The Architect of my own Misfortune

I’m just coming out of a long period of stress and overwork. As I wrote about at length in the last few newsletters, it was a combination of child illness and job uncertainty, and a tiresome rerun of the same period exactly a year earlier. I’ve also written about how, once upon a time, this was a newsletter was about making music, but it has become about how to get back to a point where making music is even possible. Artistically, the biggest challenge I face these days is getting started on a project and then just getting buried for four months and not having the time to even look at it.

However, right now the dust seems to have settled! When the dust has settled in the past I have frantically tried to do as many creative projects as I can. You might notice that this newsletter is a bit of a flurry of activity, but actually I’m trying not to repeat that pattern this time.

What I’m currently trying to do is make sure I don’t spend the next few years in a constant cycle of worrying about when the current job contract ends, and getting completely blindsided every time the kids get ill. So even though I get to dip my toe back into making music (for my mental health mainly), it’s no more than that, for now at least.

That said, this month is a lot. Eight recommendations and three blog posts.

We’re covering everything from zines to wealth tax to Sherlock Holmes, via the Beach Boys and a large language model… from 1930. With blog posts about the end of an online golden age, being polite to AI chatbots, and why I might have been wrong about imminent US Civil War. And we’re also covering my favourite topic: writer’s block.

Shall we?

My Recent Blog Articles

As I mentioned, there’s been a bit of a flurry of activity in terms of my writing.

The first blog post is about how The Essay™ seems to be moving from video back to text – because video is too competitive, and text is so much quicker and easier to write. Which perhaps explains why, given a little bit more time, I’ve written a bunch of blog posts rather than anything else.

The second post concerns a funny (peculiar not ha ha) issue that I’ve heard people discuss privately but I don’t see it covered much publicly: how polite should we be to AI chatbots?

Finally, a return to The Quiet Part Loud, and a slightly more optimistic post: I think I might have been wrong about a US civil war or revolution before the end of Trump’s second term.

Recommended

GABRIEL ZUCMAN

Okay, let’s start with the big one.

Perhaps the most influential name in the wealth tax movement is French economist Gabriel Zucman. Scourge of the billionaires. Thorn in the side of the French government.

Zucman is a protégé of Thomas Piketty – arguably the most influential economist of recent times (along with Joseph Stiglitz, who is also a Zucman fan) – and his new (and pleasingly concise) book is simply called We Need To Tax Billionaires.

If you’ve read this newsletter before, you know this is something I’m boring about, but… why do we need to tax billionaires? So many reasons, many counter-intuititve, but fundamentally because billionaires (particularly those few plutocrats with hundreds of billions) are arguably more powerful than governments, and taxation is the most effective tool a democratic government has for reversing this.

However, this book is more than a mission statement.

In it he lays out the detailed plan for how a wealth tax would actually work. And he is in a good position to do this, having helped implement a similar plan which currently taxes corporations specifically (rather than their billionaire owners).

He also gives evidence-based responses for all the usual questions: no, taxing billionaires alone will not fund a government, and yes, wealth taxes in the past didn’t work (because, as he points out, the billionaires were always somehow exempt!)

His approach is known in France as, simply, the Zucman tax, and he certainly believes France will implement it relatively soon.

If it does then I think it will globally change the wealth tax debate very quickly.

Recommended

FILMMAKERS SHOULD MAKE ZINES

I’m not a filmmaker. And I don’t have the time or the patience to make zines.

But I love the idea of both!

(”What are zines?” DIY homemade magazines, basically, that have been popular in music subcultures for decades.)

I have to be honest: I don’t think there’s going to be a huge physical media revival that eclipse is digital media. Digital media is just too convenient.

But I think we need both, because physical media has properties digital media just doesn’t. It is tangible. It exists in the world.

And seeing this filmmaker’s photographs assembled by hand into these gorgeous paper booklets really brings this home for me.

Recommended

NOTEBOOK-LM PODCASTS

This is the first of a bunch of AI-related recommendations. Sorry folks, these are the times we are living in.

Actually, they all fall into the same category of ‘trying to find good uses for this neutral tool that is being so actively weaponised against us by a bunch of man-baby billionaire dickheads’.

Perhaps my favourite current AI tool is Google’s NotebookLM, because it will work with just the sources you give it. It answers questions, it make infographics… and, famously, it makes podcasts.

