons - because of a change in survival reasons (it became really cold and Dalmatian fur was the best available insulation) or because of a change in material conditions (you get a £400 tax rebate on your Dalmatian fur coat because it helps protect Britain's Dalmatian fur farms.)

Does this change the kind of moral condemnation we feel like we can make?

I think it does. Changes in fashion seem to include some kind of caprice. Because we’ve stripped out most of the other ‘material’ reasons, the change in preference seems like a change in preference for the sake of it. So the harm that is inflicted by a trend for Dalmatian fur coats for fashion-reasons seems more avoidable than the harm inflicted by a trend for Dalmatian fur coats for other reasons - and hence more worthy of our condemnation. Which means (ta-da) - I think changes in fashion can have normative significance as changes in fashion.

Question for next week… Is envy necessarily bad?

Rough notes:

Speedy run through of this argument:

• Premise 1: Changes in fashion are perceptible changes in the preferences of a group for reasons that aren’t moral, material, survival related or legal.

• Premise 2: (Example) A perceptible change in the preferences of a group for Dalmatian fur coats (that is driven by reasons that aren’t moral, material, survival related or legal) is a source of harm that is particularly avoidable due to the reasons that drive this change in preference.

• Premise 3: The particular avoidability of this kind of harm is worthy of comment in our moral discourse.

• Premise 4: A change in fashion is worthy of comment in our moral discourse.

• Premise 5: Something is normatively significant if it is worthy of comment on in our moral discourse

• Conclusion: Changes in fashion can be normatively significant.

Thoughts on this:

I think the interesting tension is this question is that a change in fashion seems very trivial - but the normative significance suggests importance. The Dalmatian angle is easy, but uninteresting (see also: fast fashion or climate change).

There’s a whole big bunch of problems with my argument:

• There’s a lot of bigger questions that I can’t touch, but also don’t fully address in this essay - things like:

  • If these changes in fashion happen at a societal level, and aren’t the responsibility of any single agent - who is the moral condemnation being directed at? Is it legitimate to criticise society? How do ‘trendsetters’ fit into this - single individuals who seem able to prompt a change in fashion?

  • There’s a lot of other fashions (for ideas; for behaviours and more) that I deliberately kept out of scope. I’m not sure how well this argument would generalise.

  • Not a hundred percent sure on if the strong-weak distinction works to solve the problem I defined - as set out I feel like there’s a lot of holes. Would love if someone smarter knows why.

• There’s a bit of irrelevancy

  • I got completely and happily sidetracked by the business of what on earth a change in fashion actually is. Enjoyably diverting, but took up way too much time.

• Premise 1 is almost certainly non-exhaustive. Which means there’s probably a non-trivial reason that currently falls into the ‘reasons for a change in fashion’ bucket. I’d need to find a way to pick out or characterise the kinds of reason that lead to a change in fashion, but this is tricky because we’re talking about applying reasons (something we tend to think of as held by individuals) to a society (which is much bigger). There’s also a bunch of arguments about trends being manufactured by Big Clothing to try and ensure we buy way more stuff than we need.

• Could definitely do with a tighter definition what is normative significance and what counts. It’s also super weak/ pretty easy to fulfil.

• I wonder if the strength of perceptible stays consistent all the way through

• Ultimately - I think what you want to get to is a way of setting out how changes in fashion seem to be from an arbitrary or trivial reasons, but not in a way that defines them as essentially trivial (as then you just duck the question)

• I don’t go into either the ethics of the Dalmatian case, or the group dynamics of who determines what is fashionable (+ the privileges inherent in this)

Caveats:
*Of course, it wasn’t the case that just any old people that now liked crocs. A specific group - predominantly young, wealthy, ‘cool’ people - started to like crocs. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to ignore the specifics of precisely which group that needs to have a shift in preferences for a change in fashion to occur.

** By perceptible, I mean accessible to the average onlooker. I feel like you can quibble with this, but there’s a way to get to what I mean

I used to equate being serious about life with taking quite a ‘hard’ approach to what you want to do. I’ve ditched a lot of the ‘hard’ approach, but I’ve also realised this doesn’t mean I have to be unserious about my life, and what I want from it - just differently-serious. Some musings about this, and some excerpts from other authors who have put what I’m thinking about into better words than I can manage.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R.S. Thomas, The Bright Field.

***

Today I sat in a field, and for the first time in weeks the world felt still. I could see rainbows on my eyelashes, those sprawling circles that there isn’t a word for but should be, something delicate and Finnish. I could see white catching on grasses, and the wing of a seagull turned oyster pink as the sun set. I could hear things too, a glimmer of Spanish, a far-off siren. And I felt goosebumps sprout up on my arms, and the wind on my ear, and in my head I saw impala and warthog, and, a little later, elephants.

I hadn’t been still in a while. Time accelerated into a series of moments getting shorter and shorter. I felt myself pulled into the trap of different notifications, buzzes, things to check, until my time was ground into a very fine dust, a dust that settled around me, and I wrapped myself in it, and muffled the world outside.

Sat in that field, I felt like an ostrich chick poking my way through an egg - looking up and out at the very beautiful, very lovely world I had been muffling out. There was a breath, and a calm, and I looked at the clouds, white brushstrokes on blue and felt whole and content.

***

Sometimes on such a hot summer evening in such a court when I am trying to calm excited women shouting their execrable language at one another, I have looked up suddenly and seen one of those bright gleams of light the summer sun sends out just before he sets, catching the top of a red chimney-pot, and beautiful there, though too directly above their heads for the crowd below to notice it much.

But to me it brings sad thought of the fair and quiet places far away, where it is falling softly on tree, and hill, and cloud, and I feel as if that quiet, that beauty, that space, would be more powerful to calm the wild excess about me than all my frantic striving with it.

***

I know a lot of people who approach life Very Seriously. Edging over the mid-point of our twenties, I find myself now surrounded by Very Successful People. Those who started on the slingshot towards success have started edging up, up and away - setting up startups, publishing books, moving up a corporate ladder. This makes sense. A lot of my friends take their lives, and ambitions very seriously. And so do I.

But being Very Serious in your approach to life can look quite different.

We lost my granny a few months ago, and I have been struck - again and again - by the value of her life. My grandma was someone who appreciated nice moments. She was a painter, a reader, a mother and grandmother - someone who took long walks, and created beautiful paintings, and would stop to make the most of nice words, nice trees, nice skies, nice moments.

I think about her life, about the slices of time stacked up against one another, and I’m awed by just how many times she must have felt a sense of awe, or a sense of beauty, or humour, or a lot of love - because she took these things very seriously and made time for them. The poem at the beginning of this post comes from my uncle, and I think it was the perfect choice. It captures something Granny knew very well. I imagine that she had a lot of those moments, turning towards the brightness.

I’ve been thinking - more and more - this is the sort of life I want to live. And this is not a hard life. My grandma didn’t attack life. She lived, and embraced it, and lived wholly. And she was really impressive, in a lot of ways. But those achievements were (I think) incidental to the living of her life. I don’t know, but I think that they’re not what she set out to do. I think instead, she knew, very deeply, what she valued - beauty, love, goodness - and she deliberately made space for these (forgive the term) ‘soft’ things, and lived a life rich in them.

So I think my grandma did take life seriously, but seriously in quite a different way to some of the Very Serious approaches I see around me. I have noticed that a lot of the Very Serious approaches to life treat life in a hard way - a set of achievements, something to be stretched or pulled in different directions. Life is manipulated to fit and to form around these taut, hard goals.*

But I’ve been thinking that what I want is a serious softness. I do take life seriously, and think I always will do, but I am increasingly serious about those ‘soft’ things, because they are the moments that give the density and wholeness to my life - things like love, and beauty, and play. In a world that equates seriousness with harder goals, a serious softness requires being quite deliberate, and intentional - to take the tools for building a serious, hard life and adapt them to different goals, to - very carefully, very seriously - approach the business of making time for these softer things, even as the world makes light of them.

***

*At least, this is definitely what I did. And - to be clear - this really works for some people. Some of my best friends love striving, love reaching and hitting these very hard goals - it’s how they are wired, and it makes them happy. And it’s not an either/or - you can have a mix of both. We just hear a lot of Very-Serious-Hard approaches, and Devil-May-Care-Soft-Ones - but less about Very-Serious-Soft-Ones.

What’s the difference between shame and guilt?

It’s a fun little question, and the way I understand it is:

1. Shame is social. The ultimate source of shame is judgement (or inferred judgement) from other people. You can feel shame (but not guilt) about wearing the wrong sort of shoes.

2. Guilt is moral. You can feel guilt, but not shame about an act that is morally wrong, but isn’t something people could ever know about.

What do each of these emotions allow you to do?

