He will never be this tiny again

My son, Étienne, is one month old.

Most early mornings I lie on the sofa as he sleeps on my chest, and these hours are the most precious of my day. I get to give his mother a little more sleep while I bathe in his presence during the stillness before the sun rises.

Each morning reveals a new version of him. He weighs a little more, his face is rounder and, when he wakes, his eyes are more alert, tracking me as I move.

Each day I catch myself looking forward to future milestones: when he smiles as he recognises us, when he can hold his own head up, when he sleeps for more than three hours at a time. In part, this is excitement to see him grow, to marvel as he unlocks subtler, more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

In truth, there is another part of me that wants him to get there faster, because this stage is tough. It's frighteningly easy to see him as a sequence of jobs to be done, particularly when deprived of sleep. Change nappy, feed, burp. Tummy time, soothe, nap. Bath, feed, burp, sleep. He is immediately and shamelessly demanding. He takes and takes and gives nothing back.

Except, no, that's not quite right. He takes everything we have to give, yes, but somehow he offers even more in return. Every time I look forward to his future, I’m pulled back to the truth of the rapidly-unfolding present, and as I sink into a wordless delight in his being I find a grief inextricably entwined. He will never be this tiny again.

Grief can be hard to sit with, but trying to push it away feels like missing the point. Each morning invites me to enjoy the grief braided through the connection in the pre-dawn quiet, and when I pause to appreciate it, that grief unfolds into its own bittersweet flavour of bliss.

That is his gift: he invites me out of my forgetfulness. He reminds me that this quality of being, this preciousness, is always and has always been there. It will always be there. My little prince, sleeping gently on my chest, is its avatar.

My son doesn’t know that my self-judgement isn’t his

In case I just gave you the impression I’m some kind of monk, let me correct that. Yes, many early morning contact naps with Étienne feel like sacred presence. But also: it's 4am, I haven’t slept enough, and I feel tired and foggy. So when meditating on my son’s radiant perfection feels out of reach, I play rapid chess against anonymous strangers on my phone.

This is a terrible way to play chess. I’m bad at chess even when well rested and, at 4am, I blunder constantly, which irritates me to an unreasonable degree.

This morning, in a moment of post-blunder clarity, I noticed something that concerned me: my son, though asleep, was in contact with me while my body moved through familiar patterns of self-criticism and irritation. Familiar to me, anyway—he doesn’t know that those are my emotions, not his.

You see, I believe that a lot more information is shared through touch than is generally thought. This comes from my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher, where touch plays a huge role in 1:1 lessons to both tune into what the student is doing and to convey an experience to them.

Moreover, the more I learn about ‘Parts’1, in the Internal Family Systems sense, the more I understand that parts are psychophysical, as F. M. Alexander might have put it: neither mental, nor physical, but both, indivisibly. Put another way, Parts are something the whole bodymind does.

What all this means is that when my self-critical parts get triggered by blundering a move, I consider it perfectly reasonable to assume that my body is tensing in ways that transmit something of my patterns and conditioning to my son. Obviously, I don’t want this for him.

This realisation opens up new territory: parenting as a practice. In the Alexander Technique context, I often advise the teacher trainees I assist to remove their hands from a student when they’ve lost touch with their own coordination and presence. The risk of transmitting something at best useless, or at worst actively unhelpful, is too high. Better to step back, reorient, and then begin again.

With my son I have two options, one easy, one more challenging.

The easy option is to avoid activities that trigger my parts in this way when I’m in contact with him. I can choose not to play chess if I know it will make my body broadcast self-judgement.

The harder option is to remain aware of what’s happening and practice compassion with myself in real time, so that what I transmit is something a little more sophisticated. Not just the inner critic part, but also the capacity to be with it, to welcome and love it. That’s something I do want him to get, because he’s going to get Parts of his own no matter what I do.

Ultimately, I’m holding this intention lightly. Looking after a newborn is hard enough and I don’t want to create a stick to beat myself with. It’s enough for me to gently notice my own inner experience when I’m with him, and to bring even greater compassion to what I find.

Holding my son’s attention as sacred

I saw two essays on my feed this week discussing how university students these days can no longer focus, read deeply, or engage with anything requiring more than momentary effort. Many no longer care about anything beyond the next notification.

I want to delve deeply into this topic soon, but for now, I know I don’t want Étienne to fall victim to this attention crisis, which I suspect we’ll one day look back on as a tech-induced pandemic in its own right.

I know how easy it is to use technology to zone out from feeling certain flavours of bad, because I’ve done it a lot myself. My favourite loop is “I’ve scrolled too much and I feel awful. Oh, I know, more scrolling will fix it!”, and so a deep habitual groove becomes worn in my mind.

This avoidance is my Parts trying to soothe locally, but making things worse globally, helped by tech companies happy to monetise the pattern. The way out of this, by the way, is to feel all the emotions all the way through, though this is often much easier said than done.

As Étienne gets older, there will be conversations and decisions around screen time, education and access to technology. I want to be flexible, cultivate his skill and curiosity, and give him experience fit for a child born in 2025.

At the same time, attention is sacred and deserves reverence. What he attends to—and how he attends to it—shapes the world as much as it will shape him and, for now, I’m its guardian. To that end, I have a few rules for myself:

• Let his focus run, even if he’s just staring at a leaf or into empty space.

• Leave him be if he’s absorbed elsewhere. He doesn’t owe me eye contact when I want it.

• Model healthy use of attention, particularly with how I use my phone.

My hope is one day he’ll wake to find that in a world where attention is becoming increasingly dull, fractured and commodified, his has remained bright, steady and free, and will serve him for the rest of his life.

My son is due on 15 March, and I'm surrounded by objects that imply his presence.

The empty bassinet, the changing table and chest of drawers filled with unfathomably tiny clothes each announce they will soon belong to a brand new someone. While for now he exists for me through these objects, as pictures from scans and as increasingly dynamic movements in his mother's belly, I'm excited to meet him in person.

I'm excited to see his face and feel for the first time that this is no ordinary baby; this is my baby.

I'm excited to be the one who gets to (try to) console him when the sheer vividness of Being outside his cosy womb becomes unbearable.

I'm excited for his voice to create a third note in what has so far been a harmonious dyad, and to enjoy the music we make whether the emergent triad is harmonious or discordant.

And I'm excited to embrace the intensity of a ride that never stops, that never lets me off the hook or gives me an easy time. I'm excited that his mere existence will deepen my capacity and appreciation for love, yearning, fear, regret, joy, pain and all the rest.

Yet at the same time, I'm unsettled.

Global events of the last few weeks, the increasing ubiquity of AI, and an ache of disorientation about the utility of my skills remind me that the world I grew up in—the one that felt like home, to me—is gone.

If I am to gift my son a world that feels, to him, like home, I must first grieve the loss of mine, otherwise I risk falling into a self-indulgent nostalgia and denial of reality as it is, neither of which will serve him (or me, for that matter).

I don't know how to make sense of reality right now, and I don't know if I would feel that so intensely if not for my upcoming responsibility for this precious new life. But that's exactly what I'm signing up for: I'm not allowed to opt out, nor to drift, nor to simply hope for the best. Not any more, because the consequences are no longer just my own.

I find myself standing on the threshold of a dream1, and I can't help but wonder which side is which. I have this uncanny sense that despite the looming sleep deprivation, I'm about to experience something akin to waking up.

There are few decisions I've made in my life that have been truly irreversible, where stepping over a threshold has meant there's no stepping back. I can only imagine what's on the other side of that line.

Whatever it's like, though, I vow to embrace all of it, and all of him, wholeheartedly. It's both the least—and the most—that I can do.

Of course, we are not trains. We do have the capacity to step out of past conditioning, but as anyone who has consciously attempted it can attest, it’s a difficult project. One of the reasons for this is that doing something truly new—actually moving off those habitual tracks—feels like some combination of weird, unfamiliar and wrong.

What we do all the time comes to feels familiar, and what is familiar comes to feel right, natural and the way things are simply supposed to be. The problem is that it’s easy to use that internal sense of what feels right to guide behaviour. There’s a kind of safety in the familiar: it’s known, mapped territory from which it feels like chaos has been expelled. It’s the comforting sense of being at home, even if home also happens to be a chaotic mess. Better the devil you know, and all that.

One of my habits is to have a small amount of caffeine to start my day and when I want to feel motivated and invested in what I’m working on. On closer inspection, though, caffeine has the opposite effect on me: it makes me scattered and anxious about the things I’m not getting done because I’m too scattered. Even knowing this, it’s really difficult to learn my lesson and just cut it out completely, in part because sitting at my desk with a herbal tea in the morning just doesn’t feel right.

If I use that internal feeling of familiarity and rightness as a compass, I will, almost by definition, keep orienting towards my habitual patterns of thought and behaviour. Doing anything in a non-habitual way, like tying your shoelaces with a new technique, just feels somehow wrong, at least until it becomes familiar, at which point it starts to feel right again.

The trick is to learn to stay with the experience of unfamiliarity even in the face of the internal pressure to return ‘home’ to familiarity; to notice that urge to resolve the tension and instead stay with the dissonance of the new. The fact that something is unfamiliar is a good sign that it’s new, because it hasn’t already been mapped as a thing you do all the time.

While I’ve talked about this at an individual scale, I suspect it holds true at higher levels of organisation. How many decisions within businesses are taken because they’re the most constructive option versus being the one that feels right, both to the decision makers and to the culture of the organisation as a whole? How much of politics is just being able to read the mood of what would feel right to the public and then giving them that, or at least framing what they’re doing in language that avoids feeling wrong to voters?

