When I tell people I live in an intentional community/micro-monastry/commune I can often sense questions they are too polite to say aloud: Is it a cult? And is there….sex stuff? Reader, if we were a cult I wouldn’t tell you, but there is not sex stuff. However, several times in the last few weeks I have massaged a housemates boobs. It is not sexy. She was crying and swearing loudly and at one point a thin fountain of milk narrowly missed my face. Our smallest, newest housemate was born recently on the floor of our front room. I mainly shouted encouragement and made tea for the midwives. I also opened the door to three ambulance loads of (thankfully not needed) paramedics and generally confused everyone about how I was related. When the midwives and paramedics left after the home birth, I put bleach on the bloody towels and found a discarded catheter in the corner of the room. I managed to tip the remaining contents on myself while disposing of it. I didn’t really care. Now, we are all adapting to the new arrival, including those poor, sore, engorged boobs.

If you’ve ever breastfed, or tried to, you may have curled your toes at some of the sentences above. Often, as the mother’s body adapts to this new (ancient) function, milk ducts get blocked and a horrific infection called mastitis can occur. Massaging along the ducts helps make this less likely, and also really hurts. It is a hard thing to do to yourself with the firmness required, and partners tend to find it difficult to torture their beloved. I had mastitis, know in my bodies deep memory how much better this pain is than the alternative, and so I am the best placed person to perform this act of love for her.

Does it feel weird, I hear you ask, getting hands on with someone else’s knockers1? Not at all. It feels like ancestral scripts kicking in. There are certain things I imagine women down the centuries have done for each other. Most of them are now only done by paid professionals. Thank God for midwives and lactation consultants and health visitors, and also, isn’t it sad that they alone perform most of these functions? Where are the women who just know how to help a baby latch because accompanying each other in these seasons is what we do? Why is it not normally veteran dads teaching other men how to change a nappy, but paid-for classes and groups?

Since the birth our house has been even fuller than usual with family sleeping over on sofas, church friends dropping off meals, neighbours. All of us, including my older children can hold the baby, give the expressed milk they needed to get the jaundice down and weight up, make meals, put a wash on, sterilise bottles. We’ve been able to send the new parents to bed and take the sleepy bundle into the garden while we plant out this years tomatoes.

Honestly, as we prepared for this major change in the life of our community I have often felt nervous. Worried we would not know how to be, fearful that the extra person with needs would tip us over the edge of our capacity, that we’d be at each other’s throats from the tiredness. I feared I would be too selfish to want to help look after a baby, too glad to be out of that relentless season with mine. Instead, it feels right. I’m sure there will be times where we get close to those things (we are early days), but I no longer feel afraid that this will break us. We all seem to just know what to do. My primary-school age son, previously the youngest member of the household, came down this morning, unstacked the dishwasher and restacked it without being asked for the first time ever. Then he held the baby so their mum could eat her breakfast. As he gazed down at the tiny, fragile body in his arms he looked older in the best possible way.

It actually doesn’t take a lot to make the experience of these early months less brutal for our housemates. Anyone who has been through it knows the worst parts are the isolation, the relentlessness and the constant fear you are doing it wrong. An extra pair of hands, a half hour cuddle so someone can take a shower or a nap, a hug and encouragement in the overwhelm ease all of those. It feels good, in some deep-down way, to be able to pass on some of our hard won knowledge (lightly, when it is requested). To regularly remind them that no-one knows what they are doing, that babies cry a lot, that breastfeeding can be really difficult, that it is normal for this to be the hardest and best thing they have ever done at the same time. My husband is a naturally early riser so will take some of the dawn feeds. My bet is he will enjoy that more than getting blearily sucked into work or doomscrolling at 5.30 am.

The way we live is a HUGE gamble. It is a rebellion against a culture that teaches us to prioritise comfort, convenience and control over almost everything else. Living up close with others does involve sacrificing those things. I cannot pretend it is not demanding, annoying, sometimes tiring. It is a risk, but a calculated one.

We have made it from the belief that comfort, convenience and control are fool’s gold: appealing but ultimately unsatisfying.

They are so shiny, and so highly valued by the culture I am formed by. Large parts of me still crave them. Many forces encourage me to orient my life around seeking them, not least because they tend to be profitable. Seasons like this, where the connection between what we have sacrificed and what we have gained in mutual care is so clear are really helpful. I thought I’d mainly feel the gamble paying off when we were the recipients rather than the givers of care, when the benefits were mainly flowing in our direction. It is becoming clear to me that this is a lie of our culture too, an ungrounded story about humans and how they flourish. We are not Homo Economicus, mainly looking to optimise our self-interest. Or we do not have to be. The look of satisfaction, dignity, pride even on my sons face as he realised he could help said it all. We are made for each other, we are made by each other, and it is good.

I

Hello, today’s post is the video and transcript of a live event I hosted with Dr Curt Thompson, a practicing psychiatrist and author on the intersection of spirituality, psychology and how we flourish (hint: together). I’ve been really formed and empowered by Curt’s work which helps give an alternate (though as he says, not inherently more authoritative) frame for understanding just how relational we really are. We had such a tender conversation with members of the audience, and many said just how much they’d written down and would return to.

We covered

• The relational mind: interpersonal neurobiology’s claim that a mind is something that happens within and between persons (this blew my (relational) mind). Drawing on attachment studies and trauma healing, Curt unpacks what this means in terms of where we can find healing and hope.

• The centrality of story telling: Curt’s practice and the ‘Confessional Communities’ he has established have found immense power in simply telling our stories more truthfully and having them heard, non-judgementally. This really echoed something we’ve learned in the community house, and which I’ve observed listening to people on .

• We went into how community and relationships can hurt us, and tempt us to withdraw. When I asked Curt about this he said:

This is the great gift, and this is the great terror. Because my trauma, my distress — ultimately, it always comes in the context of intimate relationships. It’s people who hurt me. And yet I need healing from people. But I have a brain that remembers. And I remember that if I want healing, I’m gonna have to be with people. One of the things that happens when people come to see me in psychiatry — no matter what it is, whether it’s alcoholism or severe depression or panic disorder or eating disorder, whatever it happens to be — there is a sense in which what they’re really looking for on the front end is relief from their symptoms. But they’re not aware that what it’s going to cost them is the willingness to move closer in relationship. It’s a very hard thing for us to do. It’s kind of like: you need water to survive, everybody needs water. And if all you’ve ever had is contaminated water to drink, the water just doesn’t sound like a very good idea — but you gotta have it. And so you come to the next drinking fountain and you’re like…. this is the terror that we have. And this is why community makes such a difference, because I don’t just want to sit here and tell you to go do this. I want to say, I want to do this with you.

This series of events and recordings will continue to be paywalled, partly because I have a hunch that it enables more honest, human engagement if there is some kind of barrier to entry, but for the moment, all other content is free. A lot of you decided to upgrade on this basis, and although it isn’t the number I’d thought I’d needed, it still seems the right thing to do. Thank you to those who were already paid subscribers or who recently took the leap, and if you want to support this attempt to subvert the logic of the content-machine slightly, I’d really value your support.

Read more

This week, I wanted to share in full a letter I was sent anonymously. The sender followed up to say they felt quite exposed even having sent it, and we discerned together whether it was the right thing to post here. I felt very privileged to be trusted with it.

For context, the correspondent opened by saying they were writing in response to another post in my Affirming Flame not-quite-advice-column series, featuring Joanne, which was in itself a very honest admission of internal tribal dynamics:

This week it was announced that Donald Trump had helped negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, to bring the war to an end. My reaction has been disappointment. This has made me feel very uncomfortable. My reason for my disappointment is because it means that Donald Trump will now receive praise for his efforts. Anything that makes him look good, I want to shut out of my awareness. It makes me feel agitated, defensive, angry, aggressive towards anything that makes Donald Trump look good. Even if this means that the war that has brought suffering and death to tens of thousands of people might be coming to an end.

Joanne reflected on reckoning with her own shadow side, her desire to feel righteous and superior to the “other side”, and how much she wants to think and act differently.

This is the letter written in response:

Joanne’s note helps me feel a little more hopeful, but I’m struggling to apply that hope towards new behaviours in myself.

I grew up in a left-wing family, and I’ve lived almost exclusively in communities that leaned heavily left. For most of my adult life I’ve been in a very lefty urban environment, I attended a lefty university, and I’ve worked primarily in very left-leaning arts communities. I absorbed all of those influences, and in many ways my enculturation and interests are left-coded. Until somewhat recently, all of that was invisible to me - I simply took that worldview for granted.

I value relational, embodied frameworks. I love the natural world. I’m drawn to thinkers like Paul Kingsnorth and Iain McGilchrist. I’m spiritual, and increasingly drawn to Christianity. And I’m a supporter of Donald Trump.

My perspective is that it is entirely futile for me to discuss his role in our lives with anyone who disagrees. I can conjure a unicorn in my head who could have a reasonable conversation that might temper and educate my views, and who might be influenced in turn. But my sense that I can achieve this in real life is effectively zero. People like Lawson and Douglas Rushkoff are intentionally writing about de-escalation and having humanizing conversations across political divides, yet the framing of their articles convinces me that even they are too far across the chasm to be reachable. At least, that’s how I feel when their writing heaps on assumptions that I disagree with. That which is ‘self-evident’ to us all is just too far gone.

The critiques of ‘my’ position that saturate the landscape are hopeless strawmen, so make no impact on me. I’d like to find people who could take my position seriously and critique my views in good faith. Never having seen arguments that come close to my position, I now assume that the chasm is simply too wide. I admire those like Jenny Holland who brave that gap, but they seem to be singing to the choir.

Imagine that in order to have a conversation, you would first need to teach your interlocutor a whole new language. Now imagine that your two languages use all the same ‘words’ as homonyms, and your partner can’t help but attribute their own meanings to your vocabulary. This feels like a real reflection of my challenge, and even a well-meaning partner in dialogue can’t and won’t endure the enormous effort and discipline required for such a task.

When I try to imagine how I would articulate the reasons that I have arrived at my position, it strikes me that it would take tens of thousands of words to scratch the surface on any one issue, and there are numerous issues at hand. Who could have the patience to listen to me even begin to cover that ground? Especially when I’m not very articulate in conversation and don’t have at my fingertips the thousands of data points and examples that have shaped my thinking.

Put another way, if present-day me travelled back in time 10 years I have no doubt that I would utterly fail to change my own younger mind.

When I look back at the online conversations I had about this stuff 5-6 years ago, I see someone who was still able to be soft, to be generous with my empathy even in the midst of spirited debate. But even all those years ago I was arguing that the direction of the left was going to polarize and alienate. And now, after years of being called a monster and a racist and a fascist and a transphobe and a bigot, I have hardened. I admire the dialogue I was once capable of, but it now feels hopelessly out of reach.

So for the most part I remain quiet about my beliefs, and inwardly bristle when nearly everyone in my orbit assumes I share their outlook and heaps scorn on ‘my’ kind.

I don’t need to change anyone’s mind. But I do think we benefit from dialogue, and I do want to normalize the diversity of opinions in my community and dampen the seemingly universal assumption that everyone here shares a single, condemnatory view of this president. Yet the trade-off - essentially becoming a pariah - feels too heavy for that humble goal.

And the longer I sit quiet, the harder it is to quash my resentments and soften my heart to those around me. If it weren’t for my commitment to my aging parents and a job I love, I’d have relocated to ‘redder’ pastures long ago.

I don’t actually want to add much commentary here, and the correspondent is explicitly not asking for me advice. I don’t know that I’d have any to give in any case. The paragraph that stood out to me most is the one in bold, above, on the limits of language. I have experienced this, the sense that the intellectual and moral and spiritual paths have diverged so thoroughly that the step-retracing required to come back to shared ground feels endless. The good will and time and patience required is so hard to come by. I hear her on the writings of even those non-Trump supporters who are trying to bridge divides and feel it in my self. I know how much discipline it takes not to assume agreement, to surface hidden premises, to explicitly acknowledge different starting points, and some days I don’t have the energy, or I forget. I also probably don’t see many of my unconscious premises. Being in conversation with people like this correspondent, really hearing their heart cry, is my best hope. If you are someone who shares some of these experiences, 1) thank you for being here and 2) I’d be really interested to know particular words, phrases, assumptions that tend to feel alienating. I realise it might take some courage to put it in the comments but you can always message me directly.

If you’re interested in this topic, and why I DO think it is worth at least attempting this deep listening, seeking to understand each other, you might like the following posts.

On the ways humans are always trying to make ourselves the hero:

On the subtle socio-psychological dynamics of navigating different and disagreement:

And on why the only way we ever change people’s minds is (essentially) by loving them, not condemning them or arguing with them:

A reminder that I’m hosting a conversation with Dr Curt Thompson next Thursday, details here.

This weekend we had a gardening day at our community house. As part of our collective rhythms (or Rule of Life), once a month we set a day aside and each housemate takes turns planning activities for us. The brief is that we have to do something fun together as part of keeping our relationships healthy, but otherwise they reflect our wildly different interests. Some of them are just for us, but we use many as an opportunity for hospitality, inviting in friends and neighbours. My house day is always gardening focused, partly because although I am Lead Gardener there are lots of tasks too big to handle alone, and partly because I keep trying to get the wider community as excited about growing things as I am. We are also blessed with a big garden, for London, and it is a chance to share the space with others. Members of our wider community join us who have sometimes been labelled “vulnerable”, but on garden day, everyone has something to offer. Something about working side by side, outdoors, feels like good medicine.

The day this year involved the usual things: seed sowing, top-dressing veg beds, compost turning (always my favourite, the teeming life in the pile never fails to blow my mind) but also re-finding the garden. We needed multiple trips to take the huge amount of detritus to the tip now we have (almost) finished a big building project. We have a new housemate due (they will start tiny but grow fast) and are in need of more space, so have built a new chapel/garden office/podcast studio/escape space. And when I say built, I mean with our own hands. We ordered a kit of SIP panels which came on the back of three flat bed trucks and took a whole day to unload, then taught ourselves how to put it together. Almost every skill was a new one. When I saw “we”, it has mainly been the male housemates alongside assorted dads, uncles, brothers, neighbours. I’ve held things and nailed things and am now Lead Decorator and my very pregnant housemate has kept everyone fed and watered, but the average difference in strength between the sexes in this area has been in evidence. Which is fine. More than fine, really. The satisfied gathering of men having a beer the day the walls went up felt like a lovely picture of non-toxic masculinity and an echo of barn raisings down the centuries.