I have mentioned this podcast feature in my recommendations before, but I’ve come back to it in a big way – although, as to be expected with two AI voices chatting with each other, there is an element of Uncanny Valley to it.

But I realised recently that I could use it to search for online sources on the most complex and niche topics that I have wanted to understand for a long time but am unlikely to find a good primer for. Then I can feed those sources into this app, and have it to generate a 20 minute podcast which, I have to admit, is very very good at explaining complex topics in simple ways.

I’ve learned about the history of computer programming from Assembly to Rust. I’ve learned about the history of the Swiss Democratic system. I’ve learned about the ‘100 schools’ of Chinese philosophy.

If you want an introduction into a tricky topic, I highly recommend it.

Recommended

TALKIE LM

This one is fascinating. And bonkers. And particularly exciting for history nerds.

The bad news is it’s yet another AI chatbot. The good news? Here is the opening paragraph of the introductory blog article:

Have you ever daydreamed about talking to someone from the past? What would you ask someone with no knowledge of the modern world? What would they ask you? While we don’t have time machines yet, we can simulate this experience by training, in Owain Evans’s phrase, ‘vintage’ language models: LMs trained only on historical text.

Go check it out. It’s called Talkie LM particularly informative about cooperative movements, trade unions, and the kind of political machinery that fell out of faith in the late 20th century.

Also fun for folk music too.

Recommended

AI POISONING CONTINUES…

I’m still on the AI poisoning train, however, when it comes to music.

And although I haven’t heard about any advances in technology, it’s nice to stumble on a video like this by a young creator seemingly as determined as I am to find ways to damage the AI models that are stealing from us.

It feels like a movement that is picking up momentum.

(Another reason why I like that Talkie LM, as it’s trained only on content in the public domain.)

Recommended

YVETTE YOUNG COVERS THE BEACH BOYS

Yvette Young, who performs under the band name Covet, is a very particular kind of electric guitar player: the kind that gets their own signature model. (And with Ibanez too – the most underrated electric guitar manufacturer.)

She plays very complicated, very technical instrumental Math Rock-influenced music that is constantly leaping keys and time signatures.

This is a video where she is challenged to do a cover of Wouldn’t It Be Nice? by The Beach Boys in a few hours.

And it’s just fun. She decides to make it 90s shoegaze.

Recommended

JEREMY BRETT: THE DEFINITIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES

I think the dazzling reinvention of the Benedict Cumberbatch / Martin Freeman Sherlock made me forget that Jeremy Brett played the definitive Sherlock Holmes.

I stumbled on this YouTube video recently.

I think I had heard that Brett was obsessive about the role, but I had no idea what extent. It really did become all-consuming for him.

In fact, he set out to make meticulously faithful television adaptations of every story, and came pretty close, but didn’t live long enough – perhaps due to how hard he worked through a number of serious health conditions.

If you are even slightly a Holmes fan, this is well worth a watch.

Recommended

VOICE ACTOR EXPLAINS

I have never seen the Netflix TV series Euphoria, although for this video – in which Tawny Platis (a professional voice actor) breaks down characters, their accents and how they use them – that might be an advantage.

I had no idea that was that much detail.

It’s a pretty impressive insight into both the talent of the actors and the insight of the voice actor analysing them.

So now I finally have a bit more time. And although I have a million things to do, making music is such a necessity for my mental health (it has taken me too long to learn that).

Back to music means back to my incredibly complicated notes on all the incredibly complicated ideas I want to incorporate.

Except that this time I have been away so long that they had all gone from my short-term memory. And for the first time in a very very long time, this felt liberating. Instead of taking refuge in complex structure, I felt like, this time, I might be able to just sit down and write.

Here’s the thing: I have written a lot of professional library music, and although some of it was tricky to write, I would pretty much always be satisfied with the result. Yet whenever I tried to write music just for myself I would end up abandon it.

So this time I just sat down and started writing, but with a different attitude: I wouldn’t expect to get it right straight away. I would just do a first draft, and accept it wouldn’t be perfect. Then I would move onto another one. But I would come back, see what could be improved, and then rinse and repeat until the track was done.

So that’s what I did.

Did it work?

Of course it fucking didn’t.

I haven’t been lost in complex structures for over a decade for no reason. And I feel like this detour helped me to understand what the reason has been.

