Victoria Trumbull, Tony D. Sampson and Sylvie Delacroix debate whether individuals can create ideas or merely play host to them. Chaired by Jonny Thomson.

Outside the thin canvas, some fucker is actually playing a flute. I’m lying alone on my back in a hot, damp yurt, the susurration of my breath disappearing into the melancholy music being played by the dork outside. Sweat is pooling unpleasantly in the hollow at the base of my throat. It might be two o’clock in the morning. It might be the year 1825. This might be Jupiter. I could be anybody. I am unrecognisable to myself. By my optimistic calculation, there are currently at least two spiders in my hair.

The yurt, and consequently the spiders and the flute, are in a field located just outside Hay-on-Wye. It’s one of those impossibly snug and quaint Welsh towns that American tourists are neurologically incapable of believing really exist. Each year, it fills with enough visitors to support the town’s disproportionately plentiful book shops. It’s the sort of place where you might happen to see Slavoj Žižek buying toilet paper. You could spot Cornel West eating a slice of carrot cake. It demystifies artists and intellectuals, and places them before you on a chair on a dais in a Welsh town. It’s a place that blurs the traditional barrier between people who write and people who read. This dissolution is what draws many — including me — to the fields outside Hay. It’s just unfortunate that I’m here during a heatwave, I think, peeling my back audibly from the mattress as I turn over. I mildly disgust myself. I nurse a hope that the impossible heat warps the guy’s flute into silence.

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I’ve come for How the Light Gets In — an annual festival of ideas that sees philosophers and scientists descending on the town to discuss the foundational questions that animate their work. Under the burn of this suddenly livid Welsh sun (there’s a sentence nobody ever anticipated writing), I’m reminded that many of the stupidest people I know have PhDs.

It’s not an irrelevant thought at a festival of ideas but on some level, myopia is simply the nature of expertise. You’re initially drawn in by foundational questions — basic, broad questions; which is not to say simple ones. Questions like whether a mind is the same sort of thing as a brain, or whether free will exists. Whether technological progress is inevitable or that’s merely one naive presumption previous civilisations have fallen victim to.

They got me

You’re initially hooked by the sorts of questions upon which entire bodies of knowledge complacently sit — questions like whether evolution has a purpose — whether it’s tending toward something, or whether we just like to impose stories upon it because stories are how our brains arrange information. To progress from this starting point — whatever big, tangled question you’re into— you must decide what you consider to be the most feasible theory, the most likely answer, and on you go. You try to do this diligently and without prejudice. You fail in various respects — you’re bound to.

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It’s easy to forget that this is where you started; this is what you did in order to be able to progress beyond generalities to focus on detail. It is easy for decades to slide away in which people who think for a living largely forget to revisit these foundational questions, to reconsider the leaps they’ve made in order to get things done. Could you be incorrect in your belief that evolution has no teleology, or that we have free will, or we don’t? You could. It isn’t good for the progress of your research or your sanity to revisit this thought constantly, but it is good for epistemic humility to look again occasionally — to unsettle complacency and kick up dust. It maintains curiosity, minimises contempt for differing views, and generally makes a person less complacent. ‘Could I be wrong about all of it, or all the parts that matter to me?’

Yes. Always yes.

In the heat of the yurt each night, after a day of talks and debates on foundational questions, I am unsettled. Hurled about inside my still body. It’s apt. These great, untethered questions — so curiosity-inducing and inspiring when we are young — can become threatening as we move away from them toward settled positions. If you’re already sure on the question of whether there is a God invested in the world, revisiting that question could register as an insult, a bore or a danger. It can seem like a waste of time — an irrelevance. Because after all, you know. You’re sure.

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To return deliberately in good faith — even a little and sometimes — to a position of not-knowing can make you unrecognisable to yourself. This is a place in which it becomes possible for us to learn and to change. It breaks us open, even if only briefly. Conscious not-knowing is to be in an alien environment, back welded damply to a bedsheet in stifling discomfort, wondering how many spiders are currently scuttling through your hair in the heavy, breathless dark. It is to be assailed by some fucker with a flute, without the satisfaction of knowing for sure whether he’s being wry or just another fool as unmoored by the black heat as you are.

It’s good to be alienated from our own perspective from time to time— to lie in the dark wondering how the world would look if the foundations of what you believe were untrue, or just terminally incomplete. It’s good to live your life preserving a small voice somewhere at the back that asks and answers — ‘Could I be wrong about all of it, or all the parts that matter to me?’