Despite my comparatively weedy arms, I have been trying to grow in these skills too, not wanting to lean too hard into gender stereotypes. It is partly because I can see how good it is to face a hitch, a frustration, a seemingly immovable material problem and figure out how to fix it. The relative resistance of the physical grounds me. It is so intractable, demands so much more of me. While filling and painting I had a strange sensation of unfamiliarity, used as I am to mainly engaging with more malleable pixels, sentences, concepts. I am only using AI sparingly, and conflictedly, but I can already feel it forming me, making me used to its speed and ease. Technology does this, puts most of us, much of the time in what Andy Crouch calls “Superpower Zone.” He distinguishes between tools, which demand something of us but make things a bit easier, and certain types of tech, which demand essentially nothing of us, effectively sidelining human capacities. These types of tech put us in Superpower Zone, which is:

…the exhilaration of effortless power; the exhilaration of having some technologically-assisted ability, whether it’s pressing the accelerator in a car or scrolling through huge amounts of information or photographs online. It’s the sensation that I am getting a great deal done with very little effort. It’s quite habit-forming, because when we are operating as heart-soul-mind-strength complexes, which is what we really are, getting things done is difficult and often slow and complicated. And what the superpower zone gives us, and what the superpowers in technology afford us, is a reduction in complexity, a reduction in the sensation of effort, and an increase in the sensation of efficacy. That’s like a drug for a human being. But the superpower zone never fully involves or develops all four of those constituent parts of the human being. You always leave something behind to take advantage of it.

When I sit in my car and press the accelerator, my strength is not being used at all. It takes essentially no strength to press the accelerator. Whereas, when I get on a bicycle and pedal, I’m fully involved with my strength, my heart, my mind, and my soul. And it fully involves me and develops me as a person. When I get off a bike after a vigorous ride, I’m stronger than I was before. Whereas the longer I sit in a car, the more my physical capacities diminish….The basic problem with the superpower zone is that…it’s actually quite diminishing of us as persons in the fullness of what we were meant to be.

A few weeks of working much more with my hands does feel like it is growing me, rather than shrinking me. We are using some power tools, but I decided they are still tools, not tech, because they still require human skill, focus, effort, strength. When you mess up a screw hole there is no undo button, and it has scared me how part of my mind kept groping for one.

While we were clearing the garden of pallets, I decided to attempt an idea I had held for most of the four years we have lived here: bike sheds. We had four giant perspex panels that the previous owners had used to divide a room, and with some ingenuity, a little help and some determination, I managed to turn the pallets and panels into two new bike shelters. This in turn frees up space in our shed for more bulk buying of lentils and incoming baby equipment.

At one point, my nine year old son wanted to help. A younger man from another community house who had pitched up for the day took him under his wing. Together, they sawed lengths of waste wood to brace the pallets, measuring and levelling carefully. I doubted my son’s even weedier arms would be able to saw anything, but he kept going, determined to finish the job. Afterwards, with a lot of careful instruction, he used a nail gun and a power drill. Another guest, watching all this through half closed eyes said “aren’t you worried he is going to injure himself?” “No” I replied, honestly. “Or rather, he might, and we might end up in A&E, but I think the learning would be worth it.” I recalled a conversation with recently about her forthcoming book and her conversations with anthropologists about what is really needed for interdependent societies. “Toddlers with Machetes” is the memorable phrase she gifted me, a vision of families and cultures and tribes which teach their young real skills then trust them, expect something of them.

My son wielded his power tools that day, but also spent lots of time with other kids on a trampoline, sneaking too many biscuits when the adults weren’t looking. When I asked him round the firepit that evening what his favourite part of the day was he said “building the bike shelters”. Now, every time a guest comes he takes them down the garden to show them.

Gardening and building (and cooking and mending) things together is increasingly central to who we are trying to become. Some of the values of our community are Hospitality, Prayer, Celebration, Creativity and Upskilling. The last one might read strangely, but it has become more and more central. We are not from a generation which inherited a lot of practical skills. We all went to university, were taught that learning to make things, mend things, grow things, build things were somehow less valuable than analytic, strategic thinking or stuff you can do on a screen. Head, not hands, essentially. The implicit invitation was to make enough money so you could afford to get someone else to do practical things for you, buy a new one whenever something broke. I’ve no quarrel with thinking or working on a screen (like this work, in fact), but I am calling bull on those being the only skills worth developing.

It is partly the prepper in me, wanting to be of some use to our neighbours when the apocalypse comes (AI or climate or both). It is also, increasingly, because learning these kinds of skills is just bloody satisfying. I saw it in my son and I feel it in myself. This makes sense. Two of the five ingredients in a flourishing life, according to the grandaddy of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, are Flow and Mastery - doing things which stretch us and take our whole attention, and seeing ourselves get better at them. I have never felt either working with an LLM, but I experienced both this weekend, thinking hard about what seeds to plant to maximise our vegetable harvest, figuring out how to make bike shelters from materials destined for the tip. There is joy in it.

I am often, however, living both sets of values at the same time. It was one of my housemates who suggested we build the new space ourselves. The rest of us were sceptical. It has taken significantly more time than hiring someone in and not saved us that much money, in the end. The process has been full of delays and frustrations. We have been stretched in our capacity, sometimes grumpy, occasionally resentful. The end result is less polished, less perfect than it would have been if professionals put it up. We may run into problems with it later down the line (teaching yourself to fit windows is pretty complex, it turns out.) Most of the burden has not fallen on me, and still there have been days when I have longed for the frictionless option, to throw money at the problem rather than work through the stickiness ourselves. I’m glad we haven’t.

Like most of the values we are trying to live, I have to keep intentionally choosing them. When I’m rushed and tired I have no interest in trying to figure out why the dishwasher is not draining. I want someone else to deal with it. Sometimes that is ok, but we are living in a time not just of learned but taught helplessness. It is far more profitable for humans to ask an app or a machine or a frictionless, globalised service to meet our needs. There will be other humans involved, but we will never need to risk the friction of actually relating to them. Learning instead to meet our own needs, for and with others, to share what we have, to teach each other what we know, disrupts that taught helplessness. We have to learn how to be together. It keeps the value of all that skill and knowledge locally, in webs of relationships, in gardens and homes, rather than allowing it to be extracted and sold back to us.

It steadies me, makes me more hopeful. I think it probably grows our souls as well as our skills. There is no undo button for character formation, after all. And if it doesn’t, at least we have somewhere to put our bikes, and somewhere to pray.

I wrote a piece last week partly about the changing Substack landscape and my sense that in order to make a living as a writer it is increasingly necessary to pivot to salesy, content-market-machine tactics. I offered a bold, vulnerable feeling invitation: for more of you to become paid subscribers on a more relational, less transactional basis so I could make the whole thing free. I said that if I hit 475 paid subscribers I could do that, an increase of nearly 100.

40 of you took up the invitation. THANK YOU. Existing and new. Several existing paid subscribers upgraded to Founding (you can do this in your settings, if you’d like to ) and others took out subscriptions for others as gifts. If you are among them, it is one of the most encouraging things that has happened in a while. It is the most paid subscribers I have ever gained in a week, and already helps with the sense of financial precarity pursuing this kind of vocation, in these kind of times provokes. More than that, I felt met in my groping attempt to articulate a different way of connecting, not theoretically, but in real concrete commitment. There are a lot of us, then, who do not want to interact with the world solely as a customer, who are prepared to experiment with a different logic.

Lovely shared the post and someone responded to him with this, fascinating note:

If nothing else, it has been a fascinating exercise in surfacing some of our assumptions, noticing what our consumption patterns say about our deeper values, what we believe about human nature. Classic Economics has a lot of baked in anthropology. We will optimise our self-interest, always, it teaches. Some paid subscribers did indeed defect, reducing the numbers of growth overall to about 30, and I felt (I was glad to discover) genuine sense of “God Speed.” It is ok if this halting attempt at as much honesty and humanity as I can muster in public gives some people the ick. As I am holding onto:

So what is next? Honestly (big word at the moment), I don’t know. This post is free, and audio and events will continue to be for paid subscribers as planned, partly because it protects the space for real conversation. I don’t want to make a knee jerk decision about whether 30 net new paid subscribers is enough to make all the written content free. I don’t know exactly what it would mean for my ability to earn money on here in the future. I didn’t think so, but I got so excited about the idea that I am loathe to let it go. So I am going to take a moment and pray about it. Wherever I land, for those of you reading, thank you. Whether you can afford to pay or not, I am so grateful to have you here.

What does neuroscience have to do with the soul?

Dr Curt Thompson is a board-certified psychiatrist and medical doctor who has spent his career at the intersection of brain science and spiritual formation. I and many others have found his work hopeful and humanising, helping integrate areas usually kept separate.

Drawing on the field of interpersonal neurobiology, Thompson believes, like me, that that we are wired for connection at every level: our brains, our bodies, our stories, and our longing for transcendence are not separate systems but one, inescapably relational whole. Thompson is especially interested in shame, which be believes creates cracks that wholeness — quietly, insidiously, shaping the stories we tell about ourselves long before we are conscious of it. It fractures relationships with ourselves, others and the divine.

The good news is that attention, community, and presence can begin to rewrite those stories. And that rewriting, Thompson suggests, is not just psychological healing. It is spiritual formation.

Read more

Before this week’s essay proper, a couple of practical things (scroll to Heading 3 if you want to skip):

1) Speaking

Firstly, if you’d like to invite me to speak, especially around any of the dates in the list below I’d love to hear from you. I’ll be in D.C (May), Colorado (June) and Georgia (October), and then in Denmark and Sweden. You can reach me on elizabeth at elizabetholdfield.com

2) Making, not marketing

Secondly, this is a free post. I wrestle with the free/paid model here, my desire to live aligned with the gift economy pulling one way, my need to provide for my family another. Ideally, nothing would be paywalled, but giving away my labour for free isn’t realistic in this season.

The reason I am telling you this is, to be very honest, is because my paid subscribers are going down. I don’t know if it’s global economic precarity, substack saturation, lack of skill on my part or something else [constructive feedback welcome]. Because I rely on this work (and it is work, real work) for part of our families income, this matters. There are all kinds of “hacks” and “ten things you are getting wrong” posts I could be following, trying to “convert” more of you with my “high value proposition”. I could paywall more posts, write sexier headlines, more hot takes. I could disappear down a data rabbit hole, work out which posts “perform” and feed you more of those. I could treat you like a customer and this work less like the fragile, relational weaving of creativity and more like transactional content-machine marketing. This is what I “should” do.

Can you hear how my heart is not in it? My (occasional, fleeting) sense that my writing is any use in the world relies on discerning from a different logic. Slower, steadier, more human scale. What is arising now? What is being suppressed that might need to be said? Where is the wind blowing in my soul, and is that a clue to something larger? About us, not just me? About something beyond us, beneath us?

I can’t bring myself to do the salesy stuff. Substack does some of it automatically, I am realising, for which I apologise. I’m slowly figuring out the settings to turn that off. Instead, this is what I am trying today: asking.

If you value my writing and wouldn’t notice £5 a month leaving your account, would you consider upgrading? Not because I am promising you “high value content”, setting up a transaction. Because something here feels like it occasionally makes you think more deeply, nudges you towards aliveness, or because you want to support real human writers, not AI slop.

If enough of you subscribe on this basis, I can make it all free access. The very idea feels like a fresh wind, a very faint hope. The people who can’t afford a paid subscription wouldn’t need to ask for a gifted one any more. We wouldn’t be setting up this strange two tier status thing, like airport lounges. If I hit 475 paid subscribers (I’m currently on 379) that is what I will do1. Gosh, this feels vulnerable. I keep wanting to revise that number down. (Vulnerability is a big part of aliveness, she reminds herself). I am emboldened by and others way out on the wilder edges of trying to live a different logic.

I am aware that what I may get instead is a mass exodus for daring to suggest we could relate on anything other than a customer - seller model. It is a bit presumtious. Go in peace, if this is not just for you. It might be needed, a sign that the seasons are on the change, the formation of this platform is changing, that there is other work I need to be doing. This has to be sustainable in ways which go with the grain of my soul, or not at all. We shall see.

3) A Stupidly Simple Soul-Support (accessible to us all)

This morning I ate my breakfast outside in our community house garden, face tilted to the spring sun like a dandelion. I had left my phone, turned off, inside. If I hadn’t, my head would have drooped down instead. The portal, as Patricia Lockwood calls smart phones, would have hoiked me right out of there. My mind would be hurtling across the globe, divebombing into degradation and desolation while my body still sat, surrounded by a yellow cloud of gone-to-seed kale flowers titilated by amorous bees but oblivious to it, clenching and hunching with urgency.

Instead, I breathed deep, noticed the kale and the bees and picked up my slice of toast. It was from a hearty, yeast-scented bread-machine loaf my housemate had made. Because I wasn’t scrolling or reading or listening to a podcast, I noticed how the slice of crisp conference pear (wonky from our Oddbox but still sweet) resisted my teeth less than the oily, rich peanut butter, the dry friability of the toast. It was like digging down through distinct geological layers. I was a breakfast archeologist, just for a moment. Salty butter, malty bread, crunch of peanuts, the pear top note singing like a squeeze of lemon on fried food. A world of distinct textures and flavours in one mouthful. Glorious. Thank you, I did not have to force myself to say.

I always feel like a beginner with spiritual practices. We have collective ones in our community house, but finding time for my own soul is a constant battle against my distractible, novelty-seeking, non-morning person tendencies. The one I am currently finding most life giving is absurdly simple: being grateful for every bite of food.