For as long as this dynamic goes under-recognised, it makes the job of effecting meaningful change, whether personally or collectively, much more challenging than it otherwise needs to be. “You are going to feel a little uncomfortable and that’s a good thing” can be a bitter pill to swallow if you immediately equate the experience of the unfamiliar with pain or if the person telling you this hasn’t earned some level of trust.

One thing I want to emphasise here though is the difference between something feeling weird, in the unfamiliar sense, and feeling weird in the bad sense. I want to encourage you to spend more time in the unfamiliar, but I absolutely do not want to encourage you to spend more time in the bad. If something feels bad, stop.

When I sometimes do hands-on Alexander Technique lessons—and, surprise! this is Alexander Technique—various things I do with a student bring about a sense of unfamiliarity. Someone might say “this feels weird”. I then ask, “good weird? neutral weird? bad weird?” I’ve yet to have an experience where someone said “bad weird”, it’s always just…not what they’re used to. It’s usually good weird. That’s the constructive space where something new can emerge.

This is something I invite you to practice: can you bring the kind of awareness to your daily life where you can differentiate between just unfamiliar and the actually bad? The first is the path to the freedom to change, the second can cause harm. Language often conflates the two, though, so there’s a process of learning to be able to separate them. Trust your internal sense of what feels bad, but be a little suspicious of your internal sense of what feels right.

What opportunities can you find in the week ahead to experience the ‘good weird’ of unfamiliarity and then stay there for a little while without trying to change it?

I had a wonderful time meeting new people, putting faces to names from Twitter and deepening a couple of relationships from previous in-person gatherings. There were some exceptionally resonant conversations that I suspect can only happen when you get a critical mass of like-minded weirdos together for a while.

In the last couple of days, as the social fabric started to shift towards a comfortable green velvet paired with a neon pink silk, I noticed a feeling that was remarkable in its absence from my normal life. I had the feeling that I was co-living with people, and I don't mean in the 'living in a big house together' sense. It felt like the adventures of my life were happening with other people who were also living their own adventures with me.

This sense is different from how my relationships with most of my friends has drifted with age, with living in a big city and with habit. It struck me that most of the time when I meet with friends in person or online, one of the first questions is some version of "so what have you been up to?" It's like we're living separate lives that we then tell each other about, not sharing in the living itself.

While it's a genuine blessing to have friendships where we sincerely want to know how each other’s lives are unfolding, I realised that I also want more friends who I do life with rather than just talk about my life with. It seems that talking about my life takes me out of it somehow, putting me into a kind of reflective, evaluative mode that often makes my life feel less good than when I’m just living it.

‌And to my wonderful local friends who may be reading: this isn't meant as a criticism of how we are together. I'm hugely grateful for all the friendships in my life, especially those that a comfortable, long-standing, high-trust friend group provides. Just consider this an invitation for further deepening and co-adventuring, if you want it.

I noticed another version of this experience a few months ago when I visited Barcelona with my partner Cécile. We were there at the same time as Paul, Angie and their daughter, and because Paul is also a self-employed weirdo, I had this wonderful, yet unfamiliar experience of impromptu hanging out.

Here in London, where I’ve lived for pretty much my entire adult life, with friends who are increasingly busy professionals, it’s common—necessary even—to arrange catch-ups weeks in advance, and then to walk or take public transport 30-60 minutes to get there. It’s always a thing that requires planning, coordination and a non-trivial amount of effort.

By contrast, it was a strange shock to my system that I could just send Paul a message in the morning and arrange to meet for brunch a 15 minute amble away. Of course, it helps that Paul’s schedule was as flexible as mine (he is the “Pathless Path” guy, after all), but it’s still striking how so much big city professional life makes these kinds of casual, low-key interactions less accessible.

The lesson I’m taking away from this is that there are forces in my current context that conspire to nudge me towards this strange kind of pseudo-isolation, a kind of loneliness that I was only able to notice by meeting a need I didn’t even know I had. Pushing back against these nudges requires some level of intentionality and environment design.

Here in London, I can be on the lookout for more events that might interest my friends and take more initiative in inviting people join me. Live music, the theatre or interesting talks all come to mind. Longer term, I can also decide to choose where I live based on proximity to friends, at least to the extent I have the resources and flexibility to do that.

In the online context, one of the best examples I’ve come across for cultivating this co-adventuring vibe is the use of personal feeds in Cosy Web style non-public online spaces, like a Discord server or Slack group. 

My friend Tasshin has written an excellent article on how feeds work, but in short, imagine an invite-only common-interest community where each member gets their own channel (#feed-michael) to write about whatever is alive for them. Other members can hang out in other people’s feeds, reply, give emoji reacts (a truly overpowered social technology) and so on, which means everyone can be in the loop with what’s going on in real time and also feel seen by others—all without the need for ‘catch ups’.

I’m in a few such communities, but I’ve been giving more thought to how I might create some Cosy Web instances of my own. My Alexander Technique course is hosted on a non-public platform with community features, but it feels far too big to qualify, unless I create smaller sub-channels. I’m keeping my awareness open to any common-interests around which I might like to cohere say 30 engaged people, but for now it’s a quiet background aspiration.

If any of this has resonated with you, I’d suggest a couple of things. 

The first is to look at your local, ‘physical’ friendships and see where you can make a shift from telling friends about your life to living your life with your friends. If your primary way of being with friends is, for example, regular catch-up-flavoured drinks or dinners, are there events or activities that you could enjoy together?

The second is to look at your online life and consider if you have friends who might be interested in creating a small, non-public Discord community where you can implement this feed model. Even a small-scale online co-working community could scratch a social itch you don’t even know you have.

And I’d love to hear how you get on, if you do decide to explore this further.

You’re receiving this because, at some point, somewhere, you opted to receive emails from me, Michael. That may have been via this newsletter, via my “Alexander Technique” Substack (Expanding Awareness), or via my column in Every (also called Expanding Awareness).

For the sake of my sanity, I have decided to merge all these channels here (with permission from Every). If you’re not happy about this, please unsubscribe via the link at the bottom of this email.

My loose intention is to publish 750-1250 word pieces on things I’m thinking about, on a mostly weekly basis, inspired by how my friend Sasha does it.

I thank you for either your continued attention or for honouring your desire to focus it elsewhere.

Notes on identity: authenticity vs 'profilicity'

I'm part way through a book called You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity in which the authors argue that the meaning of identity, as influenced by society, has changed between different types: sincerity, authenticity, and 'profilicity'.

In their use of these terms, sincerity refers to playing social roles that are largely assigned to us: farmer, husband, mother or devout follower of a particular faith. These roles, transmitted through such things as religion, gender, class, age or social standing, dictate how we dress, what we do, and how we see the world. To be sincere is to align one's identity fully with the given role.

After sincerity comes authenticity, which points towards the idea that the 'true you' is what lies hidden beneath all the masks that are imposed by social roles. The authentic you is what's left when you cast the roles off and express what remains.

Finally we come to identity through 'profilicity', derived from the experience of profiles of various forms on social media, dating apps, CVs and the like. Profilicity is a kind of second-order identity that emerges when we see ourselves as being seen by others. And not just any other, but a general peer, a "larger, personally unknown public".

The authors point out that none of these identities is any less valid than another, they just reflect the way society around us works. Depending on your generation, though, you may find one of them more resonant than the others. As a mid-thirties millennial, I've been steeped in the story of authenticity and tend to find sincerity, as expressed here, stifling.

But in a world where personal freedoms are limited and success in life depends on living up to one's social role, merging your identity with the roles you've been given is an effective strategy. Yearning for a kind of self-expression that society simply won't grant you is likely to bring suffering.

As society becomes more dynamic and old social structures break down, the idea that 'true identity' can be found in the absence of the roles that once gave us direction is comforting. Authenticity offers us both a chance and an imperative to 'find ourselves', a mission that becomes all the more compelling as society retreats from telling us who we are.

Now that we live in a hyper-connected online world, where it's increasingly difficult to exist without being observed in some way by a largely anonymous crowd, defining who we are by how we are perceived and judged by others becomes its own strategy for success.

While it's tempting to believe that how others perceive you shouldn't matter, as authenticity suggests, it really depends on which societal waters you swim in. You can be as authentic as you want in your online dating profile, but if everyone around you is presenting themselves through the more highly-curated perspective of profilicity, you'll probably get fewer matches than those whose lives are naturally performance art. Those beautiful photos on an Indonesian beach, the well-regarded political views and evidence of social validation from the general peer start to matter more and more.

When I came across these three kinds of identity, I realised that it's quite possible for them to coexist, overlap and come into conflict if I'm not aware of the dynamics at play.

For example, my profilic identity in the last three years has become, for better or worse, "that Alexander Technique guy on Twitter". While this isn't wrong, it has been creating tension with my authentic identity, which has found the profilic identity increasingly ill-fitting. 

As my authentic identity started to drift away from a strong focus on Alexander Technique ("I'm more than that!! I want to explore other things!!"), I've struggled to reconcile my 'observed self' and my 'felt self', which created a stuckness that ossified both identities.

This shouldn't be surprising, though, because each kind of identity is real. Many people would be inclined to say that profilicity is somehow fake or illusory, but that misses the point. The authors of the book point out that while employers know that CVs are profilic—a highly curated performance that everyone plays along with—they still expect you to be able to do the job. They hire your profilic identity and, if you're lucky, allow your authentic identity to come too. But neither is more or less real than the other. 