Yes. Always yes.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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Declining early, declining often

This week, while catching up with a friend, I made a flippant comment about how I’m not ‘nice.’ She responded the way supportive female friends often do when they think another woman is being negative about herself. She took umbrage — “of course you’re nice!”, she insisted. The firmness of her tone appeared to gesture toward some dangerous hinterland, in which dwells every undesirable a woman might be called when she isn’t considered nice. Aloof. Difficult. Selfish. Haughty.

My friend leapt forth to haul me back into the nice corner as a reflex rooted in female solidarity. We’re taught to reinforce positive narratives, even when we haven’t really stopped to consider whether they’re true. The thing is, though, that I’m not nice. In this nuanceless universe of tedious absolutes, that may read as saying something like “I deliberately cultivate the art of being an obnoxious arse”. Not so. Between ‘nice’ and ‘obnoxious arse’, there is a universe of options.

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Not being ‘X’ doesn’t mean being ‘Y’. It merely means being ‘not X’. Niceness is not kindness or compassion or honesty. It isn’t friendliness or charitableness or even good will. It is, among other things, the attempt to prioritise other people’s comfort, and to be liked. There’s nothing wrong with that unless it requires you to betray yourself; unless it makes you resent other people and lose respect for yourself.

I make a sincere effort not to consent to anything that I don’t actually want, even if the consultation is a false one (and it often is in a world where women are generally expected to be nice, accommodating, and to prioritise the preferences of others). If you ask where I want to eat, I answer honestly. If I don’t feel like Turkish food tonight, I’ll say so. If I don’t want to do something, I’ll politely decline rather than consent resentfully and blame you later for my own dishonesty. I’ll think carefully about whether a request is something I can freely do without reservation or resentment. If the answer is no, I’ll decline.

Image credit: Hadas Weiss

Niceness is the female virtue, and not generally one we’re consulted on. It can look like an expectation that you intuit and anticipate the needs of others, organise invisible logistics, monitor moods and smooth friction before others notice it’s there. These expectations are still treated as natural to women. However, in this story of the unfair standard of gendered expectations, we forget the bit about female agency. We omit the part where we participate – often resentfully – in the maintenance of these standards while holding onto the right be feel victimised by them.

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It isn’t coercion when women routinely choose to abide by an expectation that they put the other person first in almost every sort of interaction. At some point or other, resentment becomes a form of complicity. Being ‘nice’ can be a cover for powerful negativity. It can veil (often ineffectively) deep resentment. You hate the expectation. It makes you feel furious and exhausted. You continue performing in line with it anyway, and there are high costs to this. Agency atrophies through disuse, for one thing. Also the self-betrayal of repeatedly ignoring your own preferences can make you feel contempt for the people you love.

There are situations, cultures, customs that leave women with limited choice or none at all. Most of my mother’s generation strove to meet an impossible standard. She was not totally free but she did have some autonomy and often, she elected to use it in ways that made her life harder. My mother coped with the resentment so endemic to her generation by compounding it — by resenting the fact that nobody intuited her needs, thus perpetuating the pressure by which she felt victimised and mistreated herself. This is martyrdom. Irish mothers are skilled in it and frequently made miserable by it.

Image credit: Sarah Cooper

Those of us who do have the freedom to use our agency regularly use it in an attempt to make other people happy and comfortable, even in instances where we don’t want to. We’ll often do this for people who are not deserving of this extreme consideration and care or for people who don’t actually want us to do it. This training in and prioritisation of niceness increases the social cost of subversion for all. It makes any woman not ‘being nice’ look closer to socially unacceptable, shockingly uncaring behaviour.

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It perpetuates the expectation that a ‘normal’ woman will be amenable, accommodating, and, possibly telepathic. The problem is that niceness turns women into liars. It isn’t necessarily consideration. In reality, it’s often evasive. It prioritises imminent comfort over truth, even when the truth would be helpful and leads to outcomes that are anything but ‘nice’. If I behave unprofessionally in a dispute with a colleague and a friend tells me she thinks I’m in the right (though she doesn’t – she thinks I’m being an ass but she’s just trying to be supportive), then I can internalise that feedback. It can spur me into building a self-righteous story of the justice of my cause instead of recognising that I’m behaving poorly even by the standards of people I love and respect.