It started not as a consciously spiritual practice but out of search for a healthy, peaceful relationship with eating and my body. As I age, as people shrink all around me, as millions of people starve and others obsess over macros and prices sky rocket and our food systems teeter perilously, I am seeking the body’s grace. Seeking to know what ease and joy and health look like in and through this simple action that we all need every day. Because I refuse to settle for the low-level, background dysfunction so much messaging encourages. Because I know the state of my mind, heart and body effect everything else. It is for freedom we have been set free. As I was praying about this, the phrase floated up: give thanks for every mouthful.

Give thanks for every mouthful. So easy to say, so difficult to do.

What I am talking about is not, of course, original or new. None of the good stuff is. The role of food in healthy spiritual lives has long been known, whether in giving thanks, fasting or feasting. We start our regular community house open table meals (to which people from all kinds of traditions and philosophies come) with some collective silence. We invite people to acknowledge, in whatever way they feel comfortable, the plants, animals, insects, people, places - the absurd amount of labour and sacrifice required to get this food onto our plates. It is often my favourite part of the evening. What has changed for me is the “every bite”. I am taking that acknowledgment, what many call mindful eating, and trying to stay in it, all the way through a meal. Trying to stay present to the sheer gift of having daily bread, in all it’s variety.

There is often a bit of cringe in me, writing pieces like this. Have you seen the state of the world? Mindfullnes?! Really? So over, and also is this not trivial, self-indulgent? The sneery voice in my head is a b*tch. Perhaps she is right. I don’t think so, though. This practice has transformed my ability to pay attention, because I can’t give thanks for something I have barely noticed, bolted down on the move or while facedown in the portal. Attention, as Mary Oliver said, is the beginning of devotion.

Attention is helping me notice gifts I was previously oblivious of. Pleasing fan-pattern of teeth marks in a thick slice of sharp cheddar. The almost luminous glow of a sun-lit red pepper and tomato sauce-sea around the pale islands of eggs in Huevos Rancheros. Blinding snow white of a cottage cheese mountain with chilli oil lava running down it. The way blueberries and grapes pop against my teeth with varying consistencies, like party balloons left out for different numbers of days. Freshness of coriander, of lime - these flavours I have no real right to know about, sitting here in South London. They bring a faint, South American song. The pillowy texture of a gifted, fancy, potato-flour sourdough, so soft I want to press it into my cheeks. The sandy snap of an oatcake, sweetness of a cashew, zingy spritz of fragrant orange oil in the air as I peel it. The transformative, almost alchemical powers of black pepper and glittering salt. They just sit there in our kitchen as if they were nothing, overlooked. I am looking.

Thank you, I say, chewing and swallowing, savouring every mouthful, astonished. Thank you. I feel a bit ridiculous. I am becoming the Mary Oliver of food. I feel happier, as happy even as Mary seems in her poems, immersed in the world, present to it. Like her poems towards the end of her life, present, also, to divine love, which seems to flow naturally into the open space of attention and astonishment. One of my favourite prayers is “Help us receive the gifts we have already been given”, and this stupidly obvious practice of putting down my phone while I am eating has answered it.

This is mad, I think, high on how wonderful everything tastes, on the relief that no-one I love is going hungry, on the decadence of full cupboards. It is just food.

Because I am eating slowly, giving my body time to catch up, I often get halfway through a plate and realise I’m full. I save it for later, or give it to a housemate. I don’t eat for stupid reasons, because I “should”, I don’t finish things I don’t enjoy, which turns out to almost always be things made in factories. My prayer life is now threaded through my days, and the main words are “wow” and “thank you”. I am present, and I am learning again that the simplest things; presence and attention and gratitude are the ingredients of a healthy soul and not inconsequentially, a healthier body. I am receiving the gifts that were there all the time, just waiting to be noticed. Thank you

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Wedding Poem

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By Ross Gay

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for Keith and Jen

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Friends I am here to modestly report

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seeing in an orchard

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in my town

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a goldfinch kissing

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a sunflower

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again and again

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dangling upside down

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by its tiny claws

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steadying itself by snapping open

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like an old-timey fan

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its wings

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again and again,

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until, swooning, it tumbled off

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and swooped back to the very same perch,

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where the sunflower curled its giant

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swirling of seeds

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around the bird and leaned back

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to admire the soft wind

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nudging the bird’s plumage,

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and friends I could see

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the points on the flower’s stately crown

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soften and curl inward

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as it almost indiscernibly lifted

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the food of its body

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to the bird’s nuzzling mouth

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whose fervor

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I could hear from

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oh 20 or 30 feet away

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and see from the tiny hulls

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that sailed from their

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good racket,

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which good racket, I have to say

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was making me blush,

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and rock up on my tippy-toes,

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and just barely purse my lips

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with what I realize now

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was being, simply, glad,

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which such love,

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if we let it,

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makes us feel.

4) Upcoming Events

Did you know we now translate the greek word psyche (Ψυχή) as mind and soul?

I’m hosting an online conversation (for paid subscribers) on 7th May at 6pm UK time/1pm ET with Dr Curt Thompson, psychiatrist and expert in interpersonal neurobiology. Regular readers will know I am fascinated by how we live in more relational, intentional, spiritually alive ways. I find much in neuroscience illuminating for this and Curt is one of my go-to experts on the intersection of spirituality and psychology. If you’re a paid subscriber you’ll get a separate email with joining instructions and I’ll send a reminder nearer the time. If you’re not a paid subscriber and you’d like to join us and ask your questions (and have access to the video and transcript afterwards), please consider upgrading.

If you’re in the Midlands, on April 30th I’ll be at the University of Leicester at 6pm giving a public lecture on the relevance of ancient spiritual practices in apocalyptic times. It is totally free but you’ll need to reserve tickets, and there is a reception afterwards.

From 28th-30th May I’ll be doing various things at the Understory Festival in Washington D.C, including interviewing Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman and speaking to one of my heroines, Krista Tippett.

On 20th June I’ll be speaking in London at the Breakwater Festival, an Estuary movement gathering, alongside Paul Vanderkay and others.

From the 25th-28th June I’ll be speaking at Aspen Ideas in Colorado on the role of religion in global affairs. I had a fruitful but pretty complex time there a few years ago, which you could read about in this piece.

Later in the year I’ll be speaking in Atlanta, Georgia on October 17th, in Copenhagen the following week and 23-24th October in Stockholm. Yes my body clock is going to be very confused. More details on those as I have them.

Today’s post is the recording of an amazing conversation between me, and , about our different ways of living communally. A wonderful group of our paid subscribers joined us with varying experiences of their own and we went deep. We covered risk, tolerance of uncertainty, recruiting for emotional and spiritual intelligence, why community helps with existential anxiety, what to do with conflict, money, power, sin, safeguarding, the ideas that we are trying to live by and why Sarah thinks polyamory is a spiritual practice.

If you wanted you could make it a drinking game:

Every time Sarah quotes Marx and social science and every time Elizabeth quotes Jesus, the bible or theology, take a shot. You are responsible for your own livers.

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I sometimes think of our community household as one extended mind. (You can read more about the unconventional way we live in The Times, New York Times or in my book). I’d long felt this with my marriage - my husband is trained in physics and analytic philosophy, likes to interrogate the premise of every question and has an extremely sensitive bullshit detector. I struggle to think in anything other than story, tend to see the best in people and would much rather listen than debate. My bookshelves are filled with poetry and novels and his with philosophy, science, theology and big ideas, and we are continually handing each other stuff to read. Honestly, most of my best writing has been fermented in his brain as much as mine. If that possessive pronoun even makes sense.

I also live up close with other, very differently minded people. Because we are small and don’t have a hierarchy, we have to decide everything by consensus. It means a lot of meetings, and over five years we have become familiar with how differently each of us think. We have the person who pays attention to the details, the person who sees the big picture, the person who wants to slow down and do things properly and the person who just wants it bloody done. We have people who always try to see things positively and those who lean sceptical, drawing attention to the risks. Some of us are happy to improvise and bodge it, some only feels safe with a detailed plan. We have pragmatists and idealists, people who think discretely and linearly and people who think in vast, sprawling constellations. We have entrepreneurial and managerial tendencies, people who express their emotions easily and people who don’t. We have neurodivergent people and neurotypical people (whatever that means). We might play different roles around different questions, feel strongly about different things but for any given issue we bring a diversity of approaches1.

This experience has taught me to notice another set of my deep seated prejudices. I have written extensively about homophily, what I call (after Jon Yates) People Like Me (PLM) syndrome. This deep seated tendency to prefer people who remind us of ourselves plays out here too. I do, deep down, think my kind of thinking is best, most valuable. My guess is you do too. If you are the organised, tidy minded person you probably think the improviser or big picture people are a bit irresponsible, slapdash even, and if you have a different approach you may find the detail people unnecessarily slow and anxious, stifling creativity and innovation. You can see these dynamics playing out in teams, families, friendship groups. Being forced into intimate, consequential decision making with others over questions like how much money we can afford to spend to stop the roof leaking has shown me how much I need other people’s ways of thinking. We make better decisions (though its often a long and sometimes frustrating process) because we have a bunch of different brains to draw on. It certainly feels like it brings us closer to wisdom.

All of which is to say: I think we need many different ways of processing the world. They all have their healthy and their pathological expressions. I am trying to grow out of the childish urge to only value my own.

However.

It looks to me like the people influencing the world most powerfully in this moment are not drawing on a range of different approaches in the service of wisdom. One - and it is only one - way of thinking of these differences is through ’s Hemisphere Hypothesis. As I wrote in this post:

The key insight.. is that humans, in the very structure of our brains, have different types of attention. The right hemisphere pays attention broadly, is interested in how things interrelate, can hold complexity and paradox. It’s often spoken about as intuitive, imaginative, attuned to what could be, not just what is, the whole, not just the parts. The left hemispheric mode of attention is drawn to detail, categorisation, linearity and the analytic and theoretical. The left, McGilchrist argues, evolved in order to help us “get”, find food, meet immediate needs, grab stuff. The right is there to helps us “avoid getting got”, to keep us safe, to pay attention to the people around us, their well-being, the dynamics between them, the way the weather is changing and how soothing we find a song. He says “If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterise most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathise”.

McGilchrist’s work grew out of his time as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and the pattern he noted in right and left hemisphere strokes.

The left hemisphere is aware of much less of what surrounds it – ‘sees less’, in all senses, than the right. It is less tolerant of ambiguity and tends towards exclusive, ‘either/or’, thinking; the right hemisphere is more inclusive, inclined to ‘both/and’ thinking….The phenomenological world of the left hemisphere is more self-directed, enclosed, self-validating – in thrall to its theory; the world of the right hemisphere more open to new information, the bigger picture, and what is actually the case, regardless of what the theory might suggest.

He makes this argument carefully and in long form in his books and he is very clear that we need both. Even within brains, diversity of approach is valuable. However, he also argues that modernity has made a society which primarily values left hemispheric thinking. Because brains are plastic, what we repeatedly pay attention to and value becomes self-reinforcing. Right hemispheric modes of attention have long been coded secondary and sidelined, just the “soft skills”, perhaps because they tend to result in ways of being which are harder to measure and monetise. The funding available for STEM subjects rather than humanities (interesting name) sums it up. The irony is that in McGilchrist’s argument, these right hemispheric ways of attending should be primary because they give us a more accurate picture of reality. The left is useful for discrete, functional tasks but was never meant to be in charge. His book on this subject is called “The Master and His Emissary” to describe the relationship.

You don’t need to buy the whole theory to see why this Left/Right hemispheric framing is illuminating. It was very present while reading Michael Pollan’s most recent book and speaking to him for an upcoming episode of podcast .

Michael is an eminent communicator of complex ideas, known first for his writing about the food system (his advice: “eat food, mostly plants, not too much“ became canonical for many), and then jet propelling the psychedelics renaissance with How to Change your Mind (which calls “the book that launched 1000 trips”). His latest, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness explores just that: the mysterious “hard problem“ of how mind arises from matter. Given much of our cognition and bodily processes happen below the level of our attention, where do our inner lives come from, and what exactly are they?

Pollan explains this complex subject clearly and winningly and I am not going to recreate it here. I found the book intensely thought provoking (I still experience my own consciousness differently, having read it) and I thoroughly recommend getting hold of it. It wasn’t a straightforwardly enjoyable experience though, especially the first half of the book in which Pollan is interviewing the leading scientists working on the problem of consciousness.

My frustration, which by the end of the book it seems Pollan shares, is not with the mystery of consciousness but with how poorly the scientists are able to tolerate that mystery. How fixed they are in their theories, how confident and reductive in their intensely left hemispheric assumptions. The cast of leading experts in the subject, many of whom have pivoted to working to create “conscious” machines through AI (“the construction of an artificial consciousness may be our best - perhaps our only - chance at truly understanding consciousness”) appear overwhelmingly as one type of thinker.

The psychologist Alison Gopnik called it “professor consciousness”, and when flashes of it show up in Pollan himself he says things like “ a universe we often assume to be dead and purposeless”, and praises psychedelics for their ability to “reanimate a world gone quiet and still”. There is a default atheism and materialism (the belief that all that exists is matter, or is reducible to it). The world, and by extension humans, appear machinelike, our inner lives no more than computations, easy to export into silicone.

The cast of (overwhelmingly male) consciousness experts are in theory very interested in this most fundamental human experience. In reality, they are eerily dismissive of many of the things which make it up: our subjective inner world, emotions and bodies. Again and again the word “embarrassing” comes up in relation to these things, which they code as unscientific, irrational. I couldn’t help writing in the margins: “they seem ashamed of, even afraid of the full experience of being a human, of being fully alive.” Pollan observes

“The experience of feeling and emotion to our experience of consciousness is scarcely mentioned in most theories of consciousness currently on offer….this is odd. Can you think of a conscious experience that isn’t in some way coloured by feeling, either positively or negatively? Yes, apparently, if you’re the typical AI engineer, neuroscientist or philosopher of consciousness”.

He calls most of consciousness research “relentlessly abstract - bloodless, bodiless and utterly oblivious to biology”. Finally, someone says it: Antonio Damasio, who has been able to “rescue” the “disreputable” study of emotion in the field of consciousness through sheer dint of his pre-existing credibility. The problem he faced getting his field to take it seriously? “The stereotype was that emotions and feeling were feminine” he says “and not as serious or useful a process as rational thought”.