1. Shame teaches you about codes in society. When you feel shame because you’ve done something that warrants judgement, you learn how not to do things that will lead to judgement.

2. Guilt teaches you about what is right or wrong. When you feel guilt because you’ve done something that is morally wrong, you learn how not to do it next time - how to do the right thing.

Which means that the importance of:

1. Shame relies on ‘what warrants judgement’ being worth caring about.

2. Guilt relies on ‘what is right or wrong’ being worth caring about.

Which means that

1. Shame seems pretty pointless. Anyone who has been a teenage girl, stressed about having Topshop Jamie rather than Joni jeans* knows that what you can be judged for isn’t the same as what is worth caring about

2. Guilt seems very important. It’s a tool that allows us to know what is right or wrong, and that allows us to be better. We should feel guilty, and we should care about guilt.

Why does this matter? At the moment, I’m in a situation where I have two options.

Option 1: Higher-Guilt; Low-Shame.

Option 2: Low-Guilt, High-Shame.

Option 1 is keeping quiet. This is what I’ve done until now. Doing so has caused a small amount of guilt, but has also saved me a vast quantity of shame. The second involves sharing information. This would open me up to shame, but also alleviate my guilt.

The option I should take depends on how guilt and shame trade off against one another. If they can be traded off against one another, I should do Option 1. It’s a very small amount of guilt, and Option 2 involves a helluva lot of shame. But it doesn’t seem to me like guilt and shame can be traded off against one another. The moral aspect of guilt seems orders of magnitude more important than the social stigma of shame.

So if I really don’t care about shame, and if I can avoid some guilt by embracing the shame that taking Option 2 entails, I think - by my own reasoning - I should do so.

This is a situation where I’m exploring how far I’m willing to live by my values. Am I willing to reveal something that is shameful (in the sense I’ve defined above) in order to avoid guilt? Given I consider avoiding guilt as far more important than avoiding shame, this seems to me like something I should do.

If I was braver, there would be a really good click-bait revelation here. But (call it cowardice or call it a more developed prefrontal cortex) I’m (for once) not going to overshare. I’m going to stick to the Keep Quiet route for now - keep the situation to myself, and see whether this reasoning works and what people think of it.

Ultimately, this whole situation has put me into a bit of a quandary. I really value being honest. This comes from being assaulted. I spent a year not able to talk about what happened, and I felt dirty and deceitful. As a result, I really actively don’t like not speaking about things. I associate not oversharing, not being honest and authentic with that year of misplaced guilt and shame. (Jung called secrets ‘psychic poison’) I’ve found it so weird not speaking about this! It feels a bit too close to lying. But I am also scared of the potential for shame.

So I’m wondering what to do. Am I obliged to speak about this situation? Am I wrong not to? When is an omission a lie? How do guilt and shame trade-off against one another? Can they?

***

I had a read of ‘The Philosophy of Shame’ to have a closer look. The book’s a bit muddled, and lots of pieces aren’t relevant to me - but some quick takeaways…

Firstly, my guilt = more important than shame is a very post-Enlightenment, Western, individualist take. The prioritisation of the interior over the exterior, the individual over the collective - it’s a particular current of thought. But equally there are definitely still reasons to be sceptical of shame. Shame is (shocker) historically not good. “Lettres de cachet” were used to imprison adulterous women and gay men simply for being a source of shame to their families. Just because I can trace the genealogy of this belief to those Enlightenment currents doesn’t debunk it - shame still strikes me as pretty meh, independent of origin.

Secondly - the force of shame on memory (Ernaux again) - her writing how ‘I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame’. I liked this observation of how shame can scald us in a way that is utterly unexpected, how easily we remember those moments in which we feel acute shame. It made me think of - oddly - the link of shame and love. Shame itself is awful, but the willingness to bear it can be a very pure declaration of love. There’s a scene in Captain Correlli’s Mandolin where the father of Pelagia endures humiliations for her at the hands of the occupiers. It is an awful scene, but - partly because shame is so scalding - his willingness to bear it is a deeply moving sign of love.

Thirdly - a lovely bit from the Greeks! Protagoras describes Hermes distributing shame throughout the world after the crime of Prometheus. This encapsulates how limiting shame can be - in response to the existence of fire, Zeus finds a comparable way to hobble man - because shame can be quite so paralysing.

It didn’t solve my conundrum, but I did enjoy it.

***

*(aware that is a very-my-bubble-sentence…).

Metamorphoses is Ovid’s account of change in Roman myth (changes that seem to be 40% people-into-birds, and 40% people-into-trees). The book is long and nested and meandering - a story wrapped in an anecdote tied up in a narrative embedded in a poem. Lots of the myths are familiar, but I found reading the original translation meant I got so many lovely additional details.

So what’s in store for this Substack? Part 1 is my an attempt at a myth. Gahhh! Sharing creative writing still gives me the heebie-jeebies - I feel like I’m sharing a Percy Jackson Wattpad Fan Fiction - but I’ve been inspired by the formidable output of Zinna Writes to buck up and post it. Part 2 is some ideas for other stories that I got from the book, and Part 3 is a selection of the aforementioned lovely details from Metamorphoses that I particularly liked (Parts 2 and 3 are probably only for the Greek myth nerds).

***

No one is sure how long the man has been there. The grooves in the rock provide the only indication, the stone worn down over time as he has paced the island, back and forth, back and forth.

The island is low, the trees knowing now after millennia of harsh winds not to go above their station. This means the sky rolls out above them with a width that defies a single glance. Small strawflowers butt through, greyish stalks and yellow petals poking their way amongst lichens and mosses. This island is gashed, branded. It is tattooed with a trench, knee-height. Angular and sharp, it is the only sign that this island has not been left to nature alone.

The man does not know how he is here, or what he has done to arrive in this place. Yesterdays and todays have blended, and if he thinks back he sees only a fug of sameness and being. They say that times passage is measured in change, that it must flow, must move - and so it seems that no time has passed, though all of time could have done. He paces, and on this island, it is only the depth of the trench that alters. His carving into the earth is what gives time its arrow, the depth of it a means by which a yesterday is split from a today or a tomorrow.

He does not know how he is there - but we can.

The man is Pirithous, ruler of Lapith, son of Ixion, and once - though he does not know it - a man who tried, with Theseus, to rescue Persephone.

The gods have put it about that Pirithous is now being punished for his hubris. That his attempted theft of Persephone was an act of arrogance, asserting himself to be worthy of a goddess, meaning to abduct her for his wife. This is why he is now condemned to eternal forgetfulness, trapped on an island in the middle of the River Lethe.

He remains the unsung, unknown member of that rarefied group of mortals who have been to the underworld and returned. Heracles, Theseus, Orpheus - it is a testament to the work of the gods that Pirithous does not now stand amongst them. Instead, his name has faded into a couple of lines of a poem.

As is often the case with the gods, the story of Pirithous’ attempted theft of Persephone is a half-ling, a bastard of truth and expedience. Pirithous’ intention towards Persephone were noble. He wished to free her. Her state - trapped by the pomegranate seeds forced down her throat - is one of perpetual imprisonment. Even as the summer and spring come, they are tainted by the imminent winter. But - because she was a woman, because the gods had bartered a deal, because her situation was a little better than it could have been - Persephone’s lot had become part of the natural rhythms and order of life, accepted into the world and its balance.

Only Pirithous saw the wrongness of this, of her continued imprisonment, and tried to make it right when the opportunity presented itself. When Atlas breathed, the earth shook, and Greece cracked open, a fissure emerging to the depths of Hades - and Pirithous took Theseus by the arm and told him to follow. Over the banks of the Styx, passing the depths of Tartarus, past the shrieks and laughs of the Isle of the Blest.

As they walk through Hades, it is the Asphodel Fields that strikes him most. The shades there move amongst piles of chaff, and the chaff responds with murmurs, murmurs that fall on top of one another to give the place the sussuruss of a calm sea. They are yellowish, morphing into a faceless, forbidding mass, a series of barely-breaths. All of their lives, the colour and richness, reduced to this sea of chuntering, muttering grey.

Eventually the two heroes come to a clearing, a grotto of yew trees. They are there to barter. Hades must keep his kingdom closed, preserve the boundary between life and death. Those who know of a new passage, a way in and out, hold - for a moment - the power to upend the fragile balance of dead and living, to let the shades escape, and return the Earth to the ages of Bronze and Iron. It is knowledge of this passage that Pirithous intends to barter for the return of Persephone.

In the shade of the grotto, covered in shadow, a white poplar tree bites through the ground in front of Pirithous. It is ethereal, the tufted leaves breathing with the rattling air of the underworld. It’s a sign. Hades knows that they are there, and wishes them to make their case. For a minute, all is still. The leaves and rise and fall of Pirithous’ chest are all that mark out the passing of the seconds.