Do the people who pay me for Alexander Technique stuff care about the authentic me? I'm lucky that many do, for sure, but most care only about my profilic self. Again, there's no problem with this, but I think it sets up a trap that a lot of online creator types can fall into—as, indeed, do many employed people— of feeling pressured to live up to their profile.

Personally, I've been stuck in this conflict for long enough and want to make my profilic identity less fixated. In doing this, I'm already feeling my authentic identity take a sigh of relief and start to come more to life. From here, change becomes more possible.

For now I'll leave you with a question: how do your different identities interact, and how might that be blocking your continued evolution?

See you next week.

I hope you’re all fabulously well. In this edition I talk about:

• what Shakespeare has to say about feeling your feelings

• some upcoming Write of Passage public workshops you might be interested in, and

• a podcast I was interviewed on recently

I hope you enjoy!

Blunt not the heart

I recently saw Macbeth at the Globe Theatre, here in London, and was struck by a couple of lines towards the end of the play that offer wisdom on the role of emotions.

The context is that Macduff has just been told that his pregnant wife and children have been murdered by Macbeth. He is with Malcolm, the rightful King of Scotland, who tries to comfort him.

Here’s the text — emphasis [and commentary] mine:

Malcolm

Be comforted.

Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,

To cure this deadly grief.

Macduff

He [Malcolm] has no children. All my pretty ones,

Did you say all? O hell-kite, all?

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam [mother]

At one fell swoop?

Malcolm

Dispute it like a man.

Macduff

I shall do so,

But I must also feel it as a man.

I cannot but remember such things were

That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,

And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,

They were all struck for thee — naught that I am.

Not for their own demerits, but for mine,

Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now.

Malcolm

Be this the whetstone of your sword. Let grief

Convert to anger. Blunt not the heart, enrage it.

Notice how neither Macduff nor Malcolm adopts a later British attitude of the ‘stiff upper lip’, the suppression of emotional expression even in the face of extreme adversity. Perhaps it’s because they’re Scottish, and the stiff upper lip comes more from the Victorian-era public1 boarding school culture in England.

Nor do we see any inducement to keep calm and carry on, nor any implication that big boys don’t cry, two expressions that permeate the cultural waters I have swum in.

Instead, Malcolm immediately encourages Macduff to transmute his grief into action, in the form of revenge. Macduff agrees in principle, but insists that he must also feel his grief, which is portrayed as an inherently manly act.

It’s clearly right and proper, in Shakespeare’s mind, for Macduff to feel the full force of his emotions in the midst of catastrophe and then use its energy to guide his hand, should that be appropriate. Because of course it is.

Yet, I wonder if there are two failure modes in the modern era when it comes emotions.

On the one hand, we take ‘stiff upper lip’ and ‘keep calm and carry on’ to mean something like don’t feel your emotions, just get on with it. On the other hand, there’s going around and around the feelings carousel without ever taking action or allowing the emotions to transform you and leave. The first is dissociation, the second is stuckness.

The path I’m aiming to walk lies between these two extremes, to feel emotions fully, have their energy available for action, yet develop full conscious control over the choices I make in their presence. Put another way, it’s good to feel all your anger, but it’s not necessarily good to strike someone in anger.

I recently wrote an essay for Every, Stop Running From Emotions—
And Start Being More Productive (not my choice of title!), which is currently not behind a paywall, in case you want to read more of my thoughts on this topic.

Upcoming Write of Passage workshops

Write of Passage, the online course, is awesome2. I was an alumni mentor for three of the previous cohorts, I’ve hung out with David in London, and I know the team well. It’s fair to say that I would still be employed and living my former ‘default path’ life if I hadn’t taken the course and followed its advice.

I’ve even written a 4,000 article on how to get the most from Write of Passage that explores why I think it’s so great.

The WoP team are gearing up for their next cohort, and this year they’re doing something cool: they’re running three pre-cohort workshops that anyone can join. I’m sure they’ll be excellent and valuable in their own right, even if you don’t go on to take the course. Here they are:

Grow Your Audience with the The Cultural Tutor - Tuesday 6 September, 12pm ET

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to grow your audience through Unique Expression. The Cultural Tutor and David will teach you how he finds, shapes, and shares his best ideas in a way his audience loves — and how you can, too. Expect actionable advice you can use right away (and plenty about art and architecture).

How to Start Writing Online - Tuesday 12 September, 7pm ET

In this workshop, you’ll see how writing online uses what you already know to open up new doors in your life. Experience firsthand how:

• Conversations can become your creative fuel

• Your existing knowledge (which feels obvious) can be impactful for others

• Sharing ideas can make you a magnet for life-changing opportunities.

Test Drive Write of Passage - Thursday 21 September, 2pm ET

David will teach two Write of Passage concepts meant to help unlock your writing ability:

• The Archaeologist vs. Architect framework will give you two methods for uncovering your Personal Monopoly — your unique combination of skills, ideas, and experiences.

  • By the way, this part of the Write of Passage syllabus was informed by my YouTube video: Don't choose your niche — be prolific instead. In the last cohort, I joined this live session from Bali, didn’t expect David to call on me to explain it, and ended up talking to hundreds of people while wearing a tank top. How things change.

• The POP Writing framework will give your writing that special spark. Ditch the dull stuffiness you learned in school or at work. Instead, breathe life into your writing by making it personal, observational, and playful. Learn to write only something you can write.

By the way, I’m happy to do 1:1 calls with anyone who is thinking about joining this next cohort, and wants to talk through it. Just hit reply and we’ll get something in the calendar.

I was on a podcast

I was recently interviewed on David Elikwu’s podcast The Knowledge, where we talked about a wide range of things, including:

• Switching from corporate to self-employment

• How freedom creates tension in work and life

• Staying productive without burning out

You can listen here or watch on YouTube here.

📣 This edition is ‘sponsored’ by my partner, Cécile, who recently put together some materials for people thinking about taking a sabbatical from work, having done so last year herself.

There’s a freebie for a people thinking of taking the jump, and an inexpensive paid course for those already on the journey. You can find out more here.

I recommend it highly—and not just because I think she’s pretty or because she used my fancy camera equipment. 📣

1. Grieve the road not taken

All my life I've been tantalised by little wisps of dreams. Whether these dreams belong to me or to others is hard to discern, but they arise and tempt me all the same. I could live here, or there. I could be this kind of person, or that. I could marry this person, or not.

While the wisps stir a powerful yearning, they tend to be ambiguous with their imagery and narrative. Like a siren call, they pull me away from my life as it is, towards my life as it could be.

There have been times when I listened, smiled and decided to follow that call. Sometimes that paid off, sometimes not.

There have been times when I listened, smiled, and decided to stay my course. Sometimes that paid off, sometimes not.

And there have been times when I listened, frowned and, in abdicating a decision, I tore myself apart.

Through these experiences, I suffered mostly through abdication, not through decision.

When two roads diverged in a wood, Robert took the road less travelled by, and that, he said, made all the difference. I wonder whether Robert grieved the other road, and in so doing liberated himself to step wholeheartedly onto the road he took. Or, once his decision was made, did he allow the wisps of his unfulfilled potential tear his spirit from his chosen road?

Perhaps it wasn't the road he took that made all the difference at, but the nature of his decision to take it.

I was born as a field of pure potential. As I grow, my potential crystallises, piece by piece, into actuality. To welcome this is to look directly into and accept my own finitude and death, to be rewarded, perhaps, with a sonorous, bright life of potential made manifest. To deny it is to cling to the promise of potential without action, to be rewarded, perhaps, with anxiety and resentment. It is the nature of the wave function to collapse when it encounters the world of matter—of things that matter.

In tying himself to the mast, Odysseus made his choice. He invited the full force of a road not taken to ravage and transmute his soul, yet he remained steadfast on the road he took.

I feel that I must do the same. Wherever those dream wisps come from, and whether they're mine or not, I shall listen to them with a smile. Some I will pursue, the rest I will decide against. From time to time, I shall tie myself to the mast and grieve the road not taken.

But, above all, when I have decided which road to take, I will walk it wholeheartedly.

2. Should suppresses want

A few weeks ago I finished the Art of Accomplishment Master Class, an eight week course that is largely about welcoming and feeling all your emotions.

There was one particular lesson, which explored the relationship between want and should, that really caught my attention. It’s become a cliché that you should (ha) avoid using should, because should brings with it a kind of heaviness of expectations.

There’s even an expression – “don’t should all over yourself” — that has become the kind of advice that we hear, say “yeah, I really should stop doing that” and then change precisely nothing.

This time, though, I found a way to actually stop the should process, and it does indeed work. It’s quite annoying for something that clichéd to actually work, but I guess they’re clichés for a reason.

What really stood out to me is what happens when should and want overlap.

When I want something, without the should, I feel un-conflicted about pursuing it and things generally feel light and easy.

When I feel like I should do something—or, perhaps worse, should want something—the whole experience is tight and pressured. I should do this project at work, but because I feel like I should I’m going to procrastinate, moan and not enjoy it.

But what if I feel like I should do something that I also want to do? In my experience, the should overrides and shuts down the want. It becomes much harder to see and experience my wants when they’re shrouded in should.

There are a lot of big decisions in life—whether or not to go to university, whether to have a child, whether to go for the promotion—that come with an externally-derived should.