Ah. Emotions can’t be really important in understanding how life itself is experienced by humans, because messy emotions, messy bodies, subjective inner lives are too…..feminine.

Pollan lays out many examples, and I am sure you can think of others, to demonstrate this suspicion of or discomfort with our inner lives, the desire, in my interpretation, to explain away or sideline much of our lived experience. Behaviourism in psychology, utilitarianism and consequentialism in ethics, influential Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreeson saying he aims for “zero” introspection.

Much of the money, power and technological momentum is in the hands of people who are running scared from their own minds, their own complex, embodied, emotional subjective experience. Who have forgotten how to pay attention in right hemispheric ways and are so increasingly unrooted from reality. They have accepted and repeatedly reinforced the machine metaphor until it is all they can see, all their perception will let in. The world, therefore appears “dead and purposeless”, humans are “wetware” as opposed to hardware and software, meat bags carrying around the important stuff (rational computation) and easily expendable. My husband compared it to what happens when you lose the sight in one eye - depth perception becomes incredibly difficult. I knew this in theory, but Pollan’s role as curious guide exposed it all the more clearly and horrifyingly.

My copy is peppered with exclamation points in the margin as I realised how differently I experience the world. I remember at university calling a friend over while I was finishing washing dishes to notice how beautiful it was when the peas all landed in the small holes around the plughole, like a flower. “It’s like you are on mushrooms all the time”, he said. I have never lived in a world which feels dead, purposeless, quiet or still. I have never needed psychedelics to know aliveness and purpose in the world, to feel my place in a woven web of relationships, to know my body and emotions as a potential source of wisdom, not a problem to be solved. All this seems obvious to me, to many of us, but is clearly unimaginable for those suffering from “professor consciousness”.

I read Pollan’s three most recent books ahead of talking to him, and it’s fascinating to watch his “professor consciousness” and commitment to materialism cracking, driven largely by his experiences with how psychedelics can “reanimate” the world. Again and again in the book, he expresses the tension he feels with the trajectory of consciousness studies (and the attempt to recreate consciousness) and his humanism. His sense that this reductive understanding is missing something huge about us only grows.

This is why the second half of the book is so rewarding. He turns away from a group of high credibility “experts” who he is losing faith in towards disciplines long sidelined in terms of understanding reality:

“Literature, philosophy and religion have been thinking longer and harder about consciousness than the sciences have, and I discovered that they have at least as much light to shed on the phenomenon. They can also help us defend the richness and complexity of consciousness from sciences’ tendency to simplify whatever it is trying to explain.”

Hearteningly, he meets scientists along the way which know the limits of their discipline, admit the need for a diversity of approaches to grasp reality. Developmental biologist Michael Levin, widely expected to win a Nobel prize, dismissed the idea that science could ever be the right tool to explain consciousness:

“The closest I can come is, maybe your theory of consciousness generates a poem! I might read a poem and go, ‘oh man…That is what it feels like to have consciousness.’ So maybe that is what a theory of consciousness is going to generate - art!”

Pollan starts the book in a lab, optimistic about the solvability of the hard problem, and ends it without an answer in a Buddhist retreat centre. He’s not the only one on this trajectory. The book’s biggest twist for me was a revelation from Christof Koch, who once bet David Chalmers, the man who named the “hard problem” of consciousness, that it would be solved in twenty years. Koch is no longer a materialist. He puts this down to losing that bet, plus the findings of quantum physics, plus a psychedelics trip (this is a pattern) in which he met something he calls a “Mind at Large.” “Ever since I’ve been trying to come to grips with it”, he says. This would not surprise David Chalmers, who warned that the study of consciousness might lead into “metaphysically treacherous waters”.

I finished the book heartened by Pollan’s call to value many types of knowing, to not reduce our minds to brains and our brains to computers. I was also reminded that while we are in an especially intense moment, this temptation is old. Whenever we try and flatten and narrow reality, reality fights back. This is T.S.Eliot writing in 1934.

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word….

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

For those of us who still have our depth perception and want to keep it, who value science but know its limits, who like information but love wisdom, we must refuse to let reality be explained away. I will keep writing poems and telling stories and meeting the mystery of minds very unlike my my own, seeking, indeed, to meet The Mind. I hope you will too.

• If you want to go deeper into this topic or are familiar with the territory already I am reliably informed that The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience by M. Chirimuuta, published by MIT is excellent. Yes, it is from my husband’s shelf. I have read the intro.

• If you’d like to think more about this but might get lost in some of the denser technical stuff, I highly recommend this piece by about the myths we might use to understand what is happening in AI

The Good Apocalypse Guide

21st century fallen angels

So, uh, everyone stay in your seats, but can anyone shed any light on why artificial intelligence company Anthropic might be recruiting for an expert in “chemical weapons and high-yield explosives”? Or indeed why OpenAI is currently offering a $450k salary for a researcher on “biological and chemical risks…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Alex Evans

I’m a philosopher. I always feel uncomfortable admitting this to people, as if I’m wearing an itchy jumper and need to run my finger around the too-tight collar. Part of my discomfort, my imposter syndrome, is that I don’t fit terribly well in an academic philosophy department. Kierkegaard made fun of these people, the ‘assistant professors’, and I laughed along with him, never dreaming I would be professing for a living one day. Though I revered my own teachers, there is something about being a philosopher for a living that has a hint of pretension, as if one is claiming to possess of some greater-than-average share of knowledge, even wisdom. Plato called the people who teach philosophy for money sophists, and anyone who’s read one of his dialogues knows you don’t want to be one of them. Actually, I find myself wanting to explain (in the voice of a 1950s radio announcer for some reason), a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not a fount of knowledge. It’s like Socrates said, I’m wise enough to know I don’t know! At this point, my imaginary dialogue partner smiles politely and slinks away toward the buffet table.

The real reason I’m a philosopher—and was even before I got paid for it, and would be even if I didn’t hold a university post—is that I’m always searching. Ok, it might also be because I introduce Kierkegaard and Socrates into conversations way more than is normal. At one time, I would have said I was looking for answers to all the big, important questions about life, the universe, and everything, but that is no longer how I make sense of my own restlessness. Not knowing is something I’ve had to learn, and I’m getting better at it. It starts as confusion but acquires, over time, a certain direction and momentum. Of course, philosophy isn’t the only or the best way of seeking. It’s not even my primary way. You’re much more likely to find me with some good fiction or poetry. One of the perks of philosophy, though, is that you are part of a centuries-long conversation with some of the wisest-because-they-don’t-know seekers to have ever lived. The best philosophers can slice up an idea like a fish and can give you the ‘courage to think a thought whole’, as my boyfriend Kierkegaard says.

I found a version of this question looming up at me out of one of Plato’s dialogues recently. Socrates is practicing dialectical kung fu on a sophist called Gorgias when one of his young students butts in. Callicles, who is training in oratory to hold public office one day, calls out Socrates on his claim that it’s better to suffer injustice than to commit it. ‘You can’t be serious!’ he proclaims. Sure, people might say such things to sound noble, but no one really believes them—it’s against nature to be so unconcerned with one’s own person. Callicles confidently offers up his own views on justice, which involve those who are naturally superior setting their own rules and not letting themselves be pushed around by others. For him, suffering injustice is simply unmanly, worthy only of a slave or someone too weak to defend themselves.

Callicles asks Socrates why he bothers with philosophy at all, when it’s so useless? He advises him, almost out of pity, to give up on impractical doctrines about truthfulness or justice always being better than their opposites.

Socrates my friend—and don’t get mad at me, because I’m speaking with your good in mind—doesn’t it seem shameful to you to be in the condition I imagine you’re in, along with the others who are always pushing far on into philosophy? Why, if anyone were to grab you now…and drag you off to prison, claiming you’d committed an injustice when you’d committed none, you know that you’d have no clue how to handle yourself…and when hauled into court, even if your accuser happened to be someone of the lowest and most corrupt sort, you’d be put to death if he wanted to set death as your penalty.

Socrates, what good is an art that converts a man of sense into a fool?…left to be stripped by his enemies of all he has and is, to live in his city as someone literally worthless? To say it a little crudely, anyone is free to slap such a person upside the head without paying any penalty. But good fellow, take my advice, stop your refuting.

Young Callicles has a point. Why all this going against the grain, striving for truth? It’s ridiculous. It has no practical advantage—is, in fact, bound to put one at a disadvantage. Socrates knows, as well as Callicles, that the just and truthful man will not be recognised as such. At best he will be seen as impractical and naïve, at worst a loser who needs the sense slapped back into him. The flip side of this, of course, is that the fraudster who can game the system and turn rules and norms to his own advantage appears as the wise and truthful one who tells it like it is. Callicles, in the guise of the truth-teller, presents Socrates with the real endgame of his unrealistic attitude: he will be disgraced in the city and die. He presumes that this dose of cold, hard reality would never occur to a naïve soul like Socrates, who spends his time arguing over philosophical subtleties.

Socrates responds that he is indeed serious about the ideas Callicles casts as trifling—willing to follow those questions all the way to disgrace and death, which do come, in the end.

What should any human being with even a little bit of sense be more serious about than this?—of the way one ought to live one’s life: whether it’s the way you [Callicles] exhort me toward, of doing those things [supposedly] befitting a man: speaking among the populace, training in rhetoric, and getting into politics in this way that you people engage in it nowadays; or this life spent in philosophy, and whatever it is about this life that differs from that one.

Socrates goes on to offer a defence of a life dedicated to caring for the soul, which is what he sees as the aim of philosophy. Without such training, he says, our soul would be like a sieve, with everything good pouring out, and, to mix metaphors, all the bad stuff rushing in. It takes training to commit oneself to what is just and true, and this comes first from a genuine desire to know, to not be taken in by all the false things that wear the face of truth and justice. Callicles’s shrewdness and prudence allow him to move through the world with an easy conscience. He has a sense of justice in his own doings and a sense that, unlike other people, he can cut through the bullshit and see things as they really are. He assumes that because Socrates isn’t doing the same, he’s hopelessly benighted and is in fact guilty of self-negligence. Caring for the soul is no care at all, if it won’t get you ahead in life and won’t be respected by the people around you. Politics, that’s where the real power lies, and there’s nothing politically advantageous about souls!

Socrates might easily grant this point—the two life paths, politics and philosophy, diverge too sharply to ever meet (even if Joe Biden is fond of quoting Kierkegaard on occasion). Yet he insists that caring for the soul is political, even though there’s no direct power or advantage to be had from it. Socrates even claims to be the only Athenian ‘to make an attempt at the political art in the true sense, and the only one of the present day to be actively engaged in political matters’. So how does he understand care for the soul to be a true politics?

The answer he gives in the dialogue is that, unlike the sophists who will say whatever is likely to win them advantage, he looks to those things that will make himself and his fellow citizens better; to know what one’s own good is, what looking after one’s own good would really mean, one needs to attend to matters of the soul. Since this involves being at odds with what the prevailing world thinks is good, it is a ‘form of combat’ and requires a great deal more courage than simply exercising one’s will.

I wrote an essay recently on the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who takes up the Socratic picture of care for the soul and links it to care for the polis, the city.

Asking questions, refusing to see the point, calmly going about living in ways that are out of step with the times: these activities lay the foundation for a genuine politics that would be based on neither low-rent ideology nor cynical pragmatism. They offer an alternative perspective by which the lies of the present can be exposed. For Patočka, ‘politics in a deeper sense cannot do without their interventions; it would grow coarse and lose itself in demagoguery and utilitarianism.’

Such an outlook gives us a framework for thinking about spiritual activity or ‘care for the soul’ having political value, even if one has no direct engagement in politics or cannot see the fruits of one’s own activity in the wider polis. Plato defines the ideal social order as one in which the just and honest man can live unharmed. We don’t live in such a world, and neither did Socrates, but by caring for the soul, his own, that of the fellow citizens he encountered, he embodied the desire for such a world. The fact that he could not see it around him didn’t stop him from living and conducting himself as though he could.

Perhaps all this sounds hopelessly naïve. After all, we live in the world of Callicles. Souls and cities are being squandered, good things left on the ground to rot. Yet Jan Patočka, for his part, took heart from Socrates’ example. Living under a decades-long Soviet regime, he was unable to publish or hold a university post for most of his life because he would not endorse the Communist Party.

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Last year I went to Brighton to film an episode of a podcast hosted by Jade Bowler. If you are over 27 and/or a man you have likely never heard of her. If you are a young woman, at least in the UK, I’d be astonished if you haven’t. She’s a content creator and beloved guide to many. We had a lovely conversation about my book in a yurt in the woods, and as we walked back towards where I was being picked up, I pulled out my facial sun cream. One of, I should say. I often find two or three travel size bottles in the bottom of my bag. Without thinking; I passed it to her. She looked puzzled and glanced at the overcast sky. “Oh, I wear it every day”, I said. “Started at your age. Best thing you can do for your skin”. She graciously refused and I popped it back in my bag. After a moment she said “Do you mind if I ask why?” I launched into a speech I’ve given many times while handing out suncream.

”Well, a tanned skin is a damaged skin - do you know the brown is basically the equivalent of blood splatter? Cells dying1. Also, my grandad had skin cancer, so I’m careful, and I have the complexion of Morticia Adams, and... well, you know, it slows skin aging. If you use retinol serum, you have to be extra careful.”

She listened nodding, and I almost reached to take the bottle back out, thinking I’d convinced her. Then she said, mildly, non-confrontationally:

“I’ve always wondered, with these older women obsessed with suncream. Do you think, underneath, that it really is just about looking young?”.

I flinched slightly, unwillingly, from the “older women”, but it underlined the import of this moment. I thought for a long time as we walked along the path, listening to the birdsong. The baldness of her question had punctured my self-deceit. I could see suddenly how I was helping create the norms shaping her generation, my daughter’s generations below her, whether they accepted or rejected them.

“Yes”, I said, with a heavy sigh. “It is about looking younger”.

My writing here is partly about what it takes to actually live the things we theoretically believe. I’m interested in ‘ethics’ in the most everyday ways, the process by which the tiny choices we make, stories we believe, relationships we prioritise and ways we pay attention make a person. I am trying to think deeply about who we are becoming, in this moment, with these influences. I’m motivated by (and I’m not asking for a friend) what it would actually take to really be brave and honest and loving and free, undistracted by trivialities. That moment with Jade was another uncomfortable realisation of ways in which I am not free.