A ripple passes through the shades, a voice that comes from nowhere and everywhere all at once ‘Take the bark from this tree and write on the one side your passage and on the other what it is I shall give you in return.’

Pirithous writes. He writes of Lapith, of home. Describing his journey, he moves in his mind through the olive groves and cypresses, through the fields of rapeseed, out to the edge of the island, to an inlet where jellyfish collect in summer, and the light in the sea is banded as the sun streams through. He writes of the cave, half-way up, accessible only if you pull yourself up with your shoulders, how - after the earthquake - this cave ceased to have an ending, and brought you to this spot on the banks of the Styx, a little east of the Isles of the Blest.

As he writes, he thinks about his people. Pirithous is a King, a good one - respected and honest. He thinks of the thousands waiting, reliant on him - and realises the enormity of the opportunity he has. Persephone is trapped, but she is still immortal - still with infinite summers open to her. But his people are condemned to perish, to an eternity in this dry land of Asphodel. His people are not heroes, certainly, but he thinks they must deserve more than an eternity of wandering amongst the corn husks in those barren fields. As King, he owes them more than that.

He turns the sheet. And there he hesitates. For what is the right thing to ask?

And he writes of something else. He asks for the immortality of Lapiths, for his people to never face the death of their bodies. He is not arrogant - he does not wish for them to be gods, for a people of gods would challenge Zeus - and he knows enough of the movements of the gods to be sure that this will not end well. He asks only for the end of their corporeality, the end of the death of the body.

He buries the bark, pressing it into the soil so that Hades might take it. As he pushes over the white bark, he feels the soil warm. He jumps back, alarmed, and sees the poplar tree has blossomed. The deal has been accepted.

Upon his return to Lapith a great feast is laid out in his honour. He stands, and proclaims to his people that they now need not fear death. Wine flows, and at first the people rejoice. To stay, to be able to live and to breathe, to walk the earth and taste the wine and continue to do so for evermore. To have infinite chances at heroism, infinite time to be. What luck to be a person of Lapiths, what joy to be a citizen of Pirithous!

Time passes on the island, and the new immortals live well for a century, and then another. Life continues, maintains the normal patterns and order until one day a son turns to his mother and asks when he was born. She strains, looks to dredge up the memory - and finds it gone. The son is perturbed, and turns to his aunts. They too - strain, apologise and confess that they too cannot recall. Uncles, cousins, grandparents - no one can remember the occasion of this boys birth. He may as well have come out of the dust.

Murmurings of discontent strike the city. For the boy does not know how he came to exist, and now that moment may as well have been absent. That piece of life is lost. He goes to the king himself and presses Pirithous, wanting to know the exact terms of the bargain, the deal he struck with Hades. Pirithous shows him the inlet and speaks of what he has gained - bodies that will not finish, that will always walk this Earth.

‘Are you not grateful my child? For you shall continue on, shall never know what it is to leave this Earth, shall never have to make the descent to Hades’

‘Yet I shall know oblivion none the less. I am a child of nowhere now. I know not where I came from or how I came to be. The child that I once was has been lost, as surely as if I had been stabbed. He is gone and I know not where to find him.’

When Pirithous struck his deal, he did not think of how, when Prometheus formed man from clay, he placed within them a drop of the river Lethe, of forgetfulness. Though the bodies of Lapith’s citizens persisted, their memories continued to forget. They live, still, but they die too - persisting through time, but forever losing who they once were as those people slip out of memory and into oblivion.

This created an immense panic amongst the people of Lapith. People realised that who they were now was destined to dissolve as time passed, as the body replaced itself, as the memories they had now were crowded out by others. What was this life? This living, when all that was done was condemned to be forgotten, when there could never be an ending of what one had been and what one had done?

New customs and rites emerged. Friends greeted one another with an account of their first meeting, a mutual reliving of their story, a preservation of their time together. Elaborate songs were spun around the powerful, lovers courted with details from past meetings, and people parted with ‘na min xechasteís’ - may you not be forgotten.

And what to do about the man who had condemned them to this fate, who in his deal with Hades had forgotten forgetting?

It was Pirithous’ punishment to be forgotten too - to be exiled, and for his name to never again be spoken. He was to be dissolved, erased from who it was to be, condemned to watch his own self slowly slip away.

Pirithous does not know it, but that is how he came to be on the island, to exist where he lives still.

Even now, he walks the same track, and every year it gets a little deeper.

In my day they called it the Lethian, but I believe your name for it is Mariana.

***

Some other notes from the original - bits and pieces that I wasn’t aware of despite having read a lot of the stories before. If you are a fan of Greek myths they might delight you as they did me!

• I thought this description of rumours was a really cool image:
  
  In the world’s centre lies a place between
  the lands and seas and regions of the sky …
  Here Rumour dwells,
  Her chosen home set on the highest peak
  Constructed with a thousand apertures
  And countless entrances and never a door
  It’s open night and day and built throughout
  Of echoing bronze; it all reverberates
  Repeating voices, doubling what it hears…
  When Jupiter has made the rain clouds crash
  Crowds throng its halls a lightweight populace
  That comes and goes, and rumours everywhere
  Thousands, false mixed with true, roam to and fro,
  And words flit by and phrases all confused…
  Here is Credulity, here reckless Error,
  Groundless Delight, Whispers of unknown source,
  Sudden sedition, overwhelming Fears.
  All that goes on in heaven or sea or land.

• There were some really lovely descriptions of minor characters. The description of Envy, locked in a frost-filled hovel, eating a viper, clutching a thorn covered staff, described as ‘she wounds, is wounded, she herself her own torture’ was so good, as was Hunger - all concave, bilious decay, and the languid land of Sleep.

• The Flood: There’s a moment, right in the beginning of Metamorphoses where there is a Flood (Ovid describes the tops of the trees lined with mud after the flood, roofs of temples a bit scummy from the receding water). I wonder what it would have been like to be the God of the Sea in that moment - to have a sense that for just a minute, you have control of the whole Earth, the whole world - what would you have been tempted to do.
  
  Out on soaking wings the south wind flew,
  His ghastly features veiled in deepest gloom.
  His beard was sodden with rain, his white hair drenched;
  Mists wreathed his brow and streaming water fell
  From wings and chest; and when in giant hands
  He crushed the hanging clouds, the thunder crashed
  And storms of blinding rain poured down from heaven

• Crikey, some of the gore!
  ‘And as he lay outstretched his blood leaped high
  As when a pipe bursts where the lead is flawed
  And water through the narrow hissing hole
  Shoots forth long leaping jets that cut the air.’
  
  Or
  
  ‘Her tongue with tongs and, with his brutal sword,
  Cut it away. The root jerked to and fro
  The tongue lay on the dark soil muttering
  And wriggling, as the tail cut off a snake
  Wriggles, and, as it died, it tried to reach
  Its mistress’ feet’
  
  Or (for the death of Hercules)
  
  ‘As the poison burned, his very blood
  Bubbled and hissed as when a white-hot blade
  Is quenched in icy water’

• Some details of familiar characters - like Medea riding a team of dragons; Midas hiding his donkey ears in a purple turban; Daedalus putting suncream on Icarus’ face; or Polydemus, a cyclops, trying to flirt as he ‘studied his fierce features in a pool/ And practised to compose them.’ I liked the detail in the story of Venus and Adonis, that Venus hoiks her skirt up to go hiking, de-glamming as she falls in love. I thought this was so sweet, the image of this traditionally austere goddess all rumpled and unserious.

• This image of the Gods running along the length of the Milky Way
  Across the height of heaven there runs a road,
  Clear when the night is bare, the Milky Way,
  Famed for its sheen of white. Along this way
  Come the immortals to the royal halls

• A final suprise - the Doctrines of Pythagorus - the last substantial bit of the Metamorphoses is… an argument for vegetarianism? This (p.354) is a long essay on change, the oddness that one body should be transformed into another (too long to quote - but I’d read it in full!).

***

I took a gap year as an experiment. I wanted to work out if I could be happy – because I realised I didn’t really know. If your Woe-Is-Me alarm bells are ringing, please don’t worry. Spoiler alert - the answer is Yes! Really happy! The Vast Majority of the Time! Hooray! This isn’t a misery memoir. Bear with me for (I promise) one paragraph where I will skim over the rough bit because it’s important context. But this will be the only paragraph of misery simpliciter. And that is a promise.

(TW: sexual assault/ rape). I had a rough time at University. Those three years included: a rape (and sharing accommodation with the rapist), a pandemic, losing my grandfather, Oxford Finals, a couple of months of constant low-level allergic reactions, and finished off with something approaching an eating disorder. Before that I’d had an odd time at school – lightly bullied at my first, and then pretty popular at my second, but where a quirk of timetabling meant most of my time was spent on my own or with one other girl. After university I joined a corporate job, worked very hard and didn’t feel happy. This made me very wobbly and sad - I felt like I’d worked so, so hard to keep things together over university and get to the Promised Land of Adult Life - and yet now that I’d arrived, I still wasn’t happy.

