Schroedinger’s Candidate

Half an hour later, crashing gears for my fourteenth three-point turn, I open my mouth and let out a roar of anguish. It’s not a scream. It’s not a yell. It’s a roar.

Happy Friday!

And a warm welcome from a cloud of light summer rain.

Apologies if I seem a little distracted. Earlier this week, I had a job interview at the incredible British Exploring Society and I’ve just noticed they’ve sent me an email.

I’m not expecting to be asked back for a second interview, but I still feel sick — sweaty palms, heart pounding.

Rather than ripping off the plaster of unknowingnesss, and as a harmless apotropaic ritual, I’m not going to read that fateful email until I’ve sent this out.

For now, I’m Schroedinger’s Candidate: still in the running for the job of a lifetime and, simultaneously, gently rejected as one unsuccessful applicant in a strong field.

For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel. In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.

Sometimes I go for job interviews.

This week is updates week: a series of short pieces bouncing off from past newsletters or correspondence I’ve received from you, dear reader.

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Going The Extra Millimetre [UPDATE]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Homework for Life, a journaling practice developed by storyteller Matthew Dicks that gently encourages us to find meaning in our lives by setting aside a moment in the evening to answer the question, ‘What’s been the most story-like moment of today?’

I’ve been doing my Homework for Life for a fortnight now and I thought I’d share one of my little story-worthy moments with you today. Actually, it’s the first one I wrote down, on 25 June — George Orwell’s birthday.

For some reason, perhaps post-birthday blues, I woke up angry at the world. Irritable. Projecting adolescence: I’M FINE, GO AWAY.

I didn’t want to see anyone and I didn’t want anyone to see me. I bristled as I walked down to the Thames for my morning swim. The cold water sank into my brain, but even the nature pill couldn’t tamp down my temper.

Yes he is.

Despite hating the world, I had plans to join the 1984 Symposium, a utopian rabble of a picnic anarchically organised into being by

Documentally

. It’s one of my favourite dates in the diary so I got into the car, seething with resentment, and drove the ten awful miles to Eric Blair’s graveside.

An ultraviolet summer’s day, high pollen count and howling bees, and I’m driving around in overheated circles trying to find a fucking parking space among the higgledy thatch of Sutton Courtenay.

Half an hour later, crashing gears for my fourteenth three-point turn, I open my mouth and let out a roar of anguish. It’s not a scream. It’s not a yell. It’s a roar.

And it doesn’t stop.

I roar and I roar and I roar.

It feels cathartic, like I’m exorcising all the pain of human existence, all the pain of the Universe.

So I carry right on roaring, sitting there in my old car on a hot summer’s day in a village in Oxfordshire, where King Alfred got married over a thousand years ago, where George Orwell was buried on a Thursday in 1950, and where, right now, my friends are sitting down for a picnic.

After what seems like an hour, still roaring away, a thought crosses my mind: maybe this is me now. Maybe I’ll never stop this roar thing that I’ve got going on.

You do hear about people who can’t stop hiccupping or laughing. Maybe I’ll become a famous medical case.

And then, for no reason, I stop. I drive around the corner, find a parking space, and join my friends for lunch.

But even as I’m walking through the churchyard, with its scent of cut grass and tombstones, I’m still pissed off.

So pissed off.

I still don’t want to see anyone and I still don’t want anyone to see me. I’M STILL FINE, GO AWAY.

It took less than thirty seconds for my angry adolescence to dissolve, rinsed out by the detergent of warmth and conversation.

That’s cool. Nice to notice. But it’s not why this moment was story-worthy.

That’s buried away in a detail I haven’t told you.

You see, the thing is, from the moment I woke up, right through my river swim, the drive to Sutton Courtenay, and even as I sat in my car roaring with frustration, I knew all along that my anger would vanish the moment I settled down with friends.

What I couldn’t figure out was, despite knowing full well how effortlessly my emotions would soon evaporate, why must I put myself through this anger at all?

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Delete The Internet [UPDATE]

Last Friday, I told Cesca that the only annoying thing about not having a browser on my phone is that I can’t quickly check the football scores. She replied, ‘Isn’t that the whole point?’

Oh yeah.

It’s now been 10 days since I deleted the internet browser on my phone. Still nothing bad has happened.

I have run into what can only be described as a few very minor wrinkles:

• I can’t login to the Coinbase app. I’ll use my computer instead.

• I couldn’t immediately book onto a navigation course the second that it became available online. I booked it the next day on my computer.

• I couldn’t set up the ChatGPT app. To complete the login process, and as an experiment, I downloaded (and immediately deleted) a browser. The app works fine without one.

And that, my friends, is a complete list of wrinkles. That’s it.