None of us are, of course, but you can recognise a freer person when you meet them. They are so clearly not performing for approval. I don’t mean the arseholes with low empathy. I mean the non-anxious presences, clearly more interested in the world and the people they meet than in how they are perceived. I’ve striven to be like them, and sometimes, I think, I’ve managed it. Turns out though, I’ve been managing it while also slathering on the retinol serums and suncream, while navigating the ”weight noise” which is always whispering to women (and some men), that we should be smaller, frailer, chic-er, shrinking.

I’ve written before about my disquiet with (and utter enjoyment of) my skincare “hobby”:

I’ve also written about “weight noise” and the pressure for women to be smaller which is again dominant in our culture.

And yet something about the wall-to-wall Epstein coverage has helped me see the connection between these two things more clearly. Not just that thin and wrinkle-free happen to be heavily enforced beauty standards, sucking absurd amount of women’s precious time, money and mental space towards their vacuous black hole. (And if you are a man thinking that smart, serious, adult women don’t also get caught in this powerful tractor beam, let me disillusion you). I can see, suddenly, the even more sinister implication underneath them. The lingering question from Jade was echoing as I read this piece about the late nineties/noughties culture in which I was a teenager, entitled The Mass Grooming of Gen Y (Millenials)

Notes of Optimism from the Pit

The Mass Grooming of Gen Y

When I was 13, I bought my first thong at Victoria’s Secret…

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4 months ago · 4221 likes · 357 comments · Tara Tyrrell

Looking back, I can see it’s no accident that the founder of Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie is a frequent flier in the Epstein files.

The early 2000s were a particularly difficult time to be a teenage girl…. It was also the golden age of trashy reality TV, where horrifically skinny women lived in bikinis and got sloppy drunk for their male producers’ entertainment….the only cool girl clothes in 2006 required you to have either tremendous self-esteem (lol), or the body of an underdeveloped child. Now that we know how many literal pedophiles designed and shaped that culture, it makes all the sense in the world.

Like many women around my age, watching the Epstein tragedy unfold, I recognised myself in these girls. The spaghetti strap tops, and tight jumpers and short skirts, the pigtails. I was clubbing from 14, wearing those exact clothes, off my face on Malibu and lemonade, grabbed and touched and shoved and kissed and now I write it I realise the right phrase here is assaulted, by older men who thought they were entitled to my body. Why did I hesitate over that word? I didn’t think of it as assault because although I didn’t enjoy it or want it (I wanted to be left alone to dance with my friends) there was status in it somehow, that being wanted. That being looked at. It was coded as a form of power perhaps because it was the first power we had ever known.

Recently I read the Japanese novel Butter, and was introduced to the concept of Enjo-Kosai or “compensated dating” or more bluntly, “school girl prostitution”, which was also at its height in the late nineties and early decades of this century. The UN special rapporteur on child prostitution claimed that 13% of Japenese schoolgirls were involved in it.

Why were those men who grabbed at me even there, in places frequented by underage, essentially, children? Why did some significant minority of Japanese men apparently want to pay schoolgirls to spend time with them, and more? We didn’t ask, then. We asked about the girls behaviour, critiqued it or were critiqued by others, but the men’s just seemed….obvious. Like gravity.

As I read that generational grooming piece, alongside others making this link between paedophilia (or perhaps more accurately in the Epstein case, hebephilia, a draw to early pubescents), my mind rejected it. I found myself squirming to avoid it. Youth has always been attractive because it’s linked to fertility, I argued with myself. Some part of me, deep down, believes that this is all just “natural“. That young and frail just is what is attractive, as if attractiveness is a law baked into the universe. That it will always be what straight men desire, and that male desire still makes the world go around, is a power too strong to channel. Your choices, as a woman, ultimately boil down to a) pursue youth and thinness, or b) give up on being attractive, with if you’re straight and unwillingly single can be terrifying, and even if you’re not involves sacrificing all the social (and often economic) capital which comes with it.

Noticing these ugly beliefs in myself, lurking, has been a wakeup call.

My adult brain does not believe that “young and thin=attractive” is actually a law, like gravity. I know enough cultural theory to know how arbitrary these things can be, how culturally conditioned. I have come to believe that what we think are innate desires are largely formed in us by our context, by watching others desire things, by the stories and media we consume. This memetic desire is an outcome of our hyper-social tendencies, the way we are like a murmuration of starlings, always looking to others for our cues.

Here is an alternative belief I am trying to degroom myself with:

Some men - more men than we can comfortably admit, but very much not all men - desire very young girls. Possibly their fragility and vulnerability makes them feel more of a man, salves some deep insecurities. Theorising about where those insecurities and drives may have come from would be a different piece. This one has a go at it:

Matriarchal Blessing

There is one word that explains how so many men can be in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it?

If you’ve ever thought, “Is anyone else seeing this?”—join 30,000 readers for a well-researched dose of clarity (and solidarity) about the invisible power structures shaping our lives, delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning…

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4 months ago · 20128 likes · 1718 comments · Celeste Davis

I don’t know that I agree with all of it, and I still stumble over blaming “patriarchy” for reasons I have not fully understood but the (pretty persuasive) conclusion about what helps reduce sexual violence in general: “Changing [men’s] deeply held beliefs about their sense of entitlement.” Which probably means I do agree about patriarchy, I just don’t know how helpful the word is.

Whatever you call it, the Epstein files revealed how easy it is to build a world where men with the strongest sense of entitlement have huge cultural power and no constraint. It was not been questioned, had had little social shame attached. Especially in the nineties and noughties, but also now, our culture just reinforced it. Until recently, school girl themed club nights were totally acceptable. Because this story is so baked in to our culture, women have been groomed into performing youthful, slender fragility AND men are groomed into finding it attractive. I am powerfully aware how many straight men reading this (and if you are still reading, thank you, I am glad you are here) have also been formed by this script. How many would admit in their most honest hearts that yes, pigtails and school skirts are hot. Of course they are. Britney told you they should be. You were fed images when your sexual imagination was forming that are hard to change. You may have strengthened those neural pathways through decades of questionable porn use. You were groomed too, and then, like us, you probably kept participating.

This is not about blame and shame. There are systems and forces at play beyond the power of most of us reading this. This can leave us despairing, robbed of our agency. Jade’s question to me that day implicated me and pointed to what my small part in this all might be. It showed how I am still here, in my forties, a small quiet part of me still enacting this powerful story. Everywhere I look I see women - smart women, powerful women, women old enough to know better, making choices which reinforce this belief. When we freeze our faces, shrink our bodies not to be healthier but simply to be smaller, we are agreeing with it, appeasing it, modelling it for those who come after us. Watching the new normalisation of “tweakments” (lip and cheek fillers, Botox) and full blown plastic surgery, I now can’t help but think about Lolita. The frail, almost hunched thinness of actresses on the red carpets reminds me painfully of the “heroin chic” of my youth. It makes my heart hurt. I am not looking at women who seem free. This is not me judging them. How could I, with my drawer full of serums, obsessively applying my suncream? It makes me ask, when I’m brave enough to be honest, as Jade was: what toxic lie got hold of you? Of me? How do I get this infection out, for Jade’s generation, for my daughters’ AND my sons’?

I hate the answer. It makes me sulky. I like my serums. However, now I can see it, I think I have to be prepared to contribute to a different norm. I already have a partner who fancies me exactly as I am, and I have some power. My income does not rely quite so directly as some others do on my appearance. If I can’t abdicate from this kingdom made by men with some extremely disordered desires, who can? I should stop using the skin stuff that promises to slow down wrinkles, even though I have taught myself to see it as a treat. I believe wrinkled skin can be attractive, hot even, but I am not living as if this is true. I want to try.

I don’t know what it might mean for men to degroom themselves. That is perhaps not for me to say. It would be a difficult, exposing thing to think aloud about in the comments, but I hope some of you male readers are brave enough. I will not, I promise, jump in with critique, and I encourage other commentators not to either. It is probably mainly a conversation for men to have among themselves. I do believes the root of most (not all) of this is cultural rather than biological, as the piece above argues. This opens up a space of possibility, because cultural norms are changing all the time.

I feel completely fine about my rapidly silvering hair, for example, have never been tempted to dye it, because I’ve had a decade of stylish, free-seeming women in London letting theirs shine, shame free. Silver hair is now part of my norms around attractiveness. Other things can be too. We have seem some progress (possibly now reversed by mass, non-medical GLP-1 usage) towards seeing beauty in a wider range of bodies, a wider range of skin colours (because “young and thin” has too often been accomanied with a silent or not so silent “and white”). What would need to happen for the norm of “beautiful skin” to mean folded, intricately patterned, glowing with health? For young people to draw laughter lines around their eyes like they now fake freckles? Anything is possible when we refuse to perform old scripts.

This is my aim now, as I throw out my serums (or at least some of them, maybe):

And as I write this, I can feel the possibility there. It is making my skin fizz and straightening my shoulders with the deeper truth that was buried under the lie: hotness comes from confidence. What is attractive are juicy people who enjoy themselves and other people, who are fully prepared to fall in love with the world as they drink it all in. People full of appetite and awe, moving in their power. Phwoar. And if this kind of hotness scares the men showing up in the Epstein files, feels, in the phrase which has become synonymous with them, “unf**kable”, well, all the better. The women of my tradition, the warrior Deborah and the revolutionary Mary and the angel investor Lydia weren’t worried about that either. They had something much more interesting going on, work that was theirs to do, fully aliveness to pursue, often in partnership with men who felt the same.

Why write a post about beauty standards now, as a war rages in the middle east and our democratic norms corrode and the atmosphere is coming to boiling point? Isn’t it all trivial? Yes, we have been hypnotised by triviality and it’s time to wake up. These deliberately unattainable standards alienate us from our power and - not unimportantly - our joy. They invite us to waste our lives and I refuse to do that. I can’t stop war in Iran but I can take one small step towards more freedom for myself and others. Who’s with me? The more of us there are, the easier - and more fun - it will be.

Edit: as many commenters have pointed out, keeping wearing SPF is a good idea, health wise - this was not meant to be an anti sunscreen post!

The Sacred Substack

As well as writing here I host a podcast called The Sacred. I work on it with an amazing team, based out of Theos, and we have decided to publish The Sacred also on Substack. If you’ve never listened, it is where you will hopefully find:

a different kind of conversation - one that doesn’t fuel the algorithm’s appetite for outrage, but our deeper hunger for understanding. The Sacred has become a refuge for the curious: those willing to sit with discomfort, to listen beyond their tribe, and to discover the often hidden values that drive people across the ideological spectrum.

This isn’t more content that confirms your preexisting opinions or comforts you with other people’s idiocy. Its deep-dive profile meets spiritual inquiry - thoughtful, unhurried conversations with people whose perspectives might challenge you, surprise you, or remind you that we often have more in common than we suppose. From poets to politicians, activists to academics, entrepreneurs to influencers, each guest is invited to explore the formative beliefs and experiences that have shaped who they are and surface what drives them to live the lives they’ve chosen.

But these conversations aren’t just windows into other lives - they’re mirrors for your own. As you listen to what drives others, you’ll find yourself asking: what do I hold sacred? What has shaped me? Where do my deepest values clash with the world around me? The Sacred creates room not just for understanding others, but for the quiet, necessary work of understanding ourselves. Spaces like this help us live more intentionally, in ways more aligned with the kind of people we want to be becoming, and in a noisy information environment they are increasingly rare. Most media content is designed to make us react - with fear, anger, self-righteousness, insecurity or just the urge to buy something. The Sacred is designed instead to help us reflect - on our own values, our own prejudices, our own tribalism - and in so doing to be becoming more the kind of people the world needs in this moment.

You may already be listening/watching already on other platforms but it strikes me that the sensibility of this place is a pretty good match for what we are trying to do. You’ll find full episode transcripts making it easier to capture quotes (and share them) and an active invitation to respond in the comments. If you’ve ever thought after an episode “I wish I could talk that through with someone”, this is the place. I hope you’ll subscribe and recommend!

This week’s episode is with titan of the UK media, Stig Abel:

The Sacred

How To Live if Nothing is Ultimately Sacred

Early on in our latest episode, Stig told us that he doesn’t really believe in the sacred. He’s suspicious of institutions, wary of certainty, and thinks doubt might be the most important virtue we have. And yet he’s deeply committed to fairness and kindness…

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3 months ago · 2 likes · The Sacred

New essay on communitarian feminism

I recently published an essay for US based family policy think tank Capita called Towards a Feminism of Interdependence. It was a real wrestle to articulate what my increasing fundamentalist communitarianism might mean for feminism. I was, I’ll admit, somewhat braced, because speaking of sex and gender and what we owe each other can’t help but elicit strong reactions. I was grateful that via The Sacred I had engaged with (whose episode is upcoming) and also with Sophie Lewis - two thinkers often assumed to be photo negatives who share an obsession with care. This is the summary of where I landed:

What would it mean to build a feminism not around the freedom of the individual, but around our irreducible need for each other? I live in a household of eight people—and it was loneliness, not liberation, that brought us together. Starting from that experience, I want to argue that both dominant strands of feminism—the ‘liberal’ drive to free women from care, and the ‘conservative’ insistence that care is women’s defining vocation—fail us in the same fundamental way. They cannot hold the truth of multiple things at once. Care is not a trap, nor is it a destiny. It is the connective tissue of a common life. What we need—whether we are men, women or people who struggle with those labels—is not to shrug off our interdependence, but to create better ways of being entangled with each other—a feminism grounded, as bell hooks puts it, in the practice of love.

Events

I’m speaking in a few places this month:

• On 12th March I’ll be back at the UnHerd Club for a ‘debate’ (I’ve been assured it won’t be a formal Oxford Union style debate because that is not my jam) on ‘This House Regrets the Reformation’.

• On Saturday 28th March I’ll be an Oxford Literary Festival with the lovely discussing ‘Living Life to the Full’

Things I’ve enjoyed recently

• The essay Doomers in Love by in is just wonderful and wise and wistful and worth your time (you know she’s a good writer cos she doesn’t alliterate like that).