I slowly realised over the course of my corporate year that I’d never really managed to answer the question ‘Can I be happy?’ I’d had happy periods (I thought), and happy times, but not many stretches of uncomplicated happiness in my adult life. There’d always been some confounding variable which made it difficult to work out if my spells of sadness were a product of how I was wired or where I was. And working in the City wasn’t really helping me figure it out. So I ran away to Kenya to try and answer two questions – the first ‘Can I be happy?’ and the second ‘If so, how?’

Spoiler alert again: I didn’t find all the answers (even after a whole gap-year-and-a-half). But I got a much better sense of the question, and enough answers to muddle along for the time being.

I realised I’d never be able to answer the question ‘Can I be happy?’ for sure – I’d never know if I spent most of my time happy. I realised I could control the frequency of my moods, even if I couldn’t engineer them. I realised that when trying to answer this question, you’re putting two very complicated things together (namely ‘the body’ and ‘the world), and when doing so you’re much better off looking towards nature rather than books. I realised that I wanted to live a good life, as good a life as possible, but that involved satisfying some conditions around making sure I had good days.

(Even better, I got to look for these answers gallivanting round Kenya, India, Nepal, Spain, Ethiopia and Sweden - with Switzerland and Paris thrown in for good measure. Which is an absurd privilege to have had.)

So what did I figure out?

We forget a lot. Basically everything. We forget almost all of our life. Which is weird, and disorientating and odd – but it’s also an opportunity. I’m going to spend a bit of time stressing the strangeness of how much we forget because the next bit – the opportunity – only comes if you spend enough time sitting in the oddness of forgetting.

I did a Vipassana course in India. Vipassana is 10 days spent sat in silence for 10 hours a day. You sit there, and you simply feel time pass for hours. You spend most of it distracted, or trying to focus on the movement of air at the base of your nose. One of my distractions was trying to think about what I would say when I came out – when people asked me how it went. And I realised I wouldn’t really know.

On the third day, I ran through all my memories of the first. There was the mortification of handing in all of my books and ‘Sex in the City’ being on the top of my bag. There was the lizard eating a praying mantis, the single wing falling off and floating towards the ground. There were a few other things, now forgotten. But the total amount I could remember ran to be about 10 minutes. If I was asked ‘how did it go?’, this 10-minute sample didn’t seem like great data. What I’d remembered was random – I liked the lizard so I’d paid attention, I’d found the Sex in the City funny and filed it away as ‘amusing anecdote for later’. But these sorts of things weren’t really what you’d call a representative sample. If I was a scientist, I wouldn’t hit the threshold of confidence to put that forward - to be able to say how the day went. Really, I had no idea if I’d been happy – and this would be the same for the other ten days of the course.

At some other point on Vipassana I tried to do this with all my memories. And it didn’t even fill a day. I’d lived for 8,500 days at that point and I couldn’t remember enough of them to fill a single meditation session. I basically had no idea how my life had gone – and I could try and fight against this, but the overwhelming story was going to stay the same. Most of my moments – the overwhelming majority - would be forgotten.

Of course, I knew this before. We all know with that slight unnerving sense that time passes away unrecorded. I think I’d been forced to sit in that uncomfortable truth a little more than most because when I accused the man who raped me, I had to do so on the basis of my memory. And when you’re dropping that sort of bomb in your own/ someone else’s/ your family’s life, you think a hell of a lot about whether or not you have good evidence to do so. So, I’d already thought a lot about memory, already noticed how much we forget things.

What had changed was my response. Before, I’d tried to fight back – to expand my memory outwards, to try and preserve all the time that would slip away unrecorded – by squashing it down into achievements, by picking it out with new experiences, by sharing moments with friends, by making things that would persist from one moment to the next. But on Vipassana, I realised that this was pretty pointless. Whatever I did would shift the dial from maybe 0.5% to 1%. The overwhelming story was still going to be that most of my time was going to be forgotten - and I was going to have to find a way to be okay with it.

So I thought about Kant, because he’s my favourite philosopher, and because he is the best person at dealing with unknowns. Kant draws circles around things, separating them into ‘things we can know’ and ‘things we simply can’t’ and tells us there’s no point trying to answer the questions that sit in the ‘things we simply can’t’ bucket. What I’d realised was the question I’d set out to answer – ‘Am I generally happy?’ fell into the ‘things we simply can’t’ category. I’d never know the net balance of pleasure and pain in my life. I simply didn’t have the data. Memory is biased and limited and faulty, there was bugger-all I could do about that, and so I might as well stop fretting about trying to come up with a scientific answer.

Instead of trying to focus on what was true, it made more sense to think about what was useful. I realised I might as well tell myself I’d been happy, because I wasn’t going to come up with anything like a defensible answer either way. The story was always going to be biased and wrong, so it may as well be helpful. And it seemed far better to tell myself I’d had a happy life than a miserable one.

So on Vipassana I start (and this is so cringey, but I don’t care) to trace my joys. To think about the moments that had made me experience a very pure kind of happiness and think about the happy moments and chances that led up to them – to actively work to bias my own recollections. I thought about Exeter Ball, dancing to Angels with some of my favourite people in the world, and then that meant I thought about the first time my friend Georgie and I had avocado bagels in a quad outside, and the moment my mum and I opened my IB results and realised I was going to Oxford, and a whole bunch of other things too. It was the opposite, really, of brooding. It made me feel like my life was joy-directed and that all of the happiness I experienced was inevitable.

It's easy not to do this. We think about problems because we try to solve them. We think about overcoming adversity because it makes us proud. We think about mistakes because we try to do better. Each of these, alone, is a good thing – but they do bias our memories towards remembering bad stuff. We need the reverse-brooding to counteract it – to make sure that we remember the good moments, the good things too. And I’d be okay if people stopped reading from here – this is the most important thing that I wanted to say. You will never know if you have been happy, so you might as well tell yourself you have been.

Obviously, there are limits to this. Don’t delude yourself that you’re happy, stay in a crap situation and then die. That is not the lesson I’m trying to share. I also became a bit softer in my opinions about what we can know about the character of time that’s passed – but more on that later. But generally – you’re going to forget most of your time, so stop stressing about how to preserve it. The main story is, and always will be, most of it is going to get forgotten.

This matters because an awareness of the fallibility of memory is quietly impacting a lot of our behaviour. We’ve never been so aware of how much we forget. Some of this comes from scientists – people like Kahneman and Tversky who showed how memory and the brain tricks us. Part of this comes from exams – we spend a lot of our adolescence fretting about the limits of our memory and trying to push back against them. Part of this comes from new discussions around false memories, new awareness of how changeable memory can be. But I think most of this comes from phones.

In the past, we had to get used to forgetting. If you didn’t have a scribe or a painter handy, most moments would get forgotten. Nowadays, we still forget most of our lives. But we don’t have to forget any individual moment – we can take a picture, note it down, post it. It’s a weird situation. We have to forget most things, but we don’t have to forget any particular thing – which means that we’re conscious of allowing things to slip past in a way that we weren’t before. Every moment that goes unrecorded could have been preserved in a way that wasn’t the case in the past. We’re constantly conscious of what we’re allowing to slip past, to be forgotten.

And this leads to a drive to try and preserve time – to overcome these limits. I think it’s seen in the proliferating forms of new or novel experiences. If you’d never been axe-throwing before, and you go axe-throwing – you’ve preserved that time! You’ve done something new! It’s also why loneliness is so corrosive. When you’re with someone, they might remember things that you don’t - and in sharing the moment, you’re increasing what could be preserved, the things that you forget in a kind of ‘possibility space’ where they might be brought back into existence by the person you’re spending time with. I also think it’s why we strive – we’re trying to preserve time as evidenced in the job title we achieved or the grades we get. We’ll forget the moments spent learning about fractional distillation, but the A* in Chemistry GCSE will attest to the time we spent studying. We’ll forget every individual late night, but at the end we’ll be an Associate, so that time won’t have been for nothing. And I think it’s why we create – we write and make so there is a product that can carry on, attesting to the time spent building it.

So, what might change, if people confront the overwhelming fact of forgetting head on? I don’t know. I know that, at least for me, after coming to terms with the fact that most time is forgotten, some things have changed. I still do these ‘time-preserving’ activities (seeking out novelty, spending time with people, creating and - sometimes - achieving), but I’m more motivated by the character of the time itself rather than how sticky it is. I do novelty because I like novelty, not because it’s the easiest way to preserve time. I see people when I want to see people (and I’m so much less scared of being alone). I create things because I like creating and I achieve things if I enjoy the process of achieving things. It’s a general shift in focus towards the process rather than the output, and it’s been a much, much nicer way to live.