I need my friend to take me by the shoulders and tell me that I could have handled it better if that’s what she thinks. It’s ‘nice’ to reassure someone (and it’s what we do when we go into interactions with other people assuming responsibility for their emotional equilibrium) but it’s harmful, dishonest and disrespectful if we’re not being truthful. It’s also cowardly. It leads us to say one thing and mean another — to prioritise being liked and looking supportive over genuinely helping someone we care about.

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It’s deeply unpleasant to go through life feeling that you don’t have the entitlement to be honest in case someone else doesn’t like it. To say, ‘actually I don’t care for red wine’ or ‘I’m not interested in a second date with you but it was nice to meet you’. It’s terrible to feel you need to maintain a particular façade which is utterly inauthentic in order to deserve the respect of people you resent, or maybe even dislike. Women are not powerless against this expectation. Where we have a choice to reject self-abnegation disguised as virtue, we should use it.

Niceness is a trap. Rejecting it as anything worth striving for has made me more honest. It has forced me to acknowledge resentment as evidence of my own dishonesty rather than an automatic indicator of someone else’s wrongdoing. As a result, I do all I can to ensure I don’t feel it (even if that means an awkward encounter or feeling judged). That soiled feeling of complicity when you allow someone to treat you poorly in order to keep the peace has gone and, I hope, relationships with friends have become more trusting, honest and safe. They know that if I’m in the room, it’s only ever because I want to be there.

Niceness may be the female virtue, but it isn’t one worth cultivating.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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Bracing stuff (Go team etc)

“Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone.”

Look! It’s tech entrepreneur (and longevity guy) Bryan Johnson updating the world about his latest optimisation endeavour via social media! Johnson has devoted his life to the tricky project of trying not to die. Last week, he posted that he’d ‘just’ (efficiencymaxxing there) performed oral sex on his partner and bid the world good night, then followed it by sharing her vaginal microbiome report, as one does. Or something. “Top 1% of all vaginas”, Johnson wrote. A score of a hundred out of a hundred. The tone is oddly athletic, as if written by a proud coach. It’s as though his partner’s extremely personal microbiome were a basketball team who’d just won the Eastern Conference finals.

This kind of post likely only affirms the suspicions of people who find Johnson a bit terrifying that he just couldn’t possibly be like the rest of us. The thing is, though, that he isn’t the aberration we think — he’s merely the logical destination of a way of thinking that many of us have already kind of bought into. This is what optimisation culture looks like when a person has the endless resources and commitment to make it their life’s purpose.

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Goodhart’s Law is a nice one to consider here, I think — “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. British economist Charles Goodhart coined it — it describes when we optimise for a metric rather than the purpose it’s being employed in service of. Once you do this, the metric is no longer measuring what we were using it to measure, but something else. It becomes skewed and unreliable. We sacrifice the qualitative value that led us to see value in an action because we confuse the metric for the purpose and the goal. Human beings are very prone this error. We decide to spend more time walking outdoors, because we consider time in nature inherently good and valuable. We buy a smartwatch. We count our steps until we’re taking walks to hit a number rather than recalling that we started so we could spend more time in nature for its own sake. Our sense of satisfaction emerges from the number, not the walk, and we wonder why the self-evidently good thing makes us feel guilty, burdened and disinclined.

Vaginal microbiome health is, I’m guessing, a real proxy for several important health indicators. However, if we start applying a score to people’s junk, the score is easily mistaken for the value, the focus, the thing that matters. This is the equivalent of a vaginal step count. The proxy swallows (sorry) the thing it was meant to measure. Consensual oral sex is not serving a strict biological function. Its value is non-instrumental — it is the thing in itself — desire, pleasure, intimacy, bonding, whatever you’re having yourself etc etc. Goodhart’s Law explains the mechanism by which we denude meaning by instrumentalising things like sex, or a nice walk but the deeper root is older again and unsurprisingly, it’s Aristotle who can show us the dead end of optimisation culture.

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I often end up back at Aristotle, which is ironic this week because we could feasibly question whether any Greek philosopher had much familiarity with vaginas. Aristotle notes our tendency to focus on means rather than ends; that we tend to pursue one thing in search of something else — for example we want money to buy things — but other things, we pursue for their own sake. We need these latter things, he argues, to justify our more instrumental desires. We want money to buy things, and we want to buy things to increase our comfort and status, and we want comfort and status for… what? If everything we pursue is itself merely in pursuit of something else, our pursuit cannot be justified. The thing at the bottom, for Aristotle, is eudaimonia, which we can think of as flourishing. This isn’t a destination state — it is a mode of living.