• I harvested and force fed our homegrown spinach to our community house last week and then went down an internet rabbit hole on the phenomenon of “spinach teeth”. Yes, there is a war happening but at least I know all about the mysterious phenomenon caused (scientists think) by spiky calcium oxalate crystals. No, adding dairy will not help. For once, Nigel Slater is wrong.

• It has finally stopped raining long enough to go rollerblading again.

• The Lost Words Blessing from this album by Spell Songs is profoundly beautiful and stops me in my tracks every time I hear it.

These findings have been so surprising that they have been hotly contested. I am not going to into wade into those data wars - my days leading a think tank and needing to parse polling methodology are behind me. I am less interested in the numbers of bums on pews and more in the things it is difficult to measure on surveys - the subtle permissions, social imaginary and cultural stories which are forming us. There, it is hard to deny that something fundamental has changed. I’ve been speaking to public figures for my podcast The Sacred since 2017 and it is clear to me that spiritual and metaphysical questions come up more easily and with less apology.

I’ve been thinking about this especially through one figure, and she isn’t a conservative man. Sally Rooney, for the four of you not familiar, has been called “the great millennial novelist”. The New Statesman defines “Rooneyish” as “a cluster of nerdy, attractive Dubliners become emotionally and sexually enmeshed” usually with a side order of political analysis and angst. I’ve always found her books highly readable and thought provoking, if a little bleak. For a literary, capitalism-sceptical, gender fluid generation, she has been an idol. Her books have also been hinting at an increasing interest not (as might have been expected), generalised spirituality, or religion as an interesting philosophical concept, but full blown, on the nose, God, Jesus and the Bible.

In her earliest novel Conversations with Friends, the Gen Z Bobbi and Frances initially dismiss religion because: “I’m gay, said Bobbi. And Frances is a communist.” However, Frances struggles with a period of ill health and finds herself reading the Bible, going to church and even praying.

I’m praying, I thought. I’m actually sitting here praying for God to help me. I was. Please help me, I thought. Please. I knew that there were rules about this, that you had to believe in a divine ordering principle before you could appeal to it for anything, and I didn’t. But I make an effort, I thought. I love my fellow human beings. Or do I? … Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labour of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

There is a lot going on here. Theo Hobson puts it well:

This is simultaneously a ‘woke’ monologue that borders on self-parody, and, mainly due to its setting, an indictment of the inadequacy of secular moralism. Rooney is issuing an impressive little up-yours to the culture wars, by showing us a young person who experiences progressive morality as binding on her, but who senses that the force of this obligation brings older, awkwarder, less secular things into play.

Like her protagonists, Rooney comes across in interviews as a morally serious, morally interested person: “There is a part of me that will never be happy knowing that I am just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis”. Some people find this laudable and some deeply annoying, depending on where you stand on questions like Palestine. She’s about as equaly despised and revered as Greta Thunberg.

She writes characters who spend a lot of time wrestling with what a good life looks like, in the old sense of good. Not an impressive, sexy, comfortable life (though she writes full human beings, so they are interested in those things too). They are not simplistic morality tales, managing, for one so earnest, not to come across as preachy. Her characters resist straightforward conclusions (Frances is confronted by Bible passages about marriage but then continues an affair with a married man) but the questions animate all of Rooney’s work.

After Conversations with Friends came Normal People, the book and steamy BBC series which catapulted her to superstar status. This is Rooney’s least religiously interested novel, though the themes of redemption and salvation, albeit primarily through romantic love, are central. It’s most famous quote provoked a million swoons: “I’m not a religious person, Marianne, but I do sometimes think God made you for me”.

If this was all, it could have been dismissed.

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1. Neighbouring is future proofing and resilience planning.

2. Neighbouring is democracy defence.

3. Neighbouring is terrorism prevention

4. Neighbouring can mitigate the challenges of migration

5. Neighbouring is a powerful public health programme.

6. Neighbouring makes us happier (who doesn’t want to be happier?!)

Fundamentally, I am losing faith in individual approaches. I really like the question being asked by over at : “What could you be doing together that you are doing alone?” or WAYDATYCBDT.

For me, living in a very mixed-up area of South London, my neighbouring focus has been hyper local. Just knowing more people on our long street, showing up faithfully at local institutions has felt enough of a challenge. However, as Patton makes clear, if we want to know and love our neighbourhoods, our cities, our villages well we need to reckon with their histories. We need to notice the events and dynamics that have formed them, which will still be forming us. Often, the people who live next door to us have been carefully curated by systems designed to keep us in our safe, similar tribes. His challenge, to pay real attention to the complexity of where we find ourselves in order to truly neighbour well, is one I needed to hear. Where we direct our attention (and how we allow our attention to be directed by others) is at the centre of developing the spiritual core strength we need to ride the huge waves of change we are facing. You may not live in a city as segregated as San Antonio, or a city at all, but my guess is that paying closer attention to where you find yourself will reveal something new.

In 2015, I moved with my wife and three young children to San Antonio, Texas, the most impoverished and economically divided city in the United States.

That’s not why we came. Those two facts—high poverty and an extreme wealth gap—were not even on my radar. None of the friends, neighbours, or colleagues I met mentioned them to me before or after we resettled. We’d been here a full year before I happened to see a headline in the paper about how San Antonio “yet again” ranked #1 in inequality. I soon learned that deep poverty was a century-old story here—though again, no one mentioned it.

I say this not to shame anyone, including my past self—turns out you can live your whole life in a place and not notice one of its core truths. In a way, that’s what a city like this was designed for you to do.

As with many other large cities, people here refer to San Antonio’s parts by its cardinal directions—Northside, Southside, Westside, Eastside—and think they know what those words imply. North = comfortable and majority white. South = middle class and Hispanic. East = poor and Black, and West = poor and Brown. That’s just the way things are, or are believed to be, the designations as natural and inevitable as the San Antonio River flowing through downtown.

But a geography like this—and the demography to go along with it—is neither natural nor inevitable. It emerges from a chain of events set in motion long ago.

There’s a lot of history to cover here, but one of the key moments came a century-plus ago when the Mexican Revolution prompted tens of thousands of Mexicans to flee violence and economic collapse and settle into this region. As the population surged, Anglo city leaders used a series of then-legal tools—especially racially restrictive housing practices and education policies—to ensure that wealth and hardship would not mix.

Look at the maps they used to guide neighbourhood development back then and you can see the economic makeup of the city we’re still living in today.

I started learning all of this about a decade ago, mostly from the cozy perch of a Northside home. It can be tricky to know what to do in response to such learning—beyond feeling bad. For a while, that’s mostly what I did. I read old books, scoured newspaper archives, got familiar with census data, and pieced together San Antonio’s story of development injustice. But I didn’t quite know what to do with what I was learning. Nothing I learned told me how to change the fact that I lived a pretty segregated life, at least by virtue of where I slept each night, where my kids went to elementary and middle school, where we shopped and ate and went to parks and doctor’s offices.

But I was increasingly unsettled by a lifestyle that was secluded from my neighbours. And by “neighbours,” I did not mean the people on my street, even as some of them became dear to me. I meant neighbours in what you might call the ancient sense—the sense of neighbour in the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the answer to the question “Who is my neighbour” has nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with shared humanity. Since I was living in a city designed to divide us, neighbouring in that ancient sense had to mean interacting with people a ZIP code or two or three away.

How do you do that? How do you start desegregating your life? How do you counteract your city’s design?

It’s not easy, to be honest. I’ve spent years trying to resist these patterns in my own life even as I launched a program, Know Your Neighbor, whose very mission is to break these patterns. We do that chiefly by creating stories about our city that clarify how and why we are so divided. We also bring people together at storytelling events and make sure they sit across people from different ZIP codes, with different backgrounds and experiences of San Antonio, and have a chance to hear and share stories with the neighbours that may never otherwise encounter.

Our hope is that the connections made at these events are lasting, that they turn into relationships that build into networks that can influence institutions and the way they function. We’ve been at this for a few years, but we’re very much aware that we are still in the early days. This is gradual, gestational work, the work of building a culture of neighbouring that pushes against the legacy of segregation.

In the meantime, even in a fiercely fragmented city, I have found that there are ways forward. Even at the personal level, there are ways to build little bridges that can be walked back and forth. Here’s what has worked for me:

Put your body in other parts of town

This is the fun part. Visit neighbourhoods that might be out of the way for you, where you feel like a stranger. Do it on the regular. Go eat in the restaurants. Shop the stores. Walk the streets. Realise this, too, is part of your city.

Get to know the helpers

Ten years ago, I would have said—wrongly, ignorantly—that no one was working on the challenge of poverty in San Antonio. The truth is that this city has a wide array of brilliant, dedicated people leading the way in communities that have experienced so much harm. As you get to know these folks, they’ll begin leading you, too.

Throw yourself into community solutions

Every community has conflicts brewing over planning, schooling, streets. If you pay attention, you might find out what a community wants to happen in those conflicts, and you might see a way to align yourself with their cause—say, by volunteering, donating, or attending a public meeting and speaking up on their behalf.

Give locally and longterm

If you are able to make even modest donations, consider focusing your dollars on the small but vital nonprofits that are on the front lines of challenges in your area’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Don’t be a one-time giver; don’t just respond to crises. Get in for the long haul.

People talk a lot about the system change that’s needed to overcome the challenges of neighbours divided from each other, set on wildly different trajectories simply because of the place they were born. And that’s the right instinct—there are layers of policy in play here regarding public investment in schools, housing, transportation, healthcare, and more. Those systems need changing.

But there is also a cultural layer—and indeed a personal and spiritual layer—to all this, one that we often skip. It begins with embracing a different conception of neighbour, one that calls us to help bridge the divides our forbears deliberately put in place.

What have you learned about your neighbourhood, or would like to learn? Please share your stories in the comments. Following this challenge, I am going to explore moving some of our charitable giving away from the big national charities towards the people working around the corner from me, paying close attention to the pain and promise of my neighbourhood.

Our little household lost a friend recently. He was (I’m still stumbling over the was) called Andrew Cooper. He died way too early, at 39. He was (is?) a brilliant philosopher who taught at The University of Warwick and published widely on Kant. Even typing that sentence feels weird, because as one of his friends tasked with talking about his work at the funeral said “this all feels a little strange and irrelevant. Would we would loved him any less if he hadn’t had a glittering career?” We would not.

I often find funerals a bracing reset, priorities wise. They lay out clearly what a good life is really about and remind us how frankly pointless much of what we spend our time obsessed with is, in comparison.

The memorial service for Andrew was full. Attendees came from all parts of his life, students and colleagues who spoke not about his brilliant arguments but how he showed up for them and listened to them, reliably. They came from his church and his volunteering projects around climate change and food waste. He, like us, lived in an intentional community, this one based in a vicarage. That meant a big part of his life was greeting the many random people who show up on clergy doorsteps. One of the tributes focused on how whenever the doorbell rang it was Andrew who would come thundering down the stairs and open the door with the same loud, Australian noise of delight, arms thrown wide: “eyyyyyy!” Whoever was standing there, old friend or desperate parishioner or charity fundraiser, the same. The whole congregation nodded. We’d all stood in the beam of Andrew’s “eyyyy!”. This was the overwhelming impression of the man left by his funeral: someone who was always glad to see you.

This detail stood out to me because I’ve been learning more about interpersonal neurobiology. This is a big, developing, sprawling field, to which a good entry point is this book by Daniel Seigal. He argues that the mind is “not just the activity of the brain but instead can be seen as an emergent, self-organising process that arises from bodily processes as well as from our relationships….the mind is both embodied and embedded in our relational worlds.”

I’m going to pause here to announce that I’ve started a Substack chat for paid subscribers, and it is already my favourite place on the internet. If you’ve ever wanted to connect with other people around some of the themes of this newsletter, this is the place. I think (I am still learning my way around) you can start threads too, ask questions or raise topics you’d like to think aloud with others about. We’ve already been chatting about memetic desire and who our models are (and who we’d like them to be), neurospirituality and community, and it is now even clearer that you readers are deeper and smarter and braver than I am. This is not quite gathering with you in our bodies as I hope to do one day, but it’s one tiny step closer.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we influence each other. It is adorable, this illusion of individual freedom, the story we tell about making autonomous choices. The reality of humans is that we are much more like an undulating murmuration than a solitary swift. We learn primarily through imitation during the long period of (ideally) attentive, attuned care in our vulnerable early years, and this practice of building a self by mimicry doesn’t stop when we are no longer in nappies. Almost everything about us is caught, not taught. We decide, usually pre-consciously, who we want to imitate, which lives we want to model ourselves on, and with a few sprinkles of pseudo-individualised flair, proceed to do so.

The theorist best known for surfacing this mimetic aspect of human development is French thinker René Girard. He argued that the driving force behind human choices is desire, and that we discover what we desire by looking outside of ourselves.

Fr James Allison is a priest and theologian who has worked perhaps most extensively on the many connections between Girardian thought and theology. He unpacks this:

[H]uman desire is triangular and mimetic. It is mimetic in that it is to do with imitation; it is triangular in that the transaction is three-cornered: the source (model) which stimulates the desire, the respondent (disciple) in whom the desire is implanted, and the thing (object) then desired.

This means that each of us learns to desire according to the desire of an individual or social other, and thus that desire is prior to, and what makes possible, the coming into being of the ‘self’ of any one of us. So desire is not linear and object-directed in itself (as in much individual psychology, which depends on there being a desiring ‘self’ with its own desires), but is called into being by other people’s desires: if an advertiser wants to sell me a pair of jeans he shows me someone else enjoying them1.

If you’ve heard of Girard’s work already it might be through one of his most prominent advocates: Peter Thiel. The psychological insight that drove the advertising boom of the fifties and sixties (if we see someone we admire with something, we will want it) was applied at mass, world changing scale via social media. Thiel was a real driving force. He made most of his wealth via an early investment in Facebook because he saw its potential for amplifying the power of mimetic models. Far off celebrities or attractive people in adverts, it turns out, are less effective at implanting desires in us than people we know, or who we feel like we know. , a recent populariser of Girard says “Facebook is full of models who are inside our world…they are close enough for us to compare ourselves to them. They are the most influential models of all”2.