It’s led to some interesting trade-offs. How do you value time that you know will be forgotten? How can it have value? It feels difficult to say it does. It’s the same as having a million pounds transferred into your bank account and then back out without you noticing. If I tell you that you had a truly excellent day on the 14^th of September 2008, how does that make you feel? I’d imagine not much. So how do you make happiness sticky – that is, have present happiness, but have happiness in such a way that it continues to make you happy in the future?

I think one of the ways that we can make happiness ‘sticky’ is through our habits. If you know that you have paid attention to what makes you happy, know that you’ve made it a focus and a priority, then you can be confident that you’ve spent your time reasonably happy. I know that I am happy with a pack of Pick and Mix, walking. I’ve done this an absurd number of times this gap year – through the streets of Córdoba, and then round the Swedish town I’m calling home.

I’m not going to remember each walk. In ten years, I may not even remember the habit – might not remember this was something I did that made me happy. But I’ll remember that I paid attention to what made me happy, and this will give me confidence that I was – will make it easier believe the story I tell myself that I have been happy. It’ll make sense because ‘that’s the sort of person I am’. And that knowledge – more specifically ‘I spent a lot of time walking with a Pick and Mix’, more generally ‘I know what makes me happy and I do things to help bring it about’ – represents big chunks of my mood, big chunks of my time, even as the detail of them is forgotten.

Another way to make happiness sticky is through the body. I noticed in Kenya that I had nails for what seemed like the first time in years. What this meant was I hadn’t had any reason to bite them. And so this represented a stretch of time without any need to bite them – without anything sufficiently stressful to make me chew them off. Our body is with us through everything we do, and so our body can act to evidence the things that we forget. It shows us what a lot of present moments were like.

But there are still trade-offs between this present, probably forgotten happiness and happiness in the future. I’ve started to think of these trade-offs as the difference between Good Days and a Good Life. My recipe for a Good Day involves nice coffee, reading, time outside and the Bare Minimums – co-operating hormones, sleep and the absence of a hangover (I’m easily pleased). My recipe for a Good Life is something I’m still working out – but it’s something more than just a collection of Good Days. There are some projects – love, career, children – that may mean giving up some Good Days in the service of a Good Life. One of the things that I learnt on this gap year is that I certainly need enough Good Days – enough to be confident in the character of time as time I was happy in, enough Good Day thinking to ensure that I enjoy most of my days - and now I’m working out how many of them I need.

Recognising the tension between my idea of a Good Day and my idea of a Good Life has been helpful. Before, I’d exclusively focused on trying to create a Good Life. I tried to achieve as much as I could, strive towards goals, tried to preserve as much time as I was able to in order to contribute to this set of milestones that made up a Good Life. As a result, I forgot the importance of Good Days and had a year that (I’m pretty confident) was quite unhappy. Now, when I’m trying to optimise my life – when I’m trying to work out what a ‘Good Life’ looks like, I think of my Good Days as ‘transcendental conditions’ (if you’re a philosopher) or ‘lexically prior’ (if you’re an economist) or ‘the requirement that life is worth living’ (if you’re normal). You have to have enough Good Days to ensure that you’re confident your life is worth living, or there may be a point where you cease to want living, and then you can’t have a Good Life at all. There’s only so much deferring gratification one can do.

How to know what makes a Good Day? This is much easier than a Good Life. Notice which days make you happy. If there aren’t any, try new things. Repeat until you have a Good Day. (Don’t try and answer this question by looking at what happy-looking people do. You’ll learn how to look happy, but not necessarily how to be happy.)

You’re not going to be able to work out what makes a Good Day by following rules or generalisations. This isn’t the best source of data. Sure, it may be true that, in aggregate, people who don’t have social media are happier – but if you’re someone incredibly fulfilled by your content creation business, you’re not one of those people. And following what makes people ‘on average’ happy would be stupid. It’s far, far worse data than what you get through experiments. It’s the same as if a table tennis coach found out Olympic table tennis players had smaller ears on average and so started only looking at players with small ears. It would be a much better idea to just… watch them play. Same thing here. You can look at averages and trends about what tends to make people happy, but the best data is to run a whole bunch of little experiments and find what works for you.

But if you’re still stuck, still looking at what to try – I’d go back to nature. When you think about the body, about the millions of cells, about the tiny amount we know – most of medicine is a mystery (I know this sounds very MAHA, but we move). There’s so much going on, so many sources of change and interaction effects and variables of race or gender or age or a hundred other things besides. Mind-boggling complexity, and then you add in the fact that this incredibly complex organism is interacting with this incredibly complex environment – the entire world. Two bafflingly complex systems. And we think that we can work out what to do? What will make this thing tick – because we’ve run some studies showing a correlation?

Or we can look at what has worked for hundreds of thousands of years and trust in that.

And I get that sounds kind of hippy woo-woo. But the place I moved to in Kenya was situated in the Rift Valley, and I felt like so many things became easier. I slept for 9,10 hours every night for months - the first time I could remember this happening. My skin cleared. My moods were better. And I looked at the life I was living – eating proper, unprocessed food, rarely drinking, spending time outside, gentle activity throughout the day – and it wasn’t really surprising. I was doing exactly what we had evolved to do, and (shockingly) my body rewarded it. (I also get this was an unbelievably, stupidly, absurdly privileged position, and that I’m grossly over-simplifying - but if and where you can change your life, I still think you should try and pay attention to nature when you do so).

My wobbly spell in London was partially down to events (see Misery Memoir paragraph at the beginning). And it’s tempting to try and explain things on the ‘events level’ - to create a neat set of cause and effect that led me to feel a certain way. But I also think a massive chunk of it can, and should, be explained on the ‘biological level’. I ate tons of Wine Gums, drank too much coffee and wine, didn’t spend time outside and lived off meal deals. When I moved to Kenya, the events hadn’t changed. But I could now manage them far better. And I feel like a big part of what explains where I ended up was failing to look after my body, and a large part of why I felt better was I took care of that biological level far better.

It’s a mental trick I try to do now when I feel sad - run through biological explanations (what’s going on in my body), psychological explanations (are there particular things in my past that might make this upset me more) and events-based explanations (what has actually happened and why might that have upset me) to account for why I’m feeling what I’m feeling. Often, though events may be playing a bit of a role, the biological level is where I find the biggest variation.

And you can manage this biological variation. You can eat well, try and sleep a well as possible, avoid alcohol and too much caffeine and – duh – you’ll tend to be much happier. You can choose jobs that don’t involve lots of stress if stress makes you sad. I am way, way less prone to Fun Exciting Periods of stabby-sadness if I take these steps.

This brought with it a new kind of responsibility. I’d treated my spells of low mood as things that came upon me – that I couldn’t control, that I was entirely subject to. And I’d sort of let myself off. In these low moments, if I was horrible, I excused myself. I couldn’t help it – it was these spiky attacks that I didn’t have any choice in the matter about. In Kenya, I realised that I could control them. Not in an ‘ordering from a menu’ way - I couldn’t guarantee what mood I would have. But I could make some moods much more likely than others – I could alter their frequencies. And if I didn’t do that – if I didn’t put myself in the best position to have as infrequent low moods as possible – then I was responsible for that variation. I was responsible for any excess of low mood above that baseline, because I could do things to make the frequency lower – and so if I was horrible in one of those attacks then that was on me.

This has led to some big decisions. I’ve let go of a few dreams. I want to be successful. I want to achieve things and do things. I want to be clever. But I also want to be kind. I want to be honest, I want to be loving, I want to be fun and I want to be happy. And I’m not willing to give all of those things up in order to be successful. I remember thinking very clearly Lauren, you’re never going to be the Director of the UN. I’m not as nice under stress, and I’m not willing to give up those other traits in pursuit of success – so I’m not going to operate at 100% all the time. There’s a trade-off, a personal qualities for quantitative metrics, and I’ve got a far better idea of where I’m happy setting that balance.

…

The world seems very sunny today. My Lime bike ride over to a brunch took exactly the number of minutes I had on my Lime pass (win), I met a bunch of interesting people yesterday (win) and I’m heading to Bath to see my little sister (massive win).

I have Micheal Bublé’s ‘Everything’ looping through my Spotify and I’m feeling a bit mushy and a bit sentimental. I’ve tried writing about why Holly is wonderful, so have been marinating in a bubble of nice thoughts and gratitude. I didn’t manage to do her justice, so instead of my mushy ‘I love my sister’ post (sorry Hols), I’m doing some London delights - a compilation of things that have been making me happy recently.

(For those new here - the thinking behind delights is in ‘On Delights’, and there’s a couple of other delights in ‘On Autumn Delights’, ‘On Winter Delights’ and ‘On Meandering’.)