It’s amazing how quickly I’ve become accustomed — reaccustomed, really — to not having mobile access to the fire-hose internet. And it feels great.

Ten days ago, I opened the Firefox app on my phone 150-170 times per week. That’s more than twenty times a day. Now that number is zero.

We have limited time on this Earth. I’ve made space for other things.

~

Thank you for all your comments and reflections on browser-free life — keep ‘em coming. 😍 Special shout out to RK (👋), who shared an article about the rise in analogue, person-centred hobbies. I can’t wait to start collecting pencils.

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A Word on ChatGPT

Since I mention ChatGPT, I’d like to reassure you that all of my writing is written by a messy humon. (See.)

This is a real thing. One nature therapy newsletter I subscribed to a while back was rated 100% A.I by Scribbr. It was also trash.

However, this week, I have found ChatGPT useful for generating practice interview questions and as a more user-friendly search engine.

How so?

Well, earlier today I forgot the word ‘apotropaic’ (as seen in the introduction to this newsletter). From my training as an archaeologist, I knew that there was a technical term for an act undertaken to ensure good fortune, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the word, except that it probably began with ‘A’.

And so…

Voilà.

Whereas traditional search engines need almost binary precision, ChatGPT is really good at accurately answering the hopelessly vague questions humans ask all the time: ‘How do you do the thing that does the thing with the, you know, the thingy?’

There is a cost, though: it’s been estimated that ChatGPT uses 4.32g CO2e per search query, about the same as sending an email, but twenty times (or more) the footprint of a traditional search engine query.

I suppose that suggests a rule of thumb:

• Could you get the answer in less than twenty search engine queries?

• Could you get the answer by emailing someone?

• If not, then go ahead and write one carefully crafted ChatGPT query.

But nothing will ever beat asking a friend or working it out for ourselves.

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Three Tiny Big Things

1. Is a Happy Life Different from a Meaningful One?

This 2014 article from Berkeley University discusses the conflicting research behind meaning and happiness. It’s more of a provocation than self-help, but I did find this passage salutary:

Meaningful lives involve stress and challenges. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness, which suggests that engaging in challenging or difficult situations that are beyond oneself or one’s pleasures promotes meaningfulness but not happiness.

Similarly, and more recently…

2. Psychologist Paul Bloom on How to Live a Good Life

Coincidentally, this was Michael Mosley’s final BBC interview before he died. That’s not the reason I’m recommending this as an excellent way to spend forty minutes of your four thousand weeks (hell, I listened to it twice), but it did make me realise what a great broadcaster we have lost.

The format of the interview is based around the five things that Paul Bloom believes contribute most to the living of a good life:

1. Seek out contrast, like spicy food and a cold beer. The brain responds to things based on comparison, rather than absolute value.

2. Lose yourself, find your flow. For Paul, that’s writing and Brazilian jujitsu (but not meditation). Digital distractions (and addictions) make flow states harder to find (see Delete The Internet).

3. Don’t pursue happiness; happiness is not something that rewards active pursuit. ‘People who think a lot about kissing probably don’t do a lot of kissing.’

4. Choose to suffer more. Involuntary suffering is awful, but chosen suffering (marathons, crosswords, children) is far more rewarding than taking the easy route. This is ‘the IKEA effect’: the harder we work to achieve something, the more we value our accomplishment. This effect has also been found in rats.

5. Know thyself. Study yourself as if you were an experimental subject. What do you enjoy? What irritates you? What makes you thrive? The person you think you are probably won’t match with the person you dispassionately observe out in the world. Now figure out what kind of life fits best with the real you.

Also: Paul Bloom is a hoot. He has written a book about suffering, which gets mixed reviews: one to flip through in the library before committing.

3. Eton Schooled

From Fix The News, based on research by Sutton Trust and Pink News:

Keir Starmer’s Labour government has already broken several records: the new cabinet has the highest number of state-educated and female ministers in history, and LGBTQ+ MPs make up 11.6% of the governing party, the largest proportion of any parliament worldwide.

There’s nuance to be found if you dig into the linked articles, but broadly speaking this is positive. And I’m proud that the constituency where I grew up AND its neighbours, both north and south, are all now represented by out LGBTQ+ MPs. 🏳‍🌈

These are the people we have elected to replace the Old Etonians. (Well, nearly: seven down, four to go…)

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Thank You

Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚

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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.

Big love,
dc:

💌 I finally read that British Exploring Society email and I DID get through to the second round of interviews! Holy mackerel. After all the agonising post-interview analysis and nightmarish flashbacks, I was not expecting that. Apotropaic rituals DO work. Wish me (and all the other candidates) luck! 🤞

This was written by a messy human, not by AI