Thanks to years of making library music, it turns out I find it very easy to come up with ideas. I know I’ve quoted this Paul Simon line about a million times in this newsletter, but here it is again: writers’ block is not about ‘not being able to come up with ideas’: it’s about only being able to come up with ideas that let you down.

I found it pretty easy to come up with ideas when writing professional library music, because they weren’t my ideas! I was just recycling other people’s.

The music I have always wanted to write for myself is different. All my musical heroes have a sound. Sometimes many different sounds. It’s not about one or two new ideas: it’s about creating a whole sub-genre.

I keep forgetting this and rediscovering it, but this month I came up with an analogy which sums it up, and which will hopefully remind me in future.

It’s like I’ve always wanted to be an architect. One with my own original bold inventive style. It’s like I grew up loving architects, and studying them, and trying to work out why they made the choices they made.

And eventually the way I decided to work towards becoming an architect was by starting out as a builder.

I would work on construction sites and home renovations. And I would do this for years, to the point where you could put me into any situation and I would understand the engineering, the materials, the budget, the time-frame…

But when I would start trying to build my own structures from scratch, I would always abandon them. I just couldn’t get them right.

And the reason is because I was approaching them like a builder, and not like an architect.

A builder implements someone else’s design, even if that means making a number of smaller design decisions.

But an architect has to think about the whole system and how it fits together. That’s really the difference: it’s not just about solving problems, it’s about building systems that fit together.

And an architect who wants to do something radically different has to do a great deal of work testing new potential systems to see where they might break down. Because if you don’t get them right in the planning stage, you’re not going to be able to fix them in the build.

So, yeah, I think this is why I keep abandoning the music that I start. You can’t just spontaneously build a house by, like, putting up a front door and then seeing where inspiration takes you.

Back to the drawing board.

And now for something completely different. (Although it is also about learning how to stop abandoning things early.)

This month’s revelation concerns why I’ve stopped watching television.

Or, to be more specific, I have stopped watching narrative fiction on a screen at home. I will still very occasionally go to the cinema when I have time, but I don’t find myself watching movies or television shows at home. Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV and so on.

I just haven’t been able to find anything that keeps me hooked. Occasionally I find something that’s interesting enough for me to watch maybe 10 minutes of, but no more than that.

Well, I think I’ve found out why. And it’s nothing to do with the quality of the shows.

On a whim, I decided to watch something on my desktop computer, sitting in my comfortable desk chair… but with the lights off.

I was amazed to discover that, even though what I was watching was fairly trashy, I was able to get immersed in the story. Just like in a cinema.

Really, that was all it took: sitting in the dark.

Now that I’ve noticed what a difference the environment makes in my concentration, I’ve also noticed that I basically don’t read physical books anymore. It’s always an audiobook. But maybe, in a similar way, if I was to take the time to create an environment where focus is easy, that might be something I can get immersed in too.

I don’t want to emphasise that this is not about smart phones being attention killers.

I think it’s about new technology breaking good habits I let atrophy years ago that need to be rediscovered.

A 15 year old Hamlet wannabe

This month, I’m going to get Shakespearean on yo ass. Your arse? Yo ass? Both seem wrong in this context. Anyway. I’m going down a long memory lane to the turn of the 17th century – partly due to that fantastic book on the Renaissance I recommended last month, and partly due to a bunch of random threads all coalescing.

But first, summer starts tomorrow. Sunshine, longer days, beer gardens, hayfever. Good times.

This is still more a newsletter about the battle to find the time to make music than about making music, but I’m in a bit of a lull where I actually have some free time again, and it feels like the world is opening up a fraction.

And there are a bunch of recommendations this month. Some new music, some old videos, some commentary on how undeniably unpopular AI is. And, yeah, quite a bit of Shakespeare.

But first, as I’ve had a bit more time, I’m going to dig a couple of things out of the archives of my website, starting with…

From The Vaults

EULOGIZE THIS: ILLUSIONS by RICHARD BACH

Okay, so someone did a mean tweet about my boy Richard Bach.

Fine, it wasn’t technically a tweet, and it was just an image from an Ursula Le Guin essay.

I can absolutely imagine why the commercial juggernaut that was Jonathan Livingston Seagull must have driven authors like Le Guin crazy.

But I did feel the need to do a very gentle defence to nobody in particular, because this book – Illusions – really was a ‘this book will change your life’ moment for me.

And it made me want to dig out this essay I wrote for a website (now gone) a decade ago called Eulogize This.