Miscellany: Teenage ducklings in Regents Park. The amount of water in London, the romance of canal boats. Light filtered through cowslip. A wobbly spell passing. The perfect jeans!* Realising I like my job (even if I’m not sure I’m good at it yet). Therapy. A tricky situation navigated well. Seeing clouds on the Shard from my balcony. Moorhens and herons. A fox jumping near-vertical over a fence, balletic, pulling through a right angle in a few fluid seconds. The iridescence on a pigeons neck, a little flash of peacock. The bobbing wobbling mallard that flew over my head in the Ladies Pond.

Friends: So many of my friends being happy and content - people have found their grooves, found their rhythms and I’m so pleased for them. It is a real joy of the mid-twenties that more and more people answer the question ‘how are you?’ with ‘yeah really well’.

Sometimes this is love - one friend has found a girlfriend who adores him, and has grown into a better man through her. Sometimes this is through jobs - from the consultants to the charity workers, I love seeing people find what they want to do and doing it well. Sometimes this happiness is simply the product of an awful lot of thinking. I leave every interaction with one friend feeling like a warm fuzzball because she has had to work through a lot - but she did, and it is paying dividends, and life is looking rosy.

I absolutely love these ‘yeah really well’s’ and love how happy so many of my friends are, and love too the steps that others are making - a masters, setting boundaries, moving jobs - to be happy. I’m so pleased to see so many of my friends happy.

(I just ducked out of my reverie to check where I was on my bus journey - and have managed to press the button my station in the nick of time. Another delight - near-misses are always massive wins.)

Work: Work! I had a lala week - not as productive as I’d like to be - and the world didn’t collapse. I like my job, like what I’m doing and I’m learning a lot. I like the people I work with, I like this job, and though I definitely feel an enormous amount of imposter syndrome, I also feel lucky to be now learning what I’m learning. I’m still figuring things out (and still have a lurking sense I’m going to get fired) but I'm very happy with this work, and life feels so much more manageable.

Lectures: The joys of predictable hours is being able to book things, and London has a staggering number of good ways to spend an evening. And - because I’m a nerd - for me that means lectures - on the role of maths in creativity, on what to do about space junk in low orbit, on the philosophy of memory. I love that I have friends who are willing to indulge my nerdiness, and love that people now suggest cool lectures for me to go to. Long live the nerd squad.

Arts: I went to see The Years (wow wow wow!) - which had the delight of elderly actors playing different ages. It’s amazing to watch those elderly bodies transform, drawing on muscle memory from decades past - becoming a six year old with a tilted hip and inflated cheek, slouching into teenagers the next. You don’t forget the wrinkles, the white hairs and restricted movement - but you also know exactly who they are portraying. It’s such a cool demonstration of skill, the ability to force an audience into this kind of double-think.

Also - ‘Astonishing Things’ by Victor Hugo at the Royal Academy. This was gorgeous - the drawings of a maverick man brimming over with creativity and fun, with finger painting, feather quills and hidden messages in his paintings (and the odd bonus of an ex in the mezzanine).

People: More generally - London is a city rich in serendipity. I’ve bumped into former colleagues, school friends, and so many good strangers. At points it’s felt like the city itself is trying to serve up interesting people. Highlights have been a politico in Rory Stewart’s run for mayor; a former international footballer turned cocaine addict and conspiracy theorist; a photographer dressed head to toe in red; a girl who sailed across the Atlantic; a physicist turned art dealer; a writer, and a philosopher of science (who described this Substack as the ‘new academic revolution’. For this I do, genuinely, love you.)

A funny moment. I went for sushi with a friend, and in front of us was a bunch of men from a run club. But not just any run club. A run club in collaboration with London Fashion Week. Bless my recently-dumped heart. Anti-objectifying-feminist-principles respectfully set aside for half an hour.

Food: I can RUSTLE THINGS UP! Mixed successes (my warm feta, pistachio pesto and roasted pepper pasta extravaganza was maybe… not the one) - but I am cooking without recipes. I’m throwing things together! Substituting ingredients! Rustling!

Confidence: My confidence was knocked by my breakup, which left me with a few niggling grizzles (grizzling niggles?) rattling around my head. I’d taken the approach of making a big shiny veneer of ‘everything is fine and dandy and I have a bunch of plans and lots of friends and I’m moving on and dating and it’s all COMPLETELY FINE.’

But I wasn’t that fine - not duh-duh-duh bad, but definitely a bit sad - and I finally had a very honest conversation with a very good friend about it, which gave me one of those periods of catharsis and mental quiet that feels so, so good. And now I’m feeling much more like myself. So hooray for that. (And a reminder to myself - sometimes there’s something to be said for a little vulnerability.)

Shirking: I’m not exercising loads. I said no to an unnecessary triathlon that was one thing too many. I’m not always reading or using my time, and I’m not always ‘on’. I like this, and like that I feel okay with it - that I don’t have a constant ‘should’ chuntering along in the back of my mind. I submitted a paper to a journal and it wasn’t the most perfect of pieces, submitted my dissertation with a few slapdash footnotes - neither are the very best they could be, but they’re good enough and that’s good enough.

Painting: I’ve started carting around my watercolours, and I’ve found spontaneous painting in a park with a friend = deep joy.

Spring: It had been two years since I’d had a spring, and my goodness - what a delight. Early sun and no storms meant the blossoms have seemed to go on forever, cacophonies of pink and white sprouting all over Bethnal Green. Love for primavera, this ‘first-seeing’, the spring beauty that acts as an invitation to remember.

(P.S.: For lectures - just type lectures into Eventbrite and there’s tons. I’m (hopefully - depending on how work/ life goes) seeing dreams to a better world on the 21st May; what even is the history of philosophy on the 29th; how the brain invents your reality on the 9th of June; life & times of Francis Crick on the 19th and a medic-ey AI one on the 7th of July - all free/ £>10.

Unfortunately I can’t make this but if anyone is free tomorrow there’s a watercress festival ?? in Hampshire?? Which seems like a good spontaneous Sunday activity. What a joy to live in a world with festivals for salad leaves - a bonus delight.)

*M&S Palazzos - thank me later

Quick Summary: We’ll call this stretching. Back to writing after a hiatus with the NEW AND HIGHLY ORIGINAL topic that burning out is BAD, over-scheduling yourself is BAD and resting is GOOD. Scintillating, novel stuff. You heard it here first (in my 3rd, 7th, 14th, 29th and 53rd Substacks respectively). Not my best, but c’est la vie - at least I’m writing again. Going to read some Bergson this week and come back next week with a more philosophical take.

An interesting experience this evening. I was mid-conversation at a work social, and a spicy topic came up, my adrenaline went into overdrive and I almost fainted. Full-on blurry vision, lots of sweat, white, pupils - the whole shebang.

So that’s cool.

Taking this as a message from my body to maybe… chill out. Which feels odd. I’m not doing loads of things as it is. On the London-chill-o-meter, I’m on the frostier end of the scale. There’s people here who whirlwind at a far faster clip - who gym six times a week, and meal prep, and socialise, and everything. But though I’m not at that level, I am doing more than I was - working normal(ish) hours, finishing a masters, and making many more social plans.

I fell into the trap of London, and London’s obsession with time. Time elapsing, slipping away, how to cling onto it, how best to cram it into little boxes. It makes sense. When you’re paying goodness knows how much in rent, there’s a pressure to make the most of the city - to see and do everything, and spread yourself and your time as thinly and as tautly as possible. Each hour trails behind it the opportunity cost, what else could be done, because there is always more.

I can see this in the many day-in-the-lifes that pop up in my Instagram, 7:35, 8:30, 9:45, 23:02. I see it too in the grim-faced metronomic runners, each step tamping down time a bit more. I hear it in the ‘what-have-you-been-up-to, what-will-you-be-up-to’ chatter of the city, that - in my more cynical moments - I think has an undercurrent of checking that the fun stuff, the real fun stuff, the Gatsby-London isn’t happening stage right, just out of sight.

That’s exactly the mindset I fell into. Last week I squeezed a theatre trip, a lecture and a painting class in after work, and worked late the other night. I resurrected my spreadsheet, booked in a million and one things, found myself making plans a month and a half into the future. I’ve played time-Tetris, done the double-triple stacking I have a regrettable tendency to lapse into.

But then I’ve been trying to write. And… nothing. Zero. Zilch. Part of this is because a lot of brain space has been taken up with my re-entry into more traditional employment. Part of this is a catch-22 of big things happening, that seem the only things worth writing about, but aren’t my story to tell. But it is also because spreading my time so thin meant I have been living a shallower life. Dense in events, light on reflection. This inability to write is interesting. I like writing - I’ve missed it, and (even though it’s always going to be a hobby), this blog is important to me. It is a huge counter-balance to the fear of time slipping away. And so it is strange that, despite doing much more, I feel I have less to say.