Imagine not knowing if you want to have children because you’ve been too exposed to the idea that you should (“all of your ancestors reproduced!”) or shouldn’t (“the planet can’t handle more people!”). I realised that this is the situation I’m in for many things, and I suspect I’m not alone.

The way out of this, I think, is to look clearly at all the should narratives and give yourself full permission not to comply with any of them.

Then, when the power of should has been reduced, remember that the underlying want remains. Now is the time to listen for it, protect it from being poisoned by other people’s expectations, and go after it.

3. Things I’ve made

Most of my writing lately has been for Every, which is behind a paywall. If you have a subscription, I hope you enjoy!

• Stop being who you aren’t

• Be Sincere—Not Serious

I also had fun recording a group conversation with Visa, Malcolm and Paul, hosted by Kai, on what it’s like to be a ‘feral free agent’. It’s pretty informal, but if you’re the kind of person who enjoys such things, I suspect you’ll get a lot out of it.

You can watch it on YouTube here:

4. Things others have made

I want to give a shoutout to , who recently wrote “As Pants The Hart” on his Substack, which I enjoyed deeply. Here are some of my highlights:

Deer anxiety is sober and reasonable. Person anxiety is self-stoking. People are prone to paranoid loops, the discomfort of an imagined threat primes me to be more pessimistic and scared. Deer anxiety is a clear signal to move somewhere safer. Person anxiety can be a hangover from a memory of something that happened 20 years ago.

~

Let me tell you, the combination of amplified interoception and a profound unshakeable sense of safety: that's a recipe for bliss.

~

Music wants me to dance, it shows me how, directly, like the stream calls the deer forward to drink, the music tugs on me. I don't need to push, I don't need to think, I don't need to be self-conscious about getting it right, or do anything according to any rules, for any "because" reasons. When the setting is right, and the music is right, I just need to relax and to trust, and it will inevitably pull me forward, out of my seat and onto the dancefloor.

5. Some art

I saw this installation at Kew Gardens in London. It’s called All The Flowers Are For Me and it draws inspiration from Islamic art. It’s astonishing to be in the same space at this thing.

Until next time.

The first kind of day is when I 'check' my phone in the first few hours after waking. Because I'm Very Online, I'm basically guaranteed to have a wave of notifications about interesting things and conversations I've been tagged in. There's a general sense of wanting to connect with and feel like a part of the world that exists beyond my head.

Often I do this within 10 minutes of getting out of bed. From here, if I'm not extremely careful, then something like the following cascade of events happens:

• I scroll around the various feed-based apps for a while. Usually this is just Twitter, but with the recent buzz on Bluesky and the launch of Substack Notes, there are now more online spaces that I want to catch up on.

• I get ready for my day... with YouTube videos playing. For whatever reason, little chores like emptying the dishwasher and brushing my teeth feel like they need some kind of background entertainment, even if that entertainment is whatever trash YouTube Shorts offers me.

• I rapid switch between apps between sets in the gym. It feels like exercise is great for my body, but the way I do it isn't great for my brain. I find myself scrolling, refreshing, watching video clips, and whatever else in the moments that I'm not physically pushing or pulling something heavy.

• I play music from my phone while I'm in the shower. When I'm in this mode, not even the shower provides safety from the intrusion of external content. And once I get out of the shower, I might put some more YouTube on, because words are more engaging than music.

• Then, when it comes to work... suddenly I can't focus. After a morning like that, I find my ability to tolerate the normal resistances that arise when focusing on work-shaped things is massively reduced. I'm much more likely to flip across to Twitter or a quick game of chess when I don't know what to write next or if I think of some overdue task that makes me feel bad.

On days like this, hours can pass in a flash, because I'm not really all there. I don't realise how much energy and time I burn on either bouncing around those apps like a squirrel on meth or struggling with the fuzzy brain state that I created by having done so. At the end of the day, I find myself strangely exhausted, unhappy and dissatisfied by how little I've achieved relative to my expectations.

Okay, so that's the worst-case scenario version of the first kind of day. Now let me tell you about the other kind of day, where I am diligent about not engaging with any kind of technology in the first few hours after waking. It looks like this:

• I go about my morning with greater calm and presence. I do all the same things in getting my day started as above, but I feel much less anxious. The world feels more vivid. Time passes more slowly. My breathing is deeper. I can better notice the shapes and textures of my own thinking and sensations in my body. I occasionally feel the tug of my phone, which hasn't moved since the night before, but since I decided not to look, I simply don't look.

• When I turn my attention to work... I can simply work. After a morning without what may have been a couple of hours of preliminary hyperactive context switching, my mind is much more likely to gently slip into focusing on whatever I want it to focus on. I still feel the resistances and challenging emotions, but the idea that I could 'just check Twitter' is simply less likely to occur, and if it does, I'm better equipped to ignore it. My mind feels sharper, my senses are clearer and I get a lot more done.

• At some point I look at my phone and engage with the world. These tools aren't bad and I don't want to avoid them completely. But after a several hour period of not really engaging with them, I find that I just have much less interest in them. I can look and engage, but I get bored faster. If I avoid external input early in my day, I am more likely to pick up a book later in my day.

• The day feels longer. Seriously, there is so much more time in a day when the grabby grabby apps are less part of it.

This is an enormous difference, even at the daily level, let alone when considering that my life is nothing more (or less) than a sequence of days like these.

The thing is, I'm not one of those optimise your life maximise productivity get out there and hustle sleep when you're dead types. All I really want is to end each day with a felt sense of "yes, that was a good day". This doesn't even necessarily mean "a pleasant day", but at the least a day where I felt fully engaged, having made constructive choices about where and how I focused my time and attention.

Looking at the 'bad' day I describe above, I think one reason it feels bad is that I know, deep down, that whatever sense of reward I feel while scrolling is largely illusory and detrimental to my larger goals. It's generated by teams of engineers who designed their app to trigger a release of dopamine that I associate with the satisfaction of attainment. Of course, it's also generated by my shadow desires to avoid the struggles that would create a natural feeling of reward, as evolution intended. And, it’s important to mention, plenty of actual, genuine value.

Ultimately, the problem is that when I'm not caught up in that cycle of frenetic switching—perhaps when my dopamine is level and my nervous system is calm—the things I would list as 'rewarding' are not the things that technology gives me. This is perhaps a novel way of defining values: what are the things that, when you reflect from your wisest mind, you feel uncomplicatedly good about finding rewarding?

On the one hand, I may feel rewarded when I get lots of notifications, but in the evening I feel bad for having engaged in excessive notification seeking. On the other hand, I may feel rewarded when I write and publish something, and in the evening I still feel good about having written and published something.

This is how I'm choosing to interrupt the rapid app switching pattern when I catch myself in it. I ask myself: is this something I want to feel rewarded for? What would I rather feel rewarded for? Usually the answers are 'no', and 'something more aligned to my long term goals and values, even if that involves greater struggle.'

I don't want to imply that this is easy or that this is the only way to interrupt the pattern. There's a lot that could be said about the functioning of dopamine, in particular, that suggests it gets more and more difficult to escape this pattern once you're in it. Each rewarding thing creates a short term peak in dopamine, which leads to a short term trough in dopamine, experienced as craving for more reward. A very large release of dopamine from an unnatural super-stimulus leads to a large crash and a reduction in baseline dopamine, which feels demotivating. And I recall reading that the waste products of dopamine metabolism (i.e. the cleanup of lots of dopamine) are also inflammatory to some degree, and contribute to that fuzzy, buzzy, brain fog experience.

All of this suggests that engaging in highly and artificially rewarding experiences, like notification surfing, early in the day, is an excellent way to set yourself up for a terrible day. At least, that's consistently the case for me.

The more I choose to avoid technology in the first few hours after waking, and the more I ask myself what I truly want to feel rewarded for, the better I feel at the end of every day.

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In case you aren’t on Twitter, or haven’t been there in the last couple of days, there has been some Drama. In a nutshell, Twitter suddenly and without notice decided to limit how people can interact with tweets that link to Substack (this platform). It’s currently not possible to:

• like, retweet or reply to any tweet that links to Substack

• like, retweet or reply to any tweet that quotes a tweet that links to Substack

Amusingly, it is possible to quote tweet the tweets that link to Substack, which means it’s possible to broadcast and discuss the whole fiasco, as long as the discussion happens at least two layers from the tweets with the Forbidden Links.

It looks like all this is in response to, or at least coincidentally immediately after, the announcement of “Substack Notes”, a short form broadcast and discussion feature coming to Substack that looks hilariously similar to Twitter, and which I absolutely will try out.

As someone who derives all of my income from people on the Internet giving me some of their time, money and attention (thank you), I care very much about the future of Twitter and similar platforms.

Twitter is the reason I was able to quit my job, it’s the reason I have friends around the world and it’s the reason I figured out how to teach Alexander Technique, a traditionally hands-on, in-person thing, asynchronously online. I would be sad to see Twitter fail.

That said, I want to note the ways in which moving my focus away from Twitter might be really good for me, as someone who makes things on the Internet. What would be the silver lining if Elon does run Twitter into the ground?

For one, Twitter demands a lot of time, fragmented attention and a certain mode of my personality. To be perfectly blunt, this has had an extremely non-trivial effect on my life. I can tell that my attention span is not what it was. I default to scrolling and instant gratification far more than I would like. And I have found myself thinking and talking about more and more superficial, fast-moving things. Sustaining my attention on reading books has become difficult.