Optimisation culture — a cult of perpetual progress in service of not the achievement of something, but the avoidance of something (in Johnson’s case, death) — overlooks Aristotle’s idea that flourishing is constituted by our beliefs and actions. It isn’t produced by them. It isn’t an outcome. Friendship isn’t something you pursue to generate a good life — it is part of what ‘the good life’ simply is. The same goes for love, or art, or the weird stuff we do to one another’s bodies when we want to be as close as possible to people we care about. These are not means to an end. They don’t optimise for flourishing-style outcomes. They are the flourishing.

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With typical efficiency, what optimisation culture does is take the things that belong in that second category — ends in themselves — and place them in the first — means to and end. Sex becomes a source of data, and bodies can be quantified. Your dinner is macros — mere nutritional input. A date becomes a highly transactional exchange where you treat a person as a means — a potential conduit to some desired outcome. You collate data on them, and they on you, while you each attempt to quantify the value of the other.

Each of these is a small but serious ontological downgrade. This framework rejects the possibility of an end in itself. When we live inside it, we reduce everything to a means. This is a universe without what Aristotle called telos - an ultimate end or purpose for the sake of which we engage in an action, or series of actions. Our why. It is not arrival at some particular outcome but the fulfilment of purpose.

And yes, evangelical optimisers will surely retort — “but I’m clearly working towards an end!” Johnson is very frank about his — “Don’t Die”. There’s a t-shirt and everything. The issue is that “don’t die” is not telos. It’s a constraint — a rule about what you mustn’t do, or something you’re trying to avoid, en route to something else. “Don’t skip your French classes or you’ll never learn to speak French”. Constraints help us to shape our pursuit of a goal or outcome. They’re not the outcome itself.

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“Don’t Die” tells you what not to do without questioning what living is for. A life oriented wholly towards not-ending is a life that cannot provide an answer to the question of what it’s being preserved for. You can try to optimise indefinitely without ever fulfilling your chosen purpose because there is no real purpose. There’s no flourishing in a negative. There is merely the receding horizon of another metric, another astronomically bizarre genital ranking, another proxy confused for the target. There is — in a philosophical but also in the other sense — just no end to it.

If optimisation is confused for an end in itself, Johnson’s post is where we all must inevitably land — scoring your partner’s eye of sauron out of a hundred because you have no other metric for meaning and value. The means are conflated with the end. The very thing you seek to measure becomes the goal you run towards, and you can’t ever stop running because there isn’t a finish line.

Most of us aren’t Johnson, and I concede that by using himself as a guinea pig for longevity, he may indeed produce some interesting insights and inspire some valuable research. We don’t have to throw out empiricism along with sub-optimally oxygenating red blood cells, or ghosts, or whatever we’re using a centrifuge to separate and purge from the rest of our blood this week. We simply have to remember that our urge to quantify, weigh and measure things rests on an act of evaluation. We decide what is worth measuring, and we’re often not thinking rigorously about that process of evaluation. Goodhart was really onto something. Top 1% of laws.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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“Just know that you’re poisoning yourself.”

Adam, my new housemate, is an evangelist. His religion is nutritional hygiene. He ferments things. He does calisthenics. He has a horror of processed foods. He consumes a quota of organic olive oil daily. The latter is working for him — he has the universal, glossy sheen of a baby seal and the compact sinuousness of a functional body upon which constant load bearing demand is made. Also his eyelashes are lovely and at the weekend he does a bunch of artisanal (definitely not processed) drugs manufactured in someone’s unwashed bath in Cartagena, and goes to raves.

Adam wants me to read that book, Ultra-Processed People, which explains why processed food will ruin us all but mostly just kill me. He is desperate for me to read it. He’s brought it up numerous times since I arrived in this house less than a week ago. I haven’t told him that I read it last year, because it’s funnier this way. He found me holding a can of Pepsi Max and an expression of intense pain crossed his lovely, glowing face.

“Girl, relax”, I told him.