Well, what to do about these two things - my writers block, and my fun fainting moment?

I think it’s a sign it’s time to take more time (?). To allow life to be a bit less dense, and give myself the space to fully plug into the things that do happen. To realise that - right now, with a lot swirling in my head and my heart - it might not be the moment to also do the triathlon I signed up for. Or to feel guilty about the exhibitions I should have been to, or the friends I haven’t seen yet, or the holiday I spectacularly failed to organise. It’s okay to just focus on job and getting my bearings, allow myself some fluff and flex around that.

Still figuring out this London thing, and I’ll work it out. I’ll get there. (No really I will. She says. Convincing herself, just a little).

***

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfilment

Mahon - Leaves

As I’ve walked through the city, this poem has been cropping up a lot recently. London is crammed with possibilities, which is both a blessing and a curse. Life is so dense here because London opens itself up to density, and this is the magic of it. You can meet writers, philosophers, photographers, designers, politicos and more. You can see designers, and exhibits, one of the ten once-in-a-lifetime shows on at any moment. There are a hundred and one things to do, and I do love this about London. For all I’m a bit knackered, for all I’ve over-egged it a little, London is fabulous.

But I’ve been kicking around here for a while, and over time London has become suffused with possibilities that seem a little more personal. They’re there on Regents Canal, outside a Soho Chinese, next to an East London bagel shop. They’re lurking behind ads on the tube, inside a glass office, in the background of a chance encounter with an old schoolfriend. Walking around, I’m struck by how so much of London contains traces of different lives I might have led.

So I like the release, the permission of this poem. It is okay to let some possibilities go. If anyone is feeling similar - like you’re surrounded by the clanging of unforking paths - I think there is something comforting about this idea of those lives being lived somewhere else, those alternatives content in the course that they took. There is a peace in it, thinking of these maybe-selves sat, settled and happy, somewhere else.

***

P.S. Big thank you to the two girls I met after the Years. You got me back into doing this, so thank you for that, and for our very interesting conversation. One of the lovelier London possibilities.

Growing up, I had a fear of death. I lost someone at the age of eight, and I wished every time I lost an eyelash that they would come back. I thought about dying a lot, and I found it deeply scary. It is part of what motivated me to work hard, to do lots - as if by filling my time, I could escape the fact there was not enough of it.

I became more and more concerned with how to cheat this finite time, to understand how best I could preserve it. I arrived at four rules: time could be observed, remembered, generative or compacted - each driving different behaviours (sociability, novelty, creativity and attainment) to allow me to preserve my time. By my third year at Oxford, this was something of an obsession. I obsessed over the limits of my memory, of how to keep as much time as I could.

And then I lost someone again.

I was older now, twenty, surrounded by philosophical ideas and theories that should have helped me make sense of this, but proved useless. I was confronted with the reality that the residue of preserved time I’d been running and running to build up and create was no substitute for moments with a person. The person I’d lost had done so much, had lived an exceptional life, had left a lot of love behind them - and yet the residue they left was comparatively so inadequate, such a poor substitute for the person themselves. It showed how small, really, what I’d been fighting to build up was.

This made me rethink a lot about my life, and how I lived it. Much of what I’d done had been a reaction, an attempt to cheat the bald fact of my finite, limited time. I’d been trying to build up a residue of my own that would allow me to escape the limits of my body, find ways to tamp down time from one moment to the next. And this loss showed me I couldn’t do that, and that the world did not work in the way I’d thought.

This was a painful grief, a grief both for who I’d lost, and for beliefs I’d had that the world was a certain, predictable, malleable place. One where if I did the right things, and tried hard enough, I could escape the limits of my body and become an idea. The loss made much of what I was doing feel very meaningless. I struggled to accommodate inescapably finite time into my worldview, and eventually it became clear I would have to find a peace with finite, disappearing time.

This was part of what I set out to do two years ago. I wanted to learn how to enjoy, to value unremembered, disappeared time - and I did. I learnt to have faith in habits, in the value of a disposition to look out for your happiness, because it means that you can trust you found happiness when you looked for it - even if you can’t remember what it was. I learnt about the overwhelming magnitude of unremembered time, of how it always dwarfs the remembered time to such an extent that trying to cheat this - trying to preserve your time - is like fighting gravity. It’s simply impossible. I learnt to have faith in the face of forgetting - to trust most of my time was happy, because there would never be the evidence to settle things either way. I found simple, immediate, vertical joys, ones that do not even try to stretch out into memory, but present themselves in pure, yellow moments.

I lost someone again recently and this has been a very different kind of grief. I have been struck, again and again, with a deep gratitude. I think about this persons habits, her character and values, and I am overwhelmed by the value of her life. I can’t know every moment she experienced, but I have so much faith in the value of those moments, of all of that unremembered time, in the sheer quantity of yellow. I feel deeply grateful she lived the life she did, and that I was lucky enough to have known her.

***

I’m not sure what to make of this grief. It feels strange that the overwhelming feeling is not pain, but thanks. Something feels amiss, particularly when people around me are in pain. I’ve tried to understand why I feel worried by this, and if I ought to.

I used to think of grief as a pain it is right to have. I thought it is right we feel pain after loss. Pain is a way of saying ‘this person mattered, they were important’, and in our hurting, in our pain, we communicate this message. If you could take a pill to remove the pain of grief, you wouldn’t - because it would be denying the impact that the loss and the person had on you. It would be silencing the message. It is right that we say this person that mattered, that we communicate these messages, and so, I thought, it is right that in grief we feel pain.

Now, I recognise it is not the pain that has value, but the message. It is right that the message is said. And it is right that we recognise that those we have lost were important. But pain is not the only way to say this message. The two (pain and message) can be separated, and this is what I’m learning.

It’s a subtle distinction. If we do feel pain, it is right we do so - because pain is one of the ways we remember, and acknowledge the importance of the person we have lost. But it is also not the case that we should feel pain, that we ought to seek it out. All we should do is remember, and acknowledge the importance of the person - and pain is only one way of doing this.

There are other ways to say someone mattered, that they were important - and I am doing this, in many other ways. There are many kinds of grief. I don’t know if I’ll always feel the same way - but for now I am not denying pain when it comes but, in the main, instead of pain, I am letting myself continue to be shaped by them, letting myself be reminded of things that are important, feeling this gratitude and this seems - for me, for this person - a more apt kind of grief.

***

Ways to find beauty

Look for it. Look at clouds, or faces. Look at the way clothes fold and drape, or the lines of a tube platform. Look at hands. Look at how the river splits on reeds, or how a steeple sits in the sky. Look at the world through a viewfinder, look at it as if you were to draw it, as if you are picking out the most beautiful part you wish to offer up for someone else. Listen too. Birds, again. Emphatic talking. Giggles.

If you are always picking out favourites, the world will soon become full of them. Look, too, for wit or irony. Beauty does not always have to be a heavy, seismic, shattering thing. We can see beauty in the pleasing, the things that make you clap your hands and exclaim that something is simply wonderful. Beauty can be the lightness of things fitting together well.

Find beautiful thoughts, and, if you can, try to think them. Hold onto the ones you do. Read poems. There is beauty in how an idea can be constructed, in the different contours of how something can be set out or thought through.

Love hard, and deeply. As Plato said, the world is a braver, more beautiful place when we have someone we love. Notice for them, and if there is no them, love yourself hard, and deeply, and make the world brave and beautiful for you and you alone.

Collect things. Good things, old things, pretty things. Things with stories and history. Collecting is another way of picking things out, and there is a lot to be said for surrounding yourself in picked out things. Everything is a little of something, and sometimes it is only by saying this, this one is most, that we can say anything at all.

Draw, even if you can’t. Close your eyes, and see how you would draw something, because you again pick things out and find them. Draw with your minds eye, and see what you see when things are stripped back to the essentials, become lines to fit together.

Share the beautiful. Show someone how to see it, the lines that fall one way or another, this curve or that, the things that make something beautiful, that make your heart sing - teach them that beauty is worth seeing, knowing or attending to. It is truly a gift. A life where you see beautiful things, and make beautiful things and share them is a rare and important life to live.

Hilma Af Klimt, The Ten Largest, No. 3-4 Youth

A lot of news this week. The big newspaper news is beyond my pay grade, so I’m going to focus on my ‘news’ in the ‘not-olds’ sense - and there’s a lot of them. New job. New city. New flat. Newly single. It’s a lot of new, and it definitely feels like a move from one era to another. I’m officially starting the mid-twenties (if a few months late). I’m excited. A little nervous, but mainly excited. It’s been two years - almost on the dot - since I first left for Kenya. Seven or so countries later, and now here we are. It felt like time to take stock, and think about what I’ve learnt these past two years that I’m going to take into London Round 2.