In many ways “mimetic theory” is a fancy academic sounding way of explaining something we can see plainly in the world. It drives almost all patterns of consumption. Of course we want something more if our cool friend has it. Of course smart, wealthy people can use this to manipulate us. Whether the imprimatur of Giradrian theory helps or not, it is important to be aware of it.

I’m especially interested in it as a resource in my ongoing project to grow up my soul, to be becoming someone who is of some use in these times. Not because I think I can exempt myself from mimetic desire, become the lone truly “free individual” uncontaminated by those around me. I don’t believe that is possible, or even desirable. As Luke Burgis says, “mimetic desire is like gravity. It just is". It reflects just how irreconcilably interdependent humans are. What is possibly within our power, as we come to more awareness of it, is to choose our models wisely and to take seriously our own ability to be a model to others.

Every choice we make gives other people permission to do the same. We spend a lot of time trying to ignore this inconvenient truth. The lie of my liberal 90s childhood, the ethical laissez-faire individualism of that “end of history” season was you can do whatever you like as as long as it doesn’t encroach on the freedom of others, or harm them. Trouble is, we are not free of each other, and could not be. We are entangled. If you are in your twenties and all your friends are vegan, meat will start to seem a stranger thing to desire. If you’re in your fifties and everyone you know sees meat as the heart of a meal, wanting to give it up is what appears bizarre. Whether you believe that this entanglement, this building an identity, essentially, by committee, happens for reasons of theological anthropology, sociology or neurobiology, (or like me, all three), it is becoming clearer every day. Even if you moved to a remote Island, in the very structure of your brain you would carry all the people who have loved and harmed you, all the blueprints for a self you stole.

I really want - really desire - to be becoming the kind of person the world needs now, to be becoming braver and more loving, more resilient and more peaceful, more honest and more free. This process will be largely dependent on who I am watching. Whose desires, whose model of a good life am I letting shape me. What does a wise person want, and how do I learn to want it to? I surround myself with them, pay attention mainly to them.

Watching at a distance what is happening in Minneapolis (and holding in my heart what is happening in Iran) I’m struck by how mimetic theory underscores that violence is catching, and how much I don’t want to catch it. Girard again:

“To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”

Luke Burgis unpacks this “mimetics of stoning”, playing with the biblical story of an interrupted stoning to show how once the first stone has been thrown, it makes it easier for everyone else. “It is always easier to desire something - even, and maybe especially violence - when it has been desired by someone else first.” Throwing the first stone, hurling the first insult, dehumanising another person before anyone else has requires, usually, rage and a particular twisted kind of courage. The second, third, fourth? They come easily.

This is all too tragically visible, and a dynamic we must take care to guard ourselves from. Just because our stone didn’t fly first, it doesn’t reduce it’s destructive power. “They started it” is no protection against soul danger.

The flip side, however, is that courage must also be catching. So must peace be.

We are all being formed by these times and must decide which cycles we will participate in, which models we will let form us. We can attempt to make the world feel more controllable by renarrating it - by explaining away violence, or simply looking away, seeking numbness. We can allow ourselves to be slowly formed towards accepting violence, as this blistering Russell Moore piece points out (which, like the article he is quoting, will have something to offend everyone). We can, eventually, participate in violence, whether physical or the quiet violence of apathy. This is my own temptation. After all, when so many stones have already been thrown, so many tongues already held, what difference does it make?

It can - and is, right now - come to seem righteous to exile or execute the ‘threatening other’, whether they are an immigrant, an ideological opponent or an immigration enforcement official. We can see others wanting to do so, can want this too. Because we build our sense of identity and belonging around our models, we can come to want things we never would have planned to. This chills me to my bones

Or, we can choose carefully who we are copying. Whose responses we are paying sustained attention to. Whose posture in these times seems wise, and brave and morally beautiful, likely to seed peace in a time of fear.

I’ve been sitting with this quote from a Rabbi, who went to Minneapolis as part of a mass deployment of clergy from around the US and wrote about her experiences.

Organizers also told us VERY clearly our role “We are calling clergy here because we want to center peace, bring calm, and de-escalate violence. Even if you feel fear, you need to present calm to the people around you – no matter what. This is your role, and if you don’t feel up for it, no judgment and we love you, but don’t come; find a different way to support.”

This (hard won, difficult to learn) practice of showing up steadied, resolute, with as much compassion and patience as you can muster into a situation of escalating violence creates new models. It offers others new social permissions. It interrupts the cycle of negative mimesis where we want to desire the opposite of our enemies and end up becoming them instead. When Jesus said “He who is without sin can throw the first stone” he stopped mimetic violence in its tracks.

The world is in uproar and it can take all my attention. I can let my vision be filled with images which provoke hate and fear and disgust. I will spread all these emotions around, because they are powerfully contagious. OR, I can look for the helpers. The wise ones. The brave ones. The ones who can still see beauty and hold onto the good. In my case, I can try and look to Jesus, to want what he wants.

If you also want to be being formed towards peace, you could join me in keeping these questions in mind:

Who are our models today?

Whose desires are being incepted into us?

Are the people we are mainly watching and listening to, mainly living up close with growing in the things you want to define our lives, and if not, what needs to change?

Someone is copying my life, your life. Let’s make it a good one.

I speak and write about a lot of topics in public; peace building and polarisation, spirituality, status anxiety, existential terror, living a more relational life. Sometimes people write to me about those things, or ask me in person, but the vast majority of questions I get are about our unconventional living situation. Rather than reply to all the queries individually (which is no longer feasible), in February I’ll be co-hosting a live recording of a conversation with my friend .

Sarah and I have lots in common. We are both extremely interested in human relationality, on how we reweave our social fabric and prevent accelerating social atrophy. We have both written books around this (Sarah’s is called “Don’t Talk about Politics” and mine is called “Fully Alive”.). We are also both trying to practically live in ways which line up with these concerns, and this has meant we have had to be more creative in our housing.

My home is a small Christian intentional community or “micro monastery” currently housing five adults, two children, a cat and a bump. Hers is a home where she lives with between 3 and four of her partners.

There may be some clues in those sentences about the things we do not have in common. I am a Christian, Sarah does not believe in God and is Jewish. I didn’t have sex until I got married and still feel good about that choice, Sarah is polyamorous. I am a politically confused communitarian with a dash of social conservatism on the mix. Most days I feel like a centrist Dad. Sarah is a Marxist.

Though our houses are built around slightly different values, we face a lot of the same challenges.

• How much space, stuff, money do you share?

• What do you do about guests?

• How do you navigate the very real questions around money and power in decision making?

• How do you actually make decisions?

• What happens when tensions arise?

• What about children?

• How do people join, and leave?

• How important are shared ideals or spirituality?

• How on earth do you actually make it happen, given all the systems are against it?

We thought it would be fun to have a recorded conversation about our respective work and our respective homes, and then figured that some of you might be interested in listening in and asking questions. We will be speaking online for 90mins on 3rd February , and if you are a paid subscriber of either of our substacks you can attend for free. You’ll also get to access the whole recording before anyone else. If you’re not a paid subscriber I hope you’ll consider upgrading, even just for a month. Paid subscribers support my writing, and not irrelevantly, my family, so I am SO grateful for those who can. You will already be able to see joining details below if this is you (THANK YOU), or if you decide to upgrade you can come back to this post online to find them.

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I have been what we call in our family a grumpy frog this week. Our small community house (which you can read about in the New York Times if you don’t know the details) has been even more crowded than usual. To begin with we had spare bedrooms for guests and workspace, but since they all got filled up with people I’d got used to having one of our two small reception rooms as mainly my sole place of work. I do my coaching there, I record podcasts there, I write there. It is still a common space the rest of the time but I’ve mainly had it to myself in the daytimes. Various things are shifting in the lives of some of my housemates, wonderful things, and it means some of them are around more. Because more people are working from home, I feel guilty about my assumption that I can use “my room” when other people are doing calls from the kitchen table, or in rooms in which our ever-temperamental heating isn’t working. Feeling slightly guilty makes me grumpy. Honestly, there has been other, bigger stuff going on that is probably the source of my mood, but it’s often easier to confabulate what seem like manageable reasons than look the big stuff head on. I very rarely think about what it would be like for us to live in more conventional ways, as just our nuclear family, and when I do it is often with a background sense of panic and sadness because we would have lost so much. This week I found myself dreaming idly of a dedicated office that I could decorate as I liked and leave as messy as I wanted.

The phrase “grumpy frog” comes from a great kid’s book by Ed Vere we read a lot when the children were small. Children’s literature is good for the soul at any age (I wrote a whole series about it) so if you need a brain break you can watch it being read on YouTube here. Grumpy frog loves the colour green, he loves to hop, he loves to win. What he doesn’t love, is compromise. His friends don’t always want to hop. Sometimes they want to go swimming, or bouncing. He refuses to join in. “I will not join in! Who needs friends anyway. I am perfectly happy on my log”. He doesn’t seem that happy, actually. “Why isn’t everything green? Why won’t anyone hop with me? I miss hopping. I miss my friends”. When he is presented with a pink rabbit he refuses to be their friend. Another green creature comes along, offering friendship, which sounds good but what other green creatures can you think of? That’s right, it’s a crocodile.

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Recently I was with a gathering of people working on a range of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Climate change, regenerative agriculture, migration policy, the erosion of democratic norms. I always feel a bit of a fraud in those settings. I am no longer working directly in policy, and though I am chair of Larger Us, most of my work involves writing, speaking, coaching and living around themes that can seem pretty nebulous. I have been following a thread of curiosity towards aspects of human cultures which have long been seen as peripheral, mainly because they are not easily measurable or perhaps more importantly, easily commodified. What is the sacred that we can gather around? What is the texture, the sensibility of our relationships? What is going on in these subtle, almost musical patterns of tone and linguistic cadence and body language, these stuttering, fractured choreographies of presence and belonging? What are the stories we are telling about what a human is, what we need, what a good life might look like now? Are they drawing us towards each other, or the opposite? How might we learn, again, to be with each other? Even, (whisper it) to love each other, as ourselves?

When did you last go to a gig (or a service) and have the instruments drop away, leaving the gathered people singing together? You might have had a taste of it recently at a carol concert or with friends around a tree. You probably didn’t though. Statistically. I think it is one of the reasons people pay silly money to go to gigs when the sound quality would be basically the same through some good headphones, at home. The thrill of live music or clubbing is mainly the vibrations going through a group of gathered bodies, the syncing of our heartbeats, collective euphoria, collective tears.

Sometimes when I am feeling insecure I‘ll try and turn these more poetic intuitions into prose, to say I work on “social cohesion” or “spirituality” or “anti-polarisation”. I’m not being fully honest when I do. I think relationships are everything. The failure of them is under all those very concrete problems my esteemed colleagues are throwing their lives at, the healing of them the source of our deepest gladness. You could say we are pack animals living as lone wolves. Or we are creatures made in the image of a relational divine, living in outright denial of that fact. However you want to frame it, individualism is anti-human. It is self-harm.

When we speak about relationships, our minds often go to the romantic ones, beyond that, possibly close friends and family. I do think these are important, but the wider web, the constellation of human connections by which we are held in healthy cultures often gets overlooked. I use “neighbouring” as shorthand for this. I do mean local neighbours, but also all the many people with whom our lives intersect. This year, I think we would all do well to be paying attention to those relationships. I think doing so seriously would make all the big, presenting problems better. For example:

• Neighbouring is future proofing and resilience planning.

  If you’re interested in the onrushing effects of the climate emergency, you can think of it as a purely scientific problem of parts per million of carbon, or you can notice that we no longer know how to share. What has driven out of control consumerism is a desire to avoid the entanglements of mutuality. Rooted, functioning, interdependent communities don’t need so much stuff, so much space to hide away in, so much land to act as a barrier against other people. The pub, in UK culture, was essentially the whole street’s living room. We could walk, not fly to see our friends. As the impacts of climate change hit, our greatest safety is going to be each other, the local people we live alongside and who, if like most of us you live in a city, you may never have had a conversation with. One good, manageable resolution might be just to learn all your neighbours names (unless you live somewhere rural, where you probably already do).

• Neighbouring is democracy defence.

  Ditto, evidence shows that democratic health relies on our ability to relate to each other. The most isolated we are, the more suspicious of other people, the less we are prepared to believe anyone can be trusted. Support for radical right wing parties is correlated with loneliness1.

• Neighbouring is terrorism prevention

  Isolation drives radicalisation, terrorism and violence more generally. If this sounds like an over claim, look out for an upcoming Sacred Podcast episode I recorded with Elizabeth Neumann, an eminent senior Homeland Security professional and leading expert in this area. Speaking about her book Kingdom of Rage (about the radicalisation of American Evangelicalism, a community she was and is part of), we concluded that neighbouring is terrorism prevention (this is the conversation which helped me see this pattern). Extremists, violent and otherwise, are not, (perhaps surprisingly) more likely to be mentally ill, or poor, but they are more likely to socially isolated and to feel themselves humiliated and rejected.

• Neighbouring can mitigate the challenges of migration

  If you’re worried about migration, either that there is too much of it or the growing hostility towards it, relationships help there too. Functioning neighborhoods make it less likely people will have to flee their homelands. When they do move country, from desire or necessity, interconnected local communities have more capacity to provide welcome without getting overwhelmed. When we know each other, even in real financial precarity, there is more resilience, we can handle change better2.

• Neighbouring is a powerful public health programme.

  I don’t need to tell you that loneliness has huge negative health impacts. According to one study it increases the risk of premature mortality by 26%. You are more likely to develop depression if you’re lonely. Loneliness can literally kill you, which means neighbouring might be able to save you.

• Neighbouring makes us happier

  The strength of our relationships with others is the number one predictor of health and happiness. A Washington Post article this week seemed shocked that bigger houses might be inversely correlated with life satisfaction, because they tend to be in less densely packed neighborhoods where people know each other less. I quote “Humans aren’t very good at prioritising what makes them happy, economists say, especially when it comes to living arrangements. We systematically overlook the costs (mortgages, commuting, maintenance) while dramatically undervaluing intangible benefits that actually dictate our happiness (seeing our kids at night, hanging with friends, knowing our neighbours and walking places)”.