A friend just asked me whether this was a book to read as a cynical adult. I kind of dodged the question – the answer is probably not. But for someone looking for a ‘way in’ to philosophy, who is ready to surrender to the authority of an expert… a book that gives you permission to try to become your own expert is a little bit miraculous.

From The Vaults

O MISTRESS MINE by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

While we’re digging in the vault, and also doing the Shakespeares, I thought I might as well dig this out.

I recorded this over a decade ago, and emailed the American composer who wrote the original choral arrangement asking for permission. Not that it was ever gonna make any money or anything.

But he was very nice about it, so yay – thanks Matthew Harris!

Recommended

7 WAYS TO MAXIMISE MISERY

Every once in a while, I come back to the book How To Be Miserable by Dr Randy Patterson – a book I have recommended in my newsletters many times, although not for a while.

He is a psychiatrist who found out that reverse psychology could be a very effective therapeutic approach: he would ask his patience to list all of the actions that they believed would make them feel even more miserable, and then get them to examine how many they were already doing.

This was the short summary video by YouTuber CGP Grey that put me onto this book, and I think it’s a timeless classic.

Worth re-watching every couple of years, I think.

Recommended

BLACK SUN by IRMA

I first came across this artist when YouTube fed me her cover version of Thriller, which is glorious in its own right.

I’m obviously going to be biased towards singer songwriters playing on classical guitars, but this is a bop.

Even if it is pretty obviously about the constant underlying anxiety of living in America in 2026.

Recommended

SOFTWARE BRAIN by NILAY PATEL

A lot of people I follow on social media have been talking about this podcast episode from The Verge.

I mention The Verge a lot – if you are unfamiliar with them they are far and away the most influential and respected organisation in tech media.

And perhaps the most influential media channel that The Verge has is Decoder, a (now video) podcast in which the editor in chief, Nilay Patel, grills the CEOs of Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, you name it. And these billionaire oligarchs are scrambling over each other to appear on this show, because they know it’s the one that everyone listens to. Rupert Murdoch is a regular listener. You get the idea.

However, this episode is not an interview but a video essay.

It’s an essay on the increasing chasm how these CEOs that he is constantly interviewing see AI and how the public does.

The public hates AI. The public HATES AI. Poll after poll demonstrates this.

But the CEOs won’t accept this. They believe in their dark crispy souls that this is just a marketing problem. The public just needs to be persuaded.

And Patel has a theory why the CEOs believe this despite all evidence to the contrary.

He says they have a condition which he calls ‘software brain’.

This one is definitely worth watching, particularly if you’re looking for reassurance that these AI peddling CEOs might not know what they’re talking about.

Recommended

PHONE FREE PARTIES

This is an article from USA Today about a new type of trendy party in Brooklyn, New York.

I want to start with that, because I do think that context is crucial. What this article covers is unlikely to be happening outside of Brooklyn right now.

However, Brooklyn has a habit of being where global trends are set, particularly amongst young people. The ‘artisanal lumberjack’ hipster of the 2010s arguably began in Brooklyn.

The cultural activity that forms the focus of the Brooklyn parties in this article is being phone-free. You turn up and put your phone in a little guarded locker.

But if you read the article, this is about much more than just wanting a break from social media.

This is a generation that is actively hostile to tech. This is also a generation that is determined to build community outside it.

Recommended

ALL NIGHT LONG

YouTube served me up this incredible clip from a 1962 British movie called All Night Long, in which Patrick McGoohan plays a drum solo in a jazz club.

Patrick who?

Patrick McGoohan was a star of British TV, and occasionally cinema, best known for the 1960s TV phenomenon The Prisoner.

The most wired, intense, knife-edged actor you ever did see.

He was the clear first choice to play James Bond in the first movie, but he turned it down, instead recommending his friend Sean Connery. Why did he turn it down? Because it was full of sex and romance, and he hated sex and romance. In fact, he swore to never play apart that involves sex and romance, and to my knowledge he never did. That was Patrick McGoohan.

So stumbling across this movie scene (I’m trying to track down the movie) in which he plays an ambitious jazz drummer rolling out this incredibly intense solo where it looks like he’s plotting to murder someone is just an absolute delight to me.

However, I then found out that the story is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello. And he is playing Iago.

And now I want to see this film so badly…

Recommended

IF KORN WROTE MMMBOP

This is exactly what you think it is.