Like a lot of people who grew up poor, I both like Pepsi Max and carry a deep horror of the amorphous concept that is ‘going backwards’. Living with housemates again was one example I would frequently give of what going backwards would look like for me. “If we ever break up”, I’d tell my husband, “having to live with other people again would feel like I was going backwards”. “Right”, he’d reply, glibly. “So not the devastating destruction of our shared life and all the love and trust and that kind of stuff, but the idea of being restricted to one shelf in a shared fridge? That’s the bit that would feel too much?”

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There’s nothing objective about it. It’s just another impression lodged in the automated depths of my lizard brain. We all drag about these half-baked stories about what qualifies as success or failure, about how our lives should look. About how we identify the difference between endings and beginnings, when really, they’re different angles on the same thing. We defer to this picture of the world we developed before we could even frame concepts with language, and that’s now so entrenched and familiar that we mistake it for reality itself. We can’t see the lens we impose over everything. We’re blind to its distortions.

Since moving back to the UK from Australia a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been too distracted to listen to those cantankerous old demons. I’m staying with a friend, Jon, and Adam. They’ve opened their home to me — a beautiful house in a much admired part of London. Jon cleared me a cupboard in the kitchen and made my bed because he knew I’d be jetlagged when I arrived. These men have cooked for me and included me in what they’re doing and taken care of me. They don’t have any lamps, which is horrifying, and Adam told me about how a few years back he fell in love with a one-legged girl at a rave. He spontaneously decided to visit her for a week in Los Angeles, certain that he was at the beginning of an epic love story with his future wife. On arrival, Adam discovered that the profound connection he’d felt had just been the ketamine he was on when they met. Neither of them much liked the other.

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He had to stay the full week anyway because he didn’t have the money for a hotel. She had a great dane who shed all over the bed and would breathe loudly while watching them having unenthusiastic sex. It’s an experience I would genuinely rather die than have, and I almost lost consciousness from laughing. “I’d do it again”, Adam says fondly, standing next to the couch he apparently never sits on. “Because what if she was the one, you know?” I don’t know whether to admire this guy or diagnose him with something. “Adam will do anything for love”, Jon interjects. “It’s just that he’s got the most horrendous, appalling judgement. Just none at all.” Adam nods enthusiastically, evidently feeling seen.

The point is that living here has been excellent so far. I’ve been dropped into another universe. I could resist it, compare it to my chosen norm, or wonder what it says about my life to share a fridge with a guy who fills the thing to bursting with fermented beetroot and is currently dating a woman in her thirties with a shelf of dolls and cartoon pig bed sheets. “What does she do for a living?”, I ask Adam, attempting to make polite conversation.

“…She’s a therapist”, he replies.

I could tell myself a story about how this odd change in circumstances is a form of going backwards, but that’s not really what this is. A feeling is not its instantiation. I’ve nursed an arbitrary idea that living with other people would feel bad since the first time I had to do it, when I did not understand how to constructively resolve conflict and would stick notes to the bathroom mirror reading “LORRAINE — PLEASE NEVER LEAVE A USED TAMPON IN THE SINK AGAIN, YOU DRUNKEN ANIMAL”.

We tend to confuse the representations of our fears with the fears themselves. You’re not afraid of bears — you’re afraid of sudden, violent death. You’re not afraid of intimacy — you’re afraid of being seen all the way through and then rejected. I’m not afraid of living with other people — I’m afraid of finding myself living my mother’s life, overwhelmed, under-resourced and alone in the ways that make everything harder. This is a lot to put on a man I only met last week, who keeps rushing at me with salad tongs to announce the apocalypse unfolding in my gut microbiome and asking me to please just consider eating more beans.

To look at the wonderful luck of the situation in which I’ve landed — into the compassionate welcome of these two lampless, affable weirdos — as anything but a blessing would be an insult to the hardship my mother lived through. So I’m not perturbed (maybe a little by the shelf of dolls thing). It’s always valuable to learn that the thing you feared is not only not frightening; it can be good.

(I’m still not telling Adam I’ve read the book. Let him stew, like his ferments.)

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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Flying from Canberra-Melbourne-Singapore-London-Dublin-New York- London in one week? Turns out you can do it (but you need a decent moisturiser)!

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When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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If this kind of post is not your thing, there will be a regular Peak Notions column later in the week!