How do we neighbour?

So what do I mean by neighbouring? Many of you are already doing it far better than me, especially if you’re from a generation or a location where you never lost these skills. So what I am going to say may sound absurdly simple, but for my generation, my educational history, city dwellers like me, it’s not. Here are some places to start.

• Know your neighbours names. This might require some awkward doorstep conversations as you start to model different norms. Tolerate being the weirdo. Social awkwardness will not kill you. Ask them for help sometimes, offer help. Invite them to parties. Actually throw parties! When new people moved in next door we gave them a spare shed key so they can just get in and use our tools, lawn mower, chairs etc - all of which, by the way, we picked up off the street or received second hand. It isn’t a lot but it was a small signal of wanting to be more interdependent. Each street only really needs one saw, one sander, maybe a few lawnmowers if there are lawns. I like the concept of the Library of Things for reducing consumption, but I am a bit sad that it removes the need to actually see your neighbours in order to pick stuff up and drop it off.

  Full disclosure, all this is hard going in our street, in our fairly transient part of London. Getting to know our neighbours has been a long, slow, sometimes discouraging job. I’m partly writing to remind myself, to invite myself to recommit to this practice.

• Feed people. Almost every wisdom tradition centres gathering around a table. It is harder to hate people you have shared a meal with. It doesn’t have to be expensive (sometimes all we do is a pot of daal and rice) and your home doesn’t need to be fancy (cushions on the floor will do, in a pinch), but to welcome people across your threshold and attend to their bodily needs is a sacred act. I’ve been learning more about the radical priest Ivan Illich from my friend and sitting with this quote:

• Join something. Something that requires physical gathering. Extra points if is something that puts you alongside people outside those arbitrary age, education and social economic brackets we get so easily sorted into. If this feels too much, start wherever you can. For us it is a local church, but it might be another kind of congregation, a choir, a civic service organisation. Again, if you are 50+ you might be thinking “I am part of too many things!”, in which case ignore this. The key is not to just drop in and out as you fancy it, but to be (as far as is possible, with your particular body and nervous system and economic or caring constraints, obviously), reliable. 2026: flakiness out, commitment in.

• Move into a commune. I’m only joking. Or am I? This is obviously not currently an imaginable option for a lot of people, but we have found in our intentional community/micro-monastery that having more people to share household tasks with has increased our capacity for hospitality, our access to physical space. We never would have afforded a home that can hold 12-16 people for dinner every other Monday alone. I don’t like the phrase economies of scale because it’s so machiney, but I can’t think of an organic metaphor. One of the reasons many of us don’t neighbour is it feels like too much on top of the work, care, chores and life admin. Numbed out Netflix, we tell ourselves, is all we have energy for. So there may be tweaks to the way you live which might make neighbouring seem more possible. As I wrote in the New York Times this week, even if that isn’t for you, the relational principles still hold.

As we go into a year which seems likely to become more, not less turbulent, reminding myself that relational practices underpin everything has helped restore my sense of agengy. I can’t do anything about Venezuela, or AI, or many other things. Some of us are called to try and turn the ship at global level, to tackle the symptoms using tools of policy and practice. If that is you, I’m cheering for you. I’d love to send you a care package, settle you down for a nap on our battered, stained, second hand sofa. I hope someone is neighbouring you. We don’t all have access to those levers. We all, however, have contact with people. We can all find ways to resist the isolating, dehumanising tides of our time attempting to turn us into machines. We can all figure out a few small ways to be together more, in our bodies, to call a friend to ask for help, to offer a place to sleep or a cup of tea. These things seem soft, naive even but they are perhaps the most radical, powerful acts in these times. Kettle’s on, how do you take it?

Memory is a funny thing. Every year around this time I sit down and reread my year’s journals (I am a devout bullet journaller, but I’m not going to bang on about it, because like the enneagram and cold water swimming, it’s easy to be a bore). I do it ahead of a helpful annual review called The Year’s Compass. My process is a sort of annual examen, a way of zooming out of the urgent and immediate, trying to get a sense of how things have really been. I don’t take many photos but I write down a lot of major world events, passing emotions, small pleasures, minor frustrations, profound questions, desperate and banal prayers. Therefore the journals do a fairly good job of capturing something of the texture of my days. What strikes me every year is how much I’ve forgotten. How many times something wonderful happens and months later I have totally erased it. How few of the anxieties come to pass. How I change my mind to conform to the collective narrative on things. (The evidence suggests we all do this). Every year the music streaming platform Spotify tells its users what they have actually been listening to, and only the most confident in their taste or careless of their image share it. My journals do the same. They keep me from too polished or romantic a view of myself.

If you are someone with some kind of annual review or reflection practice, you might find the following prompts helpful:

• What has been forming you this year?

• How have you changed, and why?

• Have you managed to stay loyal to your values, be growing towards the kind of person you want to be becoming, or not?

• If not, what might you want to change about how you are spending your time, which relationships you prioritise, what you are mainly paying attention to?

• What is the trellis for your soul you will therefore need in 2026?

Much of what goes into my annual review is too personal to write about here ( I won’t be making flashy social media graphics about it), but some much bigger themes emerged which might also be showing up in your “soul unwrapped”. I think they are more than just current affairs topics. They are forces that are forming us (or deforming us) that it is important to notice, name and be intentional around. I’d be interested to hear in the comments what is lingering for you. Here are my greatest hits, collective formation wise:

Violence went up

Much of the year was shadowed both by the war in Ukraine (which having shocked and horrified the West now seems to an ugly part of our collective “normal”), and by the ongoing man-made catastrophe in Gaza. Nothing like as much ink has been spilled over them as blood, but it can feel like it. Neither are really over (350 people have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire on October 10th) and even when the actual killing stops, the devastation will last generations. The pain of those that lost loved ones on October 7th, the returned hostages and the thousands on thousands killed, maimed, bereaved, traumatised since. Other wars, other catastrophes gouge and scar our world, just out of my line of sight. There have, of course, always been wars. Violence looked like it was tracking down for decades, and like many of our optimistic stories of human progress, has now reversed course.

You of course, know all this. Maybe, like me, for most of the year you’ve just tried not to think about it, or maybe you don’t have that luxury. The question I am sitting with is what does a healthy response look like. How do I neither be overwhelmed by the grief and therefore no use to the people I am called to care for (I have had pockets of this as well, this year, as my journals make clear) nor live in complete denial? What is important to look in the face, to bear witness to, and when is it ok to look away, given I am not God, not omniscient, not designed to be? What is actual useful action, and what is pointless posturing? Growing up our souls does not depend on living in peace or prosperity. It might even be harder then. In all kinds of struggles, in many “ends of the world” before us, there have been people who have figured out how to live bravely, justly, freely and lovingly, at least some of the time. People who have lived with moral courage alongside joy and gratitude, have held their lives lightly and not taken themselves too seriously. People who have done what they can and then laid down to rest. In 2026 I’m asking how do we not allow violent times to extinguish the longing for peace, to make us violent too?

AI was mainstreamed

As existing readers will know, I began the year a dogged AI refusenik, had a torrid affair with Claude and am now left in a real ethical puzzle about it all. It has been around for a while but 2025 definitely felt like the year using “AI companions” became completely normalised. I use quote marks there because the word companion is a powerful one. It comes, etymologically, from com (with) and pan (bread). Companions are people we gather round a table with, share our food with, experience times of scarcity and times of feasting alongside. People whose stomach grumbles we recognise, automatically pass the salt to. It points to the irreconcilably embodied nature of companionship. An AI might be a useful assistant, but can never be a true companion. Given that I think that real, trusting relationships are the key ingredient of our collective flourishing and our loss of relational skills behind most of the worlds most urgent problems, it troubles me deeply to see them being crowded out. If modernity is driven by our ever creative attempts to need each other less, avoid the entanglements of mutual obligation (which is understandable, because humans are a pain, but it is killing us), then AI is that on steroids.

What I don’t know is if we can get the very real gains in efficiency and removal of grunt work without (further) damaging our ability to relate to each other, atrophying our cognitive abilities and accelerating climate change. Now I write that sentence, maybe I do know. If I care deeply about my formation, about becoming the kind of person the world needs for turbulent times such as these, what am I even doing? What are we all doing? Perhaps my Dry January will be about a different sobriety this year. I’d love to know where your thinking is up to on this, if it’s changed over the year, and what values based frames you are using to figure it out, in the comments.

Feminism went backwards

One of the stories I have been able to hold onto over the last decade or so, as the “end of history” claim rang more and more hollow, is “at least things have got better for women”. No, the world was not equal, but also, look how far we’d come. Women were storming educational institutions and top jobs and a far wider range of bodies were deemed worthy of being seen in public. The grip of diet culture was loosening, freeing up so much mental space to actually live. In 2025, I had to acknowledge this no longer feels the case. Perhaps it’s a brief death spasm, but the “vibe shift” really does seem again to have normalised vile misogyny again. The emaciated frames and strangely stretched faces of more and more female celebrities began to feel like we’d somehow skipped off the timeline and landed in a spooky Stepford Wives parallel universe. Men declaring they believed in “traditional gender roles” on first dates crept into even my WEIRD over educated London milieu, in secular spaces. I kept applying my retinol serums, complicit and hypocritical as usual, but have come closer to a shaving-my-head, growing-out-my-chin-hairs and wearing-only-dungarees second wave rage than ever before. I’m not sure that is the right soul work. The women I admire, the wise rooted ones, seem resistant to extremes. They are neither collaborating and appeasing a world which only wants fragile, docile, youthful women, nor raging against it. They have an identity rooted somewhere else, a sense of being at home in their skin, confident in their belovedness, in their womanhood, in all the myriad ways that can present. They are beautiful because of this, because they seem like their gloriously created selves. They seem free. That is my ambition for 2026. Though the dungarees do sound comfy…..

The Good was still Good, and always there to be found

My journals were also full of the small, local, beautiful gifts of this life. The joyful hubbub of an ordinary primary school playground at pick up time. Watching a group of friends roar with laughter in a bar. The way steam rises off pancakes in slanting winter light, shimmering with the faint colours of a prism. Multiple men throwing themselves into the path of terrorists to protect others. The Christmas party we just had at the community house, where people from the “world of ideas” and the local neighbourhood, podcast guests and friends from church stood in the garden by the fire and belting out carols. We sang Silent Night, written in 1816 following the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, and the Coventry Carol, that dark lament for the victims of the Massacre of the Innocents in the biblical nativity story, which was revived after the bombing of Coventry in the Blitz. This year I’ve been astounded by the power of music to strip off our masks and expose our tender places, to name pain and move us through to profound bittersweet beauty. I’ve been moved by the dogged determination of people in my neighbourhood to show up for each other, by the continued miracle of a local church made up of rich and poor, conservative and liberal, twenty different counties of origin, holding together under something bigger than all those categories. Sometimes with gritted teeth. Still here. I’ve had profound experiences of divine love, unpanicked, unhurried, inviting me with the unlikely command of the angels: Do not be Afraid. Making me believe that that is possible.

I’m biased, but this advent sermon by my husband is one of the best I’ve ever heard, and helps me hold the tension of this dichotomy. The dark and the light. The brutality and beauty. He quoted the Lord of the Rings:

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

He also spoke about Jonathan Glazers’ adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel Zone of Interest. The film is set in the family home of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. You don‘t see inside the camp, but you hear the noises, see the smoke of the trains, chimneys. The film opens in black, and there are moments of deep blinding red. But the rest of it filmed almost entirely in natural light. Almost. There are two scenes in thermal cameras to capture something you might miss in the cold light of the day. There’s a girl who’s name we never hear, whose face we never get to know. But we see her in thermal imaging cameras, skulking around in night leaving apples for prisoners. The director said this:

“That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her.

Lots of darkness this year, my journals make clear, but also many many tiny points of light. Many exquisitely beautiful encouragements to hold fast to the good, to plant our feet wherever we find ourselves in this epic, mythic adventure of life, and not turn back. Not because we can control the future, not because we are entitled to peace and prosperity and comfort and convenience, none of which alone can satisfy, but because it is how we stay fully human, and fully alive. I’ll end on an old poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which helps me hold onto the kind of world I want to be ringing in:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

I’m taking a couple of weeks off and will be back in January. Thank you, sincerely, for your attention and accompaniment this year. Being in conversation with other readers and writers here, reflecting together, elbowing out space for something slower and less certain also showed up in my journals as a source of succour. Whatever your next few weeks hold, I hope you find some steadiness, and some light.

Dear Elizabeth,

My meaningful dilemma is I feel torn philosophically, spiritually and emotionally about my son’s education. He will be 4 in May and due to start reception in September. I never imagined entertaining the idea of homeschooling (my impression was that it is sheltered/extreme/ for people not like me!) but as the world does seem to be unraveling in various ways, I’ve felt the nudge to seriously discern if I should send my son off into the state school system. I’ve read that reasons to homeschool should not be fear based but because one has a clear vision of the goods/flourishing it can enable. But honestly, fear seems entwined with why the vision is appealing…

I’m afraid of not knowing the 25 other kids families (and teachers!) will influence my son at tender ages, I’m afraid that schools are not coping with the amount expected of them these days, which leads to a lot of pressure/anxiety and overwhelm for the children. I worry that school doesn’t set children up well for life, for work, to love learning for learnings sake, to be okay with failing, to be creative or entrepreneurial. I worry that school might narrow my child’s vision for life too soon.

However, I’m also afraid to feel the weight of his education on shoulders, I’m afraid that I might hold him back, limit his socialising and exposure to the world. I’m afraid it might flatten me, or limit me and my flourishing - but maybe I’m also afraid I’ll love it and find it really freeing and then my local London community will view me as the weird one!…

I’m afraid to choose badly and hurt him in some way. I know parenthood is full of this uncertainty, full of this uneasy anticipation or wondering about the paths not chosen….Practically we can make homeschooling work, but obviously life would be smoother/ easier to just send him to school. I wonder what I’m missing or what questions you would pose to me.

Gratefully, Zoe

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