Unless you’ve never heard of KORN or MMMBop, in which case I don’t know what to tell you.

Recommended

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE on KING LEAR

So for reasons that will soon become apparent, I have been on a bit of a Shakespeare binge recently.

And when I think about Shakespeare I think about going to see plays when I was a teenager.

And when I think about that, I think about Simon Russell Beale playing Edgar in the 1993 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear.

I saw a lot of Shakespeare productions when I was younger, and I don’t remember another occasion when one actor just seemed to be operating at a different level of talent to everyone else on the stage.

He would’ve been 32, and he was already getting talked about.

I tried to find clips of him but couldn’t – all I could find was this rather hammy TV spot on Robert Stevens, who played Lear. I did find some photos though.

Anyway, it’s a bit strange for me to watch this interview of the actor I still slightly think of as a boy wonder, now aged 65, talking about playing Lear himself.

It actually reminds me that I now think King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s least interesting plays, but that’s just me.

But SRB (as I have decided to call him) is always interesting to listen to, I think. It’s a joy to listen to anyone who’s talking about something they have thought a great deal about.

I’m going to go long on this one – bear with me, it is going somewhere.

You know when you stumble across a song or a movie clip or something that immediately takes you back to a particularly intense part of your life?

I stumbled on a clip from Mel Gibson’s Hamlet the other day, and it reminded me how important Hamlet was to me as a teenager.

Let’s just quickly address the Mel Gibson of it all. He was the first of my faves that was cancelled. In fact, he was the first example I remember of a major celebrity being cancelled. Sometimes I think the pressures of fame, and particularly social media addiction, twist otherwise good people into frankly evil ones. However I remember, just before the Mel Gibson cancellation became official, that I started to notice signs of antisemitism in his work. Gibson’s directorial debut features him teaching Shakespeare to a child and the passage they choose is the most antisemitic one from The Merchant of Venice… Anyway – not why we’re here.

My father was of a generation and background that would regularly see Royal Shakespeare Company productions in Stratford upon Avon, and as a teenager he would frequently take us, and give us a quick plot synopsis on the way there. Then he would pick our brains about them on the way home.

I became a Shakespeare stan, and that became a gateway into the literary genre of tragedy. Unsurprisingly, as a Goth-adjacent teenager, I became obsessed about it. Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, and particularly modern playwright Peter Shaffer – author of Equus and (still my fave) Amadeus.

Now, my personality has ended up at the other end of the spectrum in the years since. As you might have gathered from this newsletter, from previous newsletters, and from songs like this and this, I’ve become kind of obsessed about how happiness works.

But as a teenager, my favourite past times were drinking vodka and orange juice, refusing to shave my almost-moustache, and wandering around quoting Hamlet.

It just felt really deep, and it felt really deep because it was perhaps the first coherent philosophy I ever had. Life more than sucked: it was deliberately conspiring against you. Or, to quote King Lear, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods”.

I wonder now if the reason why it seemed so compelling was because, as the 7 Ways To Maximise Misery video (and the book it’s based on) highlighted earlier, misery tends to lead to habits like stillness, varied sleep, unhealthy eating, social isolation and excessive screen time which compound the problem. And even when you choose to try to overcome the misery, the decisions that an unhappy, lonely, sleep-deprived mind make tend to fixate on the wrong solution and make the problem even worse. It’s very easy to slip into a downward spiral, and that bug in the human condition can very much make it feel like the universe is out to get you.

I did manage to climb out of that hole, however, and I think Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy specifically might have helped me to do it. It is arguably the biggest cliché in English literature, but like most clichés it’s overused for a reason.

Hamlet addresses the question: given the wretched state of the world, is the rational choice to just end it all? Not because there is some immediate crises like a painful terminal illness or intrusive thoughts, but because it is the highest philosophical truth? Are we all fools for thinking it’s noble to suffer the constant slings and arrows of fate? Isn’t it better to sling arrows back, even though you will destroy yourself in the process? Or are we all cowards because we’re afraid that there might indeed be a life after death that is even worse than this one?

The thing is, when you marinade in this stew for long enough, you start to see loose ends that need tugging on.

You start to notice that there might be some possibilities in between “suffering passively every bad thing that happens to you” and “starting a fight that gets you killed”.