Something to read:

Image Credit: Cartoons Hate Her

THE BEAUTY STANDARD IS IMPOSSIBLY SKINNY-CURVY, NOT CHILDLIKE

CHH is a Substack institution, and worth a subscription for her prolific output, snort-inducing humour and general capacity to find a nuanced position on contentious issues and defend it without getting too weird or angry. These are underrated qualities on this unholy internet. When Jameela Jamil recently wrote an article titled ‘Ah shit! We let pedophiles decide our beauty standards’, I guessed that an interesting take from Cartoons Hate Her would be incoming. It was:

“Ultimately, the reason I disagree with this “beauty standards are pedophilia” discourse is that it frames women without “curves” as overgrown children, whom only pedophiles would find attractive. Not to get all “let men be masculine” on you, but this is really just another form of body-shaming, even if it’s not intended that way. Non-curvy women exist in multitudes (as I said before, most women aren’t actually that curvy) and yet a movement designed to shed light on “what women really look like” completely leaves them in the dust because they don’t look like they could have been painted on a cave wall.”

The beauty standards conversation is pitched about and refracted through so many lenses — gender, race, status, socioeconomics, age, technology, politics, history. Generally, it’s flattened and squashed to fit through one or two of these but the conversation isn’t a simple one. Straightforward or monocausal narratives about what we consider beautiful — what we value — and why will never be satisfactory. We’re all in the weeds. Reading broadly different perspectives helps.

Something to listen to:

EPICTETUS DISCOURSES AND OTHER WRITINGS AUDIOBOOK, narrated by Robert Dobbin

This one is cheating a bit since we’re reading it for Peak Notions Book Club but I’ve had an Audible membership for years now. I listened to well over a hundred books last year. When I’m reading non-fiction, I always go for a print version, but when a book merits a second pass I’ll often immediately follow reading it with a listen to the audio edition. I do this (where possible) with titles we read for the book club.

In preparation for the March 12th book club session, I’m currently listening to Epictetus’ Discourses. Audio philosophy titles can be hit and miss, often because philosophy writing is more careful than it is compelling and many were recorded before audiobooks were considered respectable or lucrative. The narrator of this one makes it really enjoyable. Dobbin’s Epictetus is funny, quite contemptuous, and wry. The fact that the translation prioritises comprehensibility for a modern reader makes it an easy, pleasant listen.

Something to subscribe to:

LONDON CENTRIC on Substack

You don’t need to be based in London to value what Jim Waterson has done with London Centric. His project to revive and reinvigorate local news in London is proving incredibly successful, consistently focusing on the sorts of stories that make a material difference.

London Centric does a lot of investigative work, and this week broke the story of an impending mass eviction of tenants in advance of renters gaining new rights in May. The resulting political pressure has halted the evictions for now. Before London Centric’s investigation, affected tenants across different properties had no idea of the scale of what was happening.

This is the power of great local journalism.

London Centric

Billionaire halts mass eviction after London Centric investigation

Hundreds of Londoners will be allowed to remain in their homes after London Centric uncovered a plan to carry out “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history” by a company controlled by billionaire landlord Asif Aziz…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

Something to not listen to:

CHEAP FOAM EAR PLUGS

Ear plugs are not just for those with chronic snorer spouses, and they won’t be ideal if you’re caring for small children or someone vulnerable who may need you in the night. But if you want to sleep through with only your bladder to disturb you, total silence is surprisingly helpful. My husband uses Loop Ear Plugs and finds them effective but I don’t believe everything has to be chic or ergonomic to work, and even Loops warp, fall out and lose effectiveness with prolonged use. I prefer crappy old fashioned, bell-shaped, foam earplugs. They don’t last forever, sure, and they’re less environmentally considerate than reusing one pair for a year, but here is a list of things that are bad for the environment: having children, industrial farming, all beauty products, driving a car, taking a flight, using glass containers and not using glass containers. So bugger off. A box of these will last a very long time. Birds in Australia shriek like pterodactyls at five am. When I use these, I hear nothing!

Below the paywall you’ll find a pair of jeans that fits perfectly, feels comfortable and doesn’t leave any waist gap. A lot of women will know what a big deal that is, especially when so many of us would opt to walk face-first into a wall before we’d go shopping for jeans. I’ve shared a couple of pictures to give you a realistic sense of what they actually look like on a human person with my body shape, and those will live below the paywall for my dignity and sanity.