Although I do not particularly like any of this, I would still say that, for me, the trade off in terms of life impact has been worth it, and I would do it again. But now I am where I am, and Twitter is where it is, I have to wonder: is this a path I want to continue to walk? And if so, assuming Twitter survives such that I still want to use it, do I want to use it the same way?

As long as there’s reason to use Twitter, I will probably be on Twitter, but I find myself increasingly drawn to other platforms, like Substack and YouTube, that would encourage me to dive into and express different traits that I now want to see more of in myself.

Back in 2021, I wrote a note called “getting my business to nudge me towards behaviours I want”, which was about why I switched from a launch-based, scarcity model to an evergreen, always available model for my course. In short, I realised that the launch dynamic felt bad for my long-term mental health, so I changed the rules of the game I was playing to make that problem go away.

I can see the same dynamic showing up in my choice of which publishing platform I decide to spend most of my creative energies on. I can feel a shift inside me towards a slower, more thoughtful kind of creativity that invites me to make things that take time to research, refine and craft. Where Twitter encourages rapid quantity, I feel myself drawn to moderately-paced quality. I want to shift the balance of creative playfulness in my life more towards curious exploration and less from low stakes banter.

As I draft this in Substack, in what is essentially a minimalist text editor with no noise or chatter, I feel a sense of calm that I don’t get on Twitter. The same is true for YouTube, where although the outputs are in an entirely different format, I can work more slowly and mostly offline if I want to. I can put out a decent video once a week instead of having to feed the Twitter algorithm multiple times every day.

Put another way, I suspect that if I continue to shape myself around the demands of Twitter, one day I’ll have to grieve the loss of the more thoughtful, more deeply thinking person I could have become had I merely chosen a different way to share my creative work.

This is not to say that Twitter and deep thinking are incompatible. There are many thoughtful people on Twitter who I respect deeply. And I don’t even plan to leave Twitter unless I have to.

All this is more illustrative of a wider identity shift I’m experiencing as an ‘online creator’, away from the Twitter-centric approach I’ve taken so far and towards what feels like a more rounded way of being and creating online. I suspect this will be better for me in the long term, and it’ll significantly improve the quality of the stuff you get from me.

So, I am excited to spend a lot more time with you here on Substack. I’ll turn on the Substack chat feature for this newsletter and hang out in there. And I’ll be dusting off my YouTube channel. Longer-form, more nerdy stuff, here we come.

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New course: “Let The Others Find You”

I’m working on a new course called Let The Others Find You. It’s going to be a guided introspective journey based on the core idea in this thing I wrote, with the same name, back in 2019. I recently did a 90 minute workshop just on this topic for Foster, which was well received, and I realised I have a lot to say.

The course will essentially be an encapsulation of the journey I’ve been on since 2019, where I went from corporate employee to ‘feral, free agent’. There are a lot of points I’ve been exploring and refining for years that I know have helped people on a similar journey, and I want to coalesce all of my experience and lessons learned into one place.

I also plan to develop regular live experiences using the pre-recorded material as a base. Think of it as a few-week container where people can explore how to let the others find them in a context where lots of ‘the others’ might be hanging out nearby at the same time.

I hope to release the self-paced materials before the end of April and then work on the ‘cohorts’ after that. I’m excited for this and I really hope it will be helpful to many of you.

Podcast chat with Spencer Kier

I was recently on Spencer’s podcast Audience of One where we discussed a whole range of topics.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Here are the show notes to give you a sense of what’s there:

• (00:33) Michael's background

• (02:25) Why he was drawn to Alexander Technique

• (04:36) What is Alexander Technique?

• (07:05) The challenges of repurposing the technique for broader use & teaching it online

• (09:01) Metaphors for getting people "there"

• (11:57) Why we aren’t normally in a state of expanded awareness

• (14:58) Can awareness be permanent?

• (19:20) Common blockers to cultivating awareness

• (21:27) Non-doing & effortless effort

• (24:12) (un)consciousness & (un)naturalness

• (27:34) Can we pre-empt the need for “unlearning”?

• (30:40) Do we lose anything by being over-aware?

• (37:31) The relationship between awareness and flow

• (41:29) What Alexander Technique isn't & what it could be

• (45:13) Where Alexander Technique fits with traditions like Buddhism and Taoism?

• (48:43) Being emotional vs. rational

• (52:58) Going from consultant to teacher-solopreneur

• (58:09) Archeologists vs. architects

• (01:04:38) Michael's final question

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I often find myself thinking about authenticity, the idea that it’s possible to ‘be myself’, or not. Although I’ve encountered many people who scoff at this, I think it points at a real thing that’s well worth digging into.

“Be yourself” is common advice, but it’s easy to get stuck when you try to follow it. Trying implies doing, and being oneself isn’t something that can be done. It’s something that happens, something that emerges of its own accord. Children, up to a certain age, don’t try to be themselves. They cannot help but be themselves, because they lack the kind of self-consciousness that tangles the rest of us in knots.

Once we become aware that it’s possible, through conscious intervention, to be other than what we naturally are, we lose that child-like state of grace. And, although it’s impossible to get it back, another version beckons to us. I’ve written in more detail about the journey of rediscovery elsewhere, but in summary, I see five stages:

• Stage 1: Unconscious naturalness. The spontaneous child who can only be as she naturally is, but lacks the awareness of her own state.

• Stage 2: Conscious unnaturalness. The self-conscious teenager who tries on many different masks in an attempt to fit in. No longer spontaneous, but increasingly ‘held’.

• Stage 3: Unconscious unnaturalness. The adult who has long forgotten that she ever put masks on. To try to be herself is only to put on another mask.

• Stage 4: Conscious unnaturalness, revisited. The adult who starts to see the masks once again, but doesn’t know how to take them off. She knows she is not herself, but the final move remains inaccessible.

• Stage 5: Conscious naturalness. The child’s spontaneity has been rediscovered and is able to express itself through the conscious direction of the adult. The adult is herself once again, but fully aware.

In my view, one crucial skill that allows the transition between conscious unnaturalness and conscious naturalness is being able to stop doing something you’re already doing, but without doing something else instead; to take off a mask without putting another one on. Said differently, the way to be yourself is to stop doing all the things that aren’t yourself. Create a kind of void into which ‘you’ can show up and express whatever is authentic in that moment.

Here’s an older YouTube video I made on this idea, if you’re interested.

I wonder about the self that emerges when you get out of the way, particularly as it relates to the question of agency. If there is a spontaneous self that acts according to its own sense of authenticity that is appropriate to each moment, does that mean that having conscious naturalness implies one single way of being, making life fully deterministic?

I keep finding myself avoiding digging too deep into the literature around 'free will’, because most educated people seem to think it doesn’t exist, and I don’t want their strongly held, well-articulated arguments crowding out the confused, nebulous whispers of mine (and articulating why I think this is good, actually, is a topic for another time).

Perhaps I am clinging to an illusion, but I maintain that agency is a thing and that life is better with it. We just need to be clear about exactly where the agency shows up, because it really seems like this thin veneer of consciousness on top of my biological organism of unfathomable complexity must be useful for something beyond just watching it all happen.

In fact, my view, for now at least, is something like this: there is no one, single spontaneous self. There are multiple ways to respond in any given moment and the expression of any of them would be fully authentic, as long as it is allowed rather than ‘done’.

As Walt Whitman puts it in “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The role of conscious agency, then, is to select between one among the multitudes of available authentic responses. In the context of a heated argument, going quiet, asking questions and launching a tirade may all be perfectly valid ways to be yourself, but you may consciously decide that some are more constructive than others. Like a conductor who wants to bring out the sounds of the violins and hear a little less of the brass section, you have the power to choose which parts of you gets a say, moment by moment.

This is importantly and emphatically not the same as putting on more masks, where you would actively impose your conception of “respond reasonably” on your own behaviour, as opposed to allowing the part of you that naturally wants to respond reasonably.

The first, putting on a mask version, requires cognition and simulation, and the idea of what ‘correct’ behaviour is has to be generated from somewhere. The second, allowing yourself version, gives access to all the wisdom of that aspect of you to flow of its own accord. This is like the difference between thinking about and trying to hit a baseball versus just letting your body move itself in response to the ball.

I want to acknowledge one potential area of confusion I may have that I will need to work through, which is how similar this model is to that put forward by Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other parts-based frameworks for your internal world. Am I just rehashing and misconstruing that? I don’t think so.

In IFS in particular, the framing is that there are different parts (managers, protectors, exiles) inside you that can take you over in service of their own aims and learned functions. They have good intentions for you (says the model), but they are not your capital S Self—that which is left in the absence of the parts. Much of the work of IFS is to ‘unblend’ from the parts to access the positive qualities of Self.

Looking at this, I think that what I am proposing here is that there are multiple authentic expressions of what IFS calls Self, and I’m not just describing the landscape of ‘parts’.

Going back to my example of the heated argument, on one hand it’s possible—and likely, for most people—that different parts, in the IFS model, will be triggered. One might make you go quiet, another might get you to lash out, and another might want to drop emotion completely and go fully analytical. All of these could be considered self-protection strategies.

But what I’m pointing at here is another level that looks similar, but in reality is very different. In the absence of parts taking over, it seems possible that Self, while unencumbered by parts, can still express itself in many different ways, any of which would be ‘authentic’.

Consider that you are the water of a river with many branching distributaries, where the river splits into smaller rivers. Trying to be yourself is like asserting that there is a new branch, that the river does and will flow that way. An IFS part taking over is like all paths but one suddenly disappearing, such that you can only flow that one way. Often you’ll also forget that there were many routes you could take.