You start to notice that, despite being lauded by the loud literary critics as the greatest of genres, tragedy is based on a philosophy of cynicism, and that cynicism is based on passivity. Or even cowardice. It is about constructing stories in which fate really is conspiring against the hero, and then drawing the conclusion that you might as well not even bother. ‘This is what life is like, and the universe will get you in the end.’ But anyone who actually operates in the real world and examines it honestly will recognise that this tragic type of story, whilst possible, is not universal to everyone all the time. We have agency. We can examine our problems, attempt solutions, fail, learn from our failures, fail again, keep failing, but eventually reach a point where the problem is manageable. Sometimes on closer inspection the problems melt away completely.

And yes, sometimes we are just outmatched by our problems and they destroy us, but there are other stories out there – like the movie Cool Hand Luke (spoiler for a 60 year old movie that I’m actually ambivalent about in many ways) in which the hero shows almost infinite resourcefulness and courage and still gets defeated and killed – that actually feel like celebrations of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

For those of us lucky enough to born into comfortable lives, we find that most of our problems can be dealt with and forgotten. Those who aren’t comfortable are not the victims of fate: they’re the victims of politics, and I suspect they never got tempted by the philosophy of tragedy because its flaws were immediately obvious.

Not only did Hamlet famously outgrow his passive cynicism in the story (and yes, take up arms against a sea of oppressors, and in doing so… die) but even Shakespeare outgrew his obsession with Tragedies. His ‘Late’ plays (particularly The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest) seem to pointedly start out as tragedies and then end in a much more realistic place: there is reconciliation, but still damage. There is complexity where there used to be poetic cynicism.

Anyway, having berated the philosophy of tragedy, I am actually left with a sense that there is something a bit admirable with at least having an opinion on the whole state of existence – whether good or bad. That takes a certain amount of intellectual ambition.

This morning I had an idea of big enough for me to want to devote the whole newsletter to it. I journal many ideas each day on a myriad of subjects, and it can get really hard to keep track of them! So if I actually want to remember the big ones I try to find a way to squeeze them into this newsletter.

Here’s this morning’s idea.

I have often looked back on that decision by my 15-year-old self to explore philosophy with bemusement. What made this not very clever, not very popular, not very happy teenager make such a spectacularly good decision that would pay off, with interest, year on year, for the rest of his life?

I think I might know now.

I have always assumed that I ‘naturally’ transitioned from that tragedy mindset to a more mature philosophy, where I take responsibility for my own well-being. I assumed that was a fairly normal thing: teenagers are obsessed with tragedy, but after navel-gazing for a couple of years most of us come to this conclusion.

But now I don’t think that’s true at all.

I think I was extremely lucky to have an education that allowed me to do this sort of study of literature, where I was encouraged to explore and obsess this philosophy of tragedy that had been such a key inspiration to Peter Shaffer, Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks.

I found myself in this environment due to, yep, class privilege. It was a mistake to assume that’s a common experience. Sure, teenagers may be fascinated by philosophy and may want to explore the big questions in life, but they’re much more likely to be in a school or domestic environment that will ridicule them for that, rather than encourage them.

Writing essays on King Lear, Hamlet and particularly Equus (which I did a monster essay for and it was the only time I got a really high mark) gave me the structure to identify, analyse, evaluate and eventually reject this philosophy – and, had I not done that, my subsequent decision to explore philosophy would almost certainly never have happened.

I don’t think I ever would have had the confidence to explore philosophy: I would’ve assumed that it’s all too complicated. More things in heaven and earth yada yada yada.

Yes, there were plenty of other people for my privileged background who didn’t take this opportunity to build a philosophical framework. But I’ll bet there are hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe millions of people who would’ve followed the same route how do they been prompted at that age to engage with this philosophical debate.

And in terms of the natural process of growing up and taking responsibility for your own happiness…

I do frequently see this process happen with people who have experienced life-changing trauma, particularly when young. And I do also see it happen incrementally with most people, but probably way less than I assumed.

And now I wonder: can this even happen outside of that narrow window of those teenage years? Once you get older, your philosophy develops from your habits and your mistakes and your traumas, and unless you spend a lot of time in therapy, you’re probably stuck with them.

As it happened, this tragedy obsession when I was about 15 was replaced by an obsession with philosophy, triggered by that Richard Bach book, the following year – and then the year after that my new philosophy got pressure tested when my mother was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually prove terminal. And it didn’t let me down.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is this:

Holy shit. Studying English Literature turned out be useful!

I’m as surprised as you are.