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“Settle on the type of person you want to be and stick to it, whether alone or in company.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion

While a quick constitutional through social media and YouTube might convince you that Stoicism is in fact a brand of testicular deodorising spray popularised by Andrew Tate, it is actually a school of philosophy, and has been for some time. Epictetus, whose Discourses we are reading for our next book club session taking place on March 12th, and which are lecture notes transcribed by his student, Arrian, around 1,900 (ish) years ago, was not the first Stoic by any means. Zeno is considered the founder of Stoicism, and he was knocking about around 300BCE. So you’ll comprehend what I mean when I write that the whole ‘Make bank investing in crypto by being STOIC!!!!’ thing is a smidge more recent. Stoicism is actually far older and more intellectually vast than the comment sections under posts about using the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius to trick girls into touching your privates.

Despite the unsettling popularity of this thing which calls itself Stoicism but is in fact rather closer to clinical sociopathy, it is but an exceptionally depressing and very factually incorrect understanding and use of Stoicism. In fact, I’d imagine you can only really emerge from reading someone like Epictetus with that sort of interpretation if you drink two bottles of drowsy cough syrup beforehand and pick up the book with live charges clamped to your nipples.

For that particular corner of the internet, being ‘Stoic’ appears to mean being self-interested, emotionally repressed (except for silent anger and seething resentment, which are manly or something), and as buff as possible. Provided of course you’re taking the right AI social media influencer’s supplements, which cost $200 a month and are (I’m guessing) largely comprised of vacuum cleaner dust and donkey testosterone.

So look, if all that is what you think of when you think about Stoicism, I don’t blame you. Those chaps are loud, ubiquitous and a bit lost, but you’re under a misapprehension. Stoicism is a rich and valuable holistic philosophy which ambitiously tries (and fails, as they all must) to give us a theory of everything. Epictetus’ Encheiridion (or Enchiridion)— the manual that best showcases his wisdom and irascible wit — is filled with sparkling insights and brutally constructive truths about living an honest, decent life in a world which tends to reward anything but. These insights and ideas have value for anyone who is interested in them, regardless of the time you live in, the culture you come from, or how much protein you can ingest before you involuntarily soil yourself and your liver falls out.

It’s no surprise that Stoicism, and Epictetus in particular, have been so influential in modern therapeutic methodologies and techniques. His psychology is inward-facing, focused on what we can control, and living according to our values even when the pressure not to, and the consequences for doing so, are great. It is a rigorous, challenging, serious philosophy.

The Discourses cover ethics, theology and metaphysics to articulate a beautifully self-contained and self-regulating universe, of which we are all a part. It’s where you’ll find the skeleton of Epictetus’ belief system. The Encheiridion is a shorter, more practically oriented, read. It’s less focused on the ideas that make up Epictetus’ Stoicism, and more concerned with what living according to those ideas looks like in action. You’ll find the Encheiridion at the back of most copies of the Discourses (including the one I recommend reading for this book club session below).

I hope you’ll come along in March 12th and join us for a discussion about what Stoicism has looked like through its evolution, the competing versions that are so popular and prolific right now, what it is about this philosophy that makes it both so compelling and so ripe for exploitation and douchebaggery, and why it has such enduring mass appeal. Perhaps your life has been improved by Stoicism, or you don’t get why so many people won’t shut up about it, or someone you know has suddenly started quoting Epictetus at you (and trying to sell you donkey testosterone supplements). We’ll get into all of it together. I hope to see you there!

You don’t need any background in philosophy to come along to this session or to find value in the book. If you do have a philosophy background, the discussion will still be interesting for you!

The book club is my way of thanking paid subscribers who keep Peak Notions afloat, and of building community here. It takes research, work, and admin (which is not my forte oh my goodness!) so for that reason it’s open to paid subscribers only. There are 15 spots available for this Peak Notions Book Club session, which takes place on Zoom at 8pm UK/Irish time on Thursday March 12th. If we get significantly more signups, I may run a second session.

PLEASE NOTE: The book club sessions will no longer be recorded. I’ve made this decision to maximise the freedom of those who attend to share their views without the pressure of feeling observed after the fact. I started Peak Notions to give myself the freedom to write and speak as I wish to. I want Peak Notions to be a space that gives others that freedom as well, so after the session, I will share a written post with paid subscribers discussing the highlights and the ideas shared, and any thoughts it prompted for me on the book. I don’t want anyone to miss out if they’d like to attend though, so I’ll see how signups go and will arrange a second session if there’s demand for it.

You can get all the details (including the confusing time zone stuff!) and put your name on the list via the sign-up sheet linked below:

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