But the ‘multiple authentic selves’ model would leave all the distributaries open and give you conscious control about which one you decide to flow down. In the language of Daoism, you’re still ‘going with’ the natural flow of the river, but you’re also gently using will to affect the way in which you go with it.

Perhaps there is a link to multiverse theory, where in another universe you flow down a different path, and there’s no free will after all, but that’s too esoteric even for me right now—maybe another time. And of course I’m still playing with this idea, so if you have any thoughts, please let me know!

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§ Get out of your own way at work

For those who subscribe to Every, here is my latest piece: How to get out of your own way at work (paywall)

§ Mini podcast: you can only respond to what you notice

I recently had a recorded conversation with River Kenna specifically on the idea that you can only respond to what you notice. If you’re interested, here it is!

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Jungian archetypes are “a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings.” (Wikipedia). They are perspectives, roles and perhaps development stages that have played out repeatedly throughout human history—and perhaps earlier—and are in a sense encoded into how we relate to ourselves and the world.

Examples of archetypes, according to Jung, include ‘The Mother’, ‘The Shadow’ and ‘The Wise Old Man’. Contemporary thinking includes more examples, like “King”, “Warrior”, “Magician” and “Lover” (from the book of this name, which explores ‘mature masculine’ archetypes specifically).

My way of making sense of this idea is something like this: there exist what might be called ‘energies’ that are both part of us and also transcend us. An individual may be a father in the technical sense of having children, while only sometimes tapping into and expressing the qualities contained within The Father.

The metaphysical assertion here is that there are meta-patterns called “The Father” and “The Mother” that manifest themselves through you. Whether or not these things actually exist seems irrelevant, because they can be experienced all the same, although some might argue convincingly that this counts as ‘existing’.

For example, if I ask you to close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and tune into “The Warrior” for a few minutes, as if it were a kind of magical radio station, I suspect you’d be able to get at least something from the experience. Perhaps your breathing and posture would change. You might have different thoughts about how the world should be, about what’s important to you or about where your attention should be.

However subtle, it seems there is some extra content there that shows up when you make yourself available to it. And if someone you cared about were being threatened, I suspect the Warrior would make itself known much more powerfully in a way that would likely surprise you.

This idea got me thinking about how it shows up in less arcane contexts, like at work. I wonder if job titles are a modern-day version of these ‘archetypal energies’. Perhaps not as powerful as the ones that go back hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, but I suspect they’re still influential in their own way.

Consider the CEO. On the one hand, CEO is a title that an individual can hold in a business. On the other hand, it’s a perspective, something larger than the individual that the individual can step into and out of. The archetypal CEO cares about certain things, wants certain things and has certain goals. In this frame, job descriptions become an attempt to crystallise the archetype in writing.

To illustrate what I mean, imagine a work meeting where participants, who are all employees of the business, are asked to sit in different seats around a table. Each seat represents a different role in the business: perhaps CEO, manager, engineer and clerk. There could be a label, a brief job description, and even some kind of talismanic object that fits the role.

Participants would be invited to move between each position and ‘tune into’ the energy of each role. As with the example of tuning into the warrior above, my assumption is that each participant would be able to follow this instruction and get some kind of useful perspective-shifting experience, however subtle. The manager would gain a greater appreciation of the CEO, and the CEO would gain a greater appreciation of the clerk.

But, importantly, I don’t think this is due to the manager empathising with the CEO as an individual. Instead, the manager is becoming available to the ‘archetypal energy’ of the CEO that whoever holds that position also tunes into.

This is feeling particularly relevant and useful to me recently, because as a solopreneur, I am every single role in my business. Sometimes I need to be CEO, sometimes I need to be designer, and sometimes I need to be office manager. However nebulous, unscientific and woo it may sound, I’ve found that when I ‘tune into the energy of the CEO’, I find it to be a useful way of orienting myself towards behaving and seeing like a CEO.

Then, later, I can put that down and tune into a different energy. This can also be difficult, though, and I suspect a lot of people get into trouble when they ‘blend’ with the archetype.

Consider the image of the CEO who can’t stop being a CEO when they go home to their families. Like the persona in ancient Greek theatre—the mask that actors wore to portray their characters—it’s vital to be able to stop playing the role once it’s no longer appropriate. You never want to forget that you’re wearing a mask.

How to get out of your own way at work

For those of you who subscribe to Every, I recently published a new essay there based on the ideas in The Inner Game of Work — you can read it here (paywalled).

And if you end up signing up for Every and want to support me, then please mark “Expanding Awareness” as the column you joined for — this gets me a share of your membership fee!

There’s a period of my life, aged 27, that I rarely talk about these days, when I was Managing Director of a tiny crowdwork-based technology intelligence startup.

I learned an enormous amount in that time, but one lesson stands out: my body knows things that my mind doesn’t.

For context, technology intelligence helps organisations monitor and make sense of technological developments that could affect them. Crowdworking is a way of doing work that spreads tasks among lots of individual contributors who get paid per task.

Our workers were mostly PhD students and postdoctoral researchers specialising in highly technical domains: materials science, aeronautical engineering, computer science, chemical engineering, and so on. We had hundreds of them on call. They would spend some of their free time scanning for interesting developments and submit them into our system. We’d refine the best stuff, with their help, to send on to our clients.

We had spent weeks pulling together a proposal for a five-year contract doing this for <enormous redacted defence company you’ve heard of>. We designed an offer, they interviewed us and then…we won.

I was elated, in part because at the time I was still working the three-month notice period of my previous job. We had pulled this off in evenings, weekends and a little annual leave, and I suddenly had a solid foundation to jump to.

But that afternoon I felt more than just proud of our achievement. Strangely, I also developed a pain in my upper chest. Thinking it was heartburn, I drank some chalky medicine and hoped it would go away. It didn’t.

On the commute home, I was reflecting on the win. What would it take to deliver it? Could we meet the necessary standards? I knew we had won, in part, because our model allowed us to radically undercharge relative to our competition, but could we even pull it off?

As I got more and more caught up in this cognitive noise, I noticed a thought float gently through my mind. It said “We haven’t signed yet. We can still walk away”.

I looked more closely at that thought and, as I accepted its message, I felt an enormous release of tension that radiated through my chest. At the same time, my imagination filled, unprompted, with scenes of a cave collapsing in on itself. It was as if some load-bearing structure in my mind had given way.

It turned out that my ‘heartburn’ was actually anxiety, panic even, screaming at me to pay attention to something I was missing. I was just too caught up in my head to notice it.

What I was missing wasn’t that we should walk away from the project; we actually went ahead and delivered strong outputs, although I left the company about six months later as I didn’t see even a medium-term path to not working for just defence clients.

In fact, what I was missing was the fact that I was terrified and that we—that I—could walk away. The latter part relates to an idea I call couldness, where having the freedom to choose from a larger set of options actually changes performance, but I didn’t know about that at the time.

Instead, I was left with a deep impression that my body knew full well that I was terrified and that I wasn’t owning up to it. My mind went straight to heartburn—that’s how disconnected I was, how much I was avoiding admitting that I was scared.

Ever since then, this experience has served as a powerful reminder for me that when the body talks, I should listen. Admittedly, that doesn’t mean I’ve always been good at listening or at wanting to deal with the consequences of what my body was telling me. In fact, my later experience with burnout is evidence of my failure to take my body seriously, but despite not always being perfectly aware or sufficiently courageous, I’ve still been getting better and better at tuning in and honouring the messages my body gives me.

This is not to say that I think my body is necessarily always right. There have been plenty of times when I’ve noticed resistance from my body that comes from out of date patterns, where my body maps “unsafe” even in contexts that are now safe. This is particularly true when it comes to stuff like attachment styles, since I am unfortunately not always in ‘secure attachment’ mode (working on it).

Since I reject the duality of mind and body, there is no contradiction here. It’s all one continuous process whereby different kinds of information can show up in my awareness in different ways, and it’s vital to use both feeling and reason together, always available to both, but never fully trusting either one.

Still, I suspect that most people over-index on the mind and disregard—or even completely fail to notice—the body, like me back then. So if any of this resonates for you, I encourage you to tune into your body a little more. What might it be telling you that you’re not consciously acknowledging?

If you’re looking for more guidance on how to actually do this, the best technique I can point you towards is Gendlin Focusing, which provides a step by step process for listening to and navigating what the body has to say. And if that’s already familiar to you and you want to go deeper, may I point you towards 🐇.

Until next time!

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The beaches are clean and sandy, the food is delicious, and the region is densely forested with quiet, winding little roads perfect for scooters. The people—Balinese and foreigners alike—are largely relaxed, cheerful and friendly.

And the view from my bedroom window looked like this:

But this is not a travel blog about Uluwatu. I’m sharing this only to contrast it with the experience I had in returning to London.

Something stood out in the first few days back, aside from the familiar grey skies and soggy air. A distinct tension emanated from the people around me. It was as if I could sense the fatigue, anxiety, and even despair of my fellow Londoners.

Of course, it’s not that weird that returning to a fast-paced, hyper-developed city like London would be a shock to my system after six months in Bali.

That oppressive sense did seem stronger than I’d ever experienced in my 15 years living here previously, though, which I attribute in part to what feels like an ongoing and saddening decline of the UK. Or perhaps it was always thus. After all, William Blake was complaining about the same thing in 1794.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

– London, William Blake (excerpt, with thanks to @Rosalind)

All that aside, what strikes me is not so much that I felt this heaviness in the air, but that, over the last few weeks, it faded into the background. I’m no longer caught off guard whenever I go outside, no longer bracing myself to share in the burdens of the people I pass on the street.