So, in no particular order, ten things I’ve learnt in these two years of travel:

1. Empty Time. One of the biggest things these two years has given me is time to breathe. I’ve learnt ‘il dolce far niente’ - the art of making something out of nothing, of finding the joy in empty, unrememberable time. I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to grow up doing things, and to be surrounded by people who also do an awful lot of doing. But travel has let me not-do things - because you’re already travelling. So if you want to sit and read Percy Jackson for three days, or gently mosey about, or go for a long walk with a podcast - you can. Travelling has given me permission to be still in a way I’ve valued, and I’ve realised I needed. Before, my empty time was a source of guilt and stress. Now, I feel much more okay about it. It’s both fine and necessary. It’s time to wonder and wander, time to be human, and also time that’s not for anything at all.

2. Alcohol. I’ve realised I can be an awful drunk. Boorish, unpleasant, pretty cringe-worthy - alcohol is often involved when I act like a pillock. I find the next shot more appealing than the last, and drink until I put myself at massive risk. Looking back, I’m stunned at how much danger I’ve been in when drunk. I now drink rarely, only with friends and people I trust, and when I’m confident I can get home. So I’m joining the ranks of the many, many sober-curious, and sticking to this infrequent drinking. I get most of the highs of drinking from dancing anyway, and none of the lows. So dancing is much better for me than drinking. Learning I’m not a drinker has been a good lesson.

3. Moods. They’re manageable! So much more manageable than I’d ever thought. Manageable with a bit of work - minimal booze, avoiding over-scheduling, looking after my body, and prioritising and protecting sleep. But my goodness, my moods are so, so, so much more manageable than I ever knew, and I’m so grateful to have discovered this - that life and events gave me the grace to have a long stretch of time without things to feel sad or stressed or scared about. Even after an odd couple of months (family illness, minor heartbreak, health issues), even in this time, my moods have been orders of magnitude better than the past. Vipassana, and spending ten days in silence with my thoughts, Kenya and spending months consistently happy - both of these things have given me touchstones and confidence that my moods aren’t something I have to accept, but something I can navigate. They’re not a necessary part of how I have to live. It’s hard to express how big a thing this is to me. It means when I’m looking at the future, I’m not having to factor in regular bouts of feeling low. It’s an option, and a product of things I can choose and manage.

4. Friends. Still like me, even though I’ve been away (woo!). I’m looking forward to being a better friend to my friends in the UK - more present, more organised, able to have light, easy catch ups rather than we have precisely 4 hours for me to hear absolutely everything that’s going on, and to do a whole bunch of new stuff and make some new memories.
   I’ve also liked getting to know my new friends - picking up some really, really special people from all over the world. I’ve forced myself to keep credentials (degrees, jobs etc.) pretty under wraps, and have found people like me without them. It’s been nice knowing I don’t have to tap dance to take up space - that people can like me for me. I’ve also liked liking people, but not needing them to be friends. It’s okay to like someone, enjoy them, and then leave them in one part of your life. You don’t need to gobble up everyone. Most people are nice, almost all are bearable, and - now being an adult - you can walk away from the unbearable ones. So people, generally, are much more navigable now.

5. Beauty. I’m much softer than I realised before I started travelling. I’m not sure whether I was soft before, and hiding it, or whether I have actually softened, melting under various suns. I do love beauty, and kids, and art, and poetry, and writing. I love nature, and awe, and painting. I love those things, and I feel much more comfortable about having this sort of love. Yes, it sounds a bit cringey and pretentious. But it’s beauty. It’s something that does make my heart sing, and I care a lot less about what people think of that. It is something I really care about. I want to keep making a commitment to the beautiful, to keep space for this particular pleasure I feel lucky to feel and to experience.

6. Life. Some life things. I still can’t drive, but I can cook (huge). I can navigate a lot of practical admin, travel, and make things happen. This has been a big confidence boost - I feel a bit more worldly, rather than just being ‘book-smart’.
   Vanity-wise: Tattooing my eyebrows was a phenomenal call. Dying my hair really wasn’t. I look best in boring colours - black, navy, grey, brown - so my days of dressing like a demented peacock are behind me. I’ve started on SPF (better late than never). I’ve almost cracked my hair. This is vain, but these things do matter to me.
   Work-wise: I’ve found a sector and a space that I love and do want to work in - start up techy stuff - and realised a couple of careers I’d considered (philosopher, writer) either aren’t viable or aren’t actually for me (I’m not good enough and I also want money). There’s also so, so many more ways to live a life than I’d realised last time I was in London. I’ve met hostage negotiators, fire-spinners, journalists, activists, photographers, sculptors and more. Things are much less trammelled, and much more fluid than I felt them to be. I was, and am, achingly free - no dependents, no commitments, no particularly expensive tastes or habits - and I’m much more aware of that now, of how I’m choosing to be where I wish to go.

7. Luck. I’m still working on this, but I’m more conscious of the many ways in which I’m very, very privileged. I’ve seen a lot of other ways life can be. Seeing the depth and history in Ethiopia made the violence and damage of colonialism real to me in a way books hadn’t - so much history was eradicated in other parts of Africa (and the world). Meeting Kanta Bua, a phenomenal trans activist in India, taught me lessons about gender identity and the trans experience that I should have known before - and I’m grateful to her for teaching me. I’ve learnt about life in other parts of the world, and I feel like I’ve learnt these lessons viscerally, in ways that have made them cut deeper than books, and I’m trying to return to them often to remember. That’s not saying there isn’t an awful lot more to learn. But I think it’s something I should have been more cognisant of before, and it has been a big lesson the last couple of years.

8. Not Winning. Another part of these two years has been letting myself fall behind. I’m not as far through as my friends are in their careers. I’m not on a tenure track, or earning a fortune, or looking to buy a house. I’m not on the very cutting edge of anything, and that’s okay. It sounds silly, but I have become okay with not seeing winning as the be-all and end-all. I let people win at Bananagrams over Christmas (a huge personal milestone). Forcing myself to sit with not winning has let me see that it’s not all that, and that when I’m trying to win I give up on some of the much more important things to do so. I’m actively trying to avoid people and situations that bring out this side of my character. And this goes beyond obvious ‘wins’. I’m the least pleasant, least nice version of myself when I’m trying to ‘win’ a conversation, trying to be acerbic, or sarcastic or cool. I’m just not. I’m earnest, and joyous, and often quite ridiculous. And I think I’ve got better at not winning, and being okay with that.

9. Love. Strange, given I’ve just been dumped, but I feel like I did learn the last year that I can have a good, healthy relationship. I wasn’t sure about this after being a pretty woeful girlfriend the first time around. I do feel now that I can be a really good girlfriend, and build a healthy relationship - even if it did end. (Rereading, this looks like a slightly weird pitch. To be clear, I’m really not looking for Substack Dating R2. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.)
   Another big lesson (albeit quite an odd one) is that I feel confident I can be a good mother. I have thought about this a lot for years - a strange amount, because it was a massive unknown for me. I don’t think you should have kids unless you can confidently say you will be a good parent, and whether or not you have children has a huge impact on the shape of your life, and how you picture it. Looking after kids for nine months or so, even if doing something very different from being a mother, has made me confident that, should I want to, I can and will be a good mum.

10. The World. My goodness me, there is some fantastic stuff out there. There are elephants, and clouds, and temples, and mountains. There’s the sun, and stars at night, and snow, and frozen lakes. There is the bush, and impala and birds. There are tomatoes with salt on them, and peppers that have been roasted in an oven, and (heaven of heavens) nice coffees. There’s the fact that you can, at almost any moment you want, put in some headphones and dance. There’s smiling at people who help you or that you pass by, and striking up conversations, and long walks talking to someone you adore. There are strangers, and acquaintances, and friends, and family. It is a remarkably good world.

***

Hopefully, this didn’t sound too self-congratulatory. The thing that I’m hoping stops it being so is that I recognise a lot of these things are really, really obvious (‘drinking loads makes you sad’ - what a revelation) - but they weren’t to me, and I feel unbelievably lucky to have been able to take the time to learn these very basic pieces of common sense that have, nonetheless, made a big difference to how I live my life.

Massive thank you to everyone who is still with me and reading. This column is sometimes my way of standing up and being counted - being open about the gunk that makes me who I am, owning the softness, failings, insecurities and many, many moments of absurdity - and taking those things as mine. I still find it wonderful that people engage with this not-winning, flawed and often quite messy self. So thank you, again.

P.P.S: Ignore this, but backlinking my work blog because I am a committed employee. If you are from my work, please don’t read this. Lawyers; data; EB Benchmarking; What is EB; What is EB awareness; Measuring EB; link for EB and TA; texas vs california; mood in market