Although it’s arguably more pleasant not to be so affected by the group stress, I am troubled by the fact that my sense of it is fading so quickly. London hasn’t changed since I got back. I just became more numb to it.

But what other choice is there?

I could choose to remain sensitive to it, to feel the ‘energy’ of this place and its people. Let it all affect me.

I don’t believe it’s possible to numb myself selectively; some of that felt-sense-anaesthetic must spread to the rest of my system, no matter how careful or conscious I am. If I close myself off to part of my experience, I inevitably close myself off to other parts of my experience.

My sensitivity is important to me. It allows me to notice and be affected by all the wonderful things in the world. It helps me stay available to parts of myself that need my care and attention. And, ultimately, it gives me the power to orient, make sense of, and navigate the environment I inhabit.

That’s great then—stay sensitive—but it still leaves me with the problem of being sensitive to all the difficult stuff. In The courage to feel it all I talked about this in the context of tantric practice and shadow work. I’m learning that if I can just be with ‘bad’ feelings for long enough, they usually transform into something positive and leave me with the sense that I’ve discovered or integrated something new.

Perhaps the same is true of that experience of London. If I choose to stay alive to and present with those “mind-forg’d manacles I hear”, perhaps those sensations too will transform into something positive. And if not—if it turns out that London is no longer the place for me—well then I’d rather notice that, too.

Either way, for me, the only way out is through.

And now for something completely different…

I saw on my Twitter timeline today that Maria, who writes , generated "Dubstep Jesus" in Midjourney, and it is every bit as wonderful as you might imagine.

I’m really enjoying the Midjourney aesthetic lately and I’m going to spend some time working on upgrading my prompt engineering skills. I like the idea of being able to create a coherent aesthetic for all the places I write.

Which is to say: brace yourselves.

Before I get into it, a couple of notes:

• Thinking Out Loud is back on Substack. Substack has improved a lot since I started writing here in 2019, plus it feels like all the cool kids are here now. If I’ve made a mistake in harmonising the lists and you’ve already unsubscribed, then sorry about that.

• I aim to publish every Saturday. I used to think I should only publish when I had something interesting to say. I was probably wrong about that. I now want to create structures that orient me towards having lots of interesting things to say. A weekly newsletter is an excellent way to do that.

A densely-patterned fabric of meaningful stories

In February 2022, my partner and I packed our lives into a 35-square-foot storage unit in south London and headed to Mexico with a couple of suitcases and backpacks. After three months in Mexico, we spent time in Hungary, France and Singapore, ending with a full six months in Bali. I will tell stories about what happened.

But returning to London has been a psychedelic experience because everywhere I go reminds me of something. I moved here in late 2006 when I was 18, and until the nomad year, here I stayed. Fifteen years of life contained within a few square miles.

When driving to visit my grandmother at Christmas, just a few days after arriving from Bali, I passed five different places I had lived over the years. Each came with a flood of memory and emotion. As I walk around familiar streets, I feel the tug of the many people I used to be. Their stories, troubles, hopes and dreams call out to me as I navigate Tube stations, sit in cafés and walk these well-trodden streets. This experience is why I wanted to leave in the first place; to see who I would be without the influence of these narrative gravity wells.

And it worked. Riding a scooter around the back roads of Uluwatu was so far removed from my previous life that thoughts and feelings unencumbered by my past selves were free to show up. Couple that with the culture of personal transformation modalities that are abundant in Bali, and that period, in particular, ended up being one of the most powerful periods of my life.

Despite all this, I knew that unbounded long-term travel wouldn’t suit me. I never set out with the intention of not coming home, a sentiment I was surprised to see echoed so soon after returning in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, which I’m currently reading. Describing Shevek, the protagonist:

He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down the same river twice, nor can you go home again.

In coming home, I realise, more clearly than before, that I’m choosing to embed myself back within the fabric I had worn in the previous fifteen years, choosing to weave new stories while acknowledging and bowing my head and spirit to the old.

As I settle into a new property in London for what is, I think, the fourteenth time, I wonder if that’s all ‘home’ really is: a sufficiently densely-patterned fabric of meaningful stories told across time and overlaid on a single place.

This time, the year away from these stories provides a new perspective, a break in the pattern—perhaps even the crack where the light gets in. Maybe this fresh perspective in the familiar home offers the firm foundation for “the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible,” which, honestly, is a pretty exciting proposition.

Let’s see, but it feels like it’s going to be a good year.

Some things I made

Here are some things I’ve published since the last issue of Thinking Out Loud.

1 // The courage to feel it all, a short article on my experience with Tantra.

2 // Want to Improve Your Public Speaking? Develop Your Awareness Skills, my latest essay in Every (paywall)

3 // Radio interview on Alexander Technique on “Find The Others”, hosted by Anthony Alvarado on X-RAY FM — Portland, OR (Spotify link)

Hey everyone,

It’s getting more and more humid here in Bali—rainy season approaches. I’m looking forward to another three months here before heading back to the UK for Christmas 🎄.

In this issue I write about an experience I suspect is quite common, that of running away from myself and ‘feelings I can’t be with’ and thereby contributing to my own suffering. A pattern I am slowly unpicking.

I hope you enjoy!

When feeling tired gets suspicious

Despite having developed some great habits around exercise, diet and circadian timing, I’ve been feeling generally tired and ambiguously weird a lot lately. I have loads of energy for physical exercise, which I’ve been doing every day for months now, but as soon as I turn my attention to particular kinds of cognitive work, planning or introspection, I suddenly want to nap or feel overcome with generalised malaise.

Curious, no? I am suspicious. What’s going on here?

I would guess that I have a lingering background shutdown defence mechanism in response to certain kinds of stressor. Put another way, there is some part of me that doesn’t feel safe when I engage with aspects of my world and, rather than take action to create the safety it needs, it makes my whole system go quiet.

This ‘works’, in that it successfully pushes away the feelings I struggle to be with, but at the same time it’s a terrible strategy for actually solving anything.

The shutdown state itself doesn’t even feel good. I’m still dimly aware of the things I haven’t dealt with, but it becomes easier to rationalise not taking action right now. And since the underlying problems don’t get addressed, life can quickly turn into a Groundhog Day of “huh I’m tired isn’t that strange well guess I’ll do the thing I’ve been putting off tomorrow instead”.

It’s a genius tactic, really. The main argument becomes “this oddly tired state of mind really isn’t great for the thing, and I don’t want the thing to be bad, so I’ll try the thing when I feel better”, which to some extent is sensible. The problem is that the right state of mind never comes, or if it does then it’s quickly overridden by shutdown (or distraction).

I also don’t think this is just a ‘me’ thing. I think that something like this is becoming more and more common…

Fugitives from ourselves

I’m reading Self-renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society, which Sam Sager has been making noise about on Twitter. It was published in 1963 by John Gardner, and I was struck by this passage in particular:

Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

By the way, my partner has written some amazing commentary on the book if you want to read that.

What stands out to me is that Gardner is describing a strategy that achieves the same outcome as my weird tiredness: to be a fugitive from myself.

While reflecting on this I chanced upon Reading Ourselves To Death, a short essay about how reading actually distances us from the vivid reality of world around us. It’s worth reading on its own merits, but the author quotes others who capture the point pithily:

A. G. Sertillanges wrote in The Intellectual Life: “The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production…. Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.”

and

Peter Thorpe argued in Why Literature Is Bad for You that the negative effects of reading outweigh the positive: “If we become too involved in the beautiful imitation, we can begin to lose touch with the real thing.

I’m particularly fond of ‘inordinate reading’ to highlight that, even with reading, the dose makes the poison. There are kinds of reading that bring us closer to the bright and spacious interface with the real world, and kinds that pull us away into distraction, however virtuous that distraction may seem.

Just being with what is

I’m reminded of one of Alan Watts’ lectures where he talks about exactly this. Here’s one of those YouTube clips with music over it, but the specific lines are:

Once you’ve learned to think you can’t stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence. When you’re alone, nobody’s saying anything, there’s nothing to do… just this worrying, this lack of distraction…

“I’m left alone with myself and I wanna get away from myself. I always want to get away from myself. That’s why I go to the movies, that’s why I read mystery stories, that’s why I go after the girls or anything or get drunk or whatever. I don’t want to be with myself. I feel queer.”

And there it is. When the flashing lights and white noise that preoccupy the mind drift away, what remains? And what to do about it?

What remains is a kind of suffering. At least, that’s almost right. What remains is a felt experience that, if I call it bad and try to run away from it, becomes exactly the suffering I want to avoid. It’s the suffering I experience while I’m feeling inexplicably tired or mindlessly scrolling Twitter.

In fact I appreciate the parts of myself that would rather I not suffer, the parts that send me to scroll Twitter, the parts that get me to read as distraction, and the parts that make me feel weird and tired. They have good intentions, but they’re missing something crucial.

Because here's the rub: the kind of suffering I run from can never go away until I accept that I—and everything I know and love—will. A large part of that suffering stems from my own unwillingness to turn around, look at that uncomfortable feeling and say “Yes, yes I know. This will all end. Everything is always ending.”

I cling to my own thoughts about the world in a desperate attempt to forget this challenge to my own existence, as if I could avert my own death if only I scrolled with enough fervour.

And yet, despite all that, existence itself is gorgeous. As I look out at a forest of indescribable colours, shapes, textures, movements and sounds, I remember that the only way I can truly be here is to stop running. When I cease to be a fugitive from myself, I cease to be a fugitive from the world—that from which I came, that to which I will return and that which I am.

Really being with the experience of being in the world—without distraction, with all the emotions, and however much the stories of what I think I am and what I fear may protest—is the only way I will ever truly feel at home.

This is the birthright I deny myself every time I decline to be with a feeling that demands to be felt. This is the birthright I remember every time I choose to pause and feel it.

Things to help you be with what is

The Arena by Rob Hardy

My friend Rob is running another round of The Arena, which is:

a one-week online experience—not a course—in which you get together with a group of creative peers, and everybody focuses on something that makes them come alive. It’s fun, it’s communal, and it brings serendipity and joy back to the creative process. And despite the fun exterior, it’s also meaningful work.

If you have a concern that this would be some kind of crush-it, hustle, publish every day thing… don’t worry, it’s not that.

But The Arena isn’t meant to be brutal or scary or demoralizing. It’s not about going to war with yourself. Quite the opposite. We do this work in a safe, private container, away from the prying eyes of the public. We do it as a community of supportive, encouraging peers. And most importantly, we prioritize aliveness and joy throughout the week. We make the choice to enjoy our work and trust ourselves.

It’s only $50, I’ve heard lots of good things, and I know that Rob is really committed to making it great, so I’d encourage you to check it out.

Supercharge Your Productivity by Khe He

If you really want to go deep into the existential questions that are often the ones that create that sense of wanting-to-be-a-fugitive-from-yourself, you might like to join the next cohort of Supercharge Your Productivity by another friend, Khe He.

I took the course a couple of years ago and it did a great job of sending me straight to those “what do I really want? questions and I still use many of the core concepts regularly.

According to Khe, You’ll learn how to:

• Get more done (by working smarter)

• Think bigger (versus making smaller things better)

• Stop putting things off until some imaginary future date

• Invest in improving your mind, career and relationships

Those aren’t my words, but I agree. Enrolment closes on October 3rd and this is the last cohort of 2022.

If you’re interested, you can learn more here. (This is an affiliate link, so you’d be supporting me if you do purchase the course after clicking it.)

Hello everyone! It’s another beautiful day in Bali and I hope you’re all well, wherever you are.

Since my last email I’ve been enjoying some of the wellness and personal transformation oriented activities that Bali has to offer, like:

weekly 1:1 facilitated breath re-patterning sessions with a trained practitioner
This form of breath work — a combination of Conscious Connected Breathing with hands-on bodywork — is one of the most fascinating things I’ve discovered in years. In just a few minutes of the breathing pattern, I enter a space that feels psychedelic in nature, a space that welcomes various things to emerge into conscious awareness so I can look at them more closely.

While it seems that this practice is largely limited to Bali for the time being — unless you live in Boulder, CO, in which case talk to Jonny Miller — I can see this fast becoming a global practice as an alternative to psychedelic therapy. I’m fighting the urge to ask about practitioner training. I suspect the combination of this with Alexander Technique would be one hell of a thing.

a two day intensive weekend exploring Hindu tantra
This workshop  pushed right up against the edge of my comfort zone, but I’m really glad I went and threw myself into it. It focussed in particular on an exploration of the healthy and shadow traits of the masculine and feminine, which is not a frame I’ve had much exposure to in the past, but I found it to be a helpful lens on a lot of stuff that’s been going on in me recently.

At the moment I’m fascinated by a concept I’m calling ‘aliveness’, which involves something like being fully able to experience the contents of any given moments without becoming fixated on them (see my full conversation with Jake below for more on this). Tantra feels like a door to this world, one where I can fully allow and express, let’s say anger, sadness or joy, without getting caught up in them. There’s a lot here to explore.

a five day silent retreat in the centre of Bali nestled among the rice fields
This was not religiously affiliated with an intensive programme of meditation. Instead it was a beautiful space that gave me an opportunity to lock my phone in a box, reset my circadian rhythm to natural day-night patterns, and remember what it feels like to not feel like I should be doing something.

I’m really excited to explore both the breath work and tantra in much more depth. I’ll report back on my findings!

Some news: I’ve got a column in Every!

But what is Every, I hear you ask? Well, let me answer that with some handy copy pasted blurb.

Every is daily newsletter dedicated to helping you better understand your business and yourself. Every day our 50,000+ subscribers get one longform essay that analyzes and explains new ideas in productivity, business strategy, Web3, and the creator economy. It’s written by a collective of thoughtful and experienced operators in tech dedicated to helping you unlock faster progress toward your goals, and live a better life.

I’m really thrilled to be joining Every’s team of writers alongside others I have long looked up to. I’m excited for Dan and Nathan’s vision for Every and consider it a real honour to be able to go on the journey with them.

The column will be called Expanding Awareness and, while it’s going to be influenced by my perspectives from Alexander Technique, will go beyond just that. Here’s the blurb for the column:

In this monthly column Michael will explore the human experience from a subjective, inside perspective, helping you develop conscious control over your awareness to unlock a greater sense of agency, ease and aliveness. From here the counterintuitive path of higher performance from less effort can be found.

The first essay in Expanding Awareness is Achieve your goals with less grinding, which explores some of the basic principles of Perceptual Control Theory and how they apply to working towards goals with less self-interference.

Every is a paid subscription, so if you’d like to get access to this article, all of Every’s other publications and the full archive of 400+ essays, you can use the discount code EA30 before next Monday to get 30% off your first year’s subscription.

And, if you do, please select “Expanding Awareness” as the primary column you joined to read as I get 50% of the revenue from these subscriptions, so if you’d like to support me, this is a great way to do it 🙏.

Some things I have made

I’ve been spending more time on YouTube lately over Twitter. YouTube feels less reactive, more serene and helps me to go deeper into thinking things through — at least for now.

• YouTube: Starting to explore non-fixation, in which I talk about one of the things that the thing I teach, Alexander Technique, might really be about.

• YouTube: It’s safe to be who I am now, in which I talk about how I noticed myself avoiding using complex ‘smart sounding’ words in a recent conversation, and why I’d like to stop doing that.

• YouTube: Conversation with Jake Orthwein - non-fixation, Alexander Technique, Dzogchen and the phenomenology of awareness, in which I chat for TWO HOURS with Jake about all of these things. It was a wonderful conversation and I’m excited to do more of these recorded chats on YouTube.

• YouTube: Workshopping the ‘NICE’ framework for Alexander Technique, in which I explore whether I can make one of those fancy four letter frameworks for my thing that other people who teach things usually seem to have (looking at you, PARA, CODE, VIEW, etc).

Some things others have made

• This Model Explains Media Manipulation - Frame Problems (aka the aforementioned Jake Orthwein). While Jake continues to work hard on the eagerly anticipated Part 3 to his exceptional “How Politics Became Pro Wrestling” series, he’s released this self-contained chapter that works as a preview. Highly recommended.

That's all for now — until next time!

Hey everyone,

Greetings from Bali 🇮🇩, where I’ve been for a little over two weeks. So far this is one of the most seemingly magical places I’ve ever visited, a place where, for some reason I’ve yet to figure out, it feels easier to connect with my inner world and make choices that will serve me well in the long term.

Many of you are new since my last email, so I’ll remind you that I am that Alexander Technique teacher now digital nomad guy who sometimes writes things that other people like. If you don’t want to stay, no pressure! There’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email.

In this issue of Thinking Out Loud I talk about the following things:

• The online to ‘real life’ friendship pipeline

• I want to raise my ambitions

The online to ‘real life’ friendship pipeline

I’ve been fortunate recently in having had the opportunity to meet up with some friends who I had only interacted with online.

In London I spent a few days, a month apart, exploring Alexander Technique and loving kindness (metta) with Tasshin, since we both happened to be passing through. On another day I got the chance to meet Nick Cammarata, where we talked about meditation and power laws.

In Singapore I spent an afternoon with Visakan Verasaamy talking about local culture, what it’s like to be very online, and playing long, ambitious games. I sampled Singaporean street food at a ‘hawker centre’ with Dio (his Twitter pseudonym), having already met him in London a few months earlier.

I just spent a nourishing weekend with Jonny Miller here in Bali, where we ran our own ‘mastermind’ session with Edmond and Candace, who we just met, and who are also now friends.

Each time I was surprised by how, actually, all those online interactions did in fact create a real relationship, one that we could pick up in person as though that’s how it had been for years. Sure, there’s a strange transition in mapping ‘this person in front of me’ against ‘the person I know from Zoom’, but that passes in minutes.

I found it difficult to make friends as a child. I had no idea what I was doing, I took things too seriously, and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself appropriately. It has taken me a long time to learn that making friends is a skill like any other that can be learned, and even more that it’s acceptable to see it as such.

At this point, I suspect that most of my deepest ‘in real life’ relationships will be with people I am already talking to online. The lesson I am taking away from this is that it’s all ‘real life’, it’s just that each channel through which we communicate is a difference kind of dance.

I recognise that for a lot of people this whole process can seem a little baffling. I’d love to hear from you if this is you and you have any questions about how to do this. I can write about it!

I want to raise my ambitions

I’ve been reflecting on what I now do for a living and, let’s be honest, it’s pretty weird.

Between 12 to 18 months ago I made a self-paced online course about Alexander Technique, that applied mindfulness practice which, also pretty weirdly, I happen  to be able to teach. To my knowledge no one has ever tried this.

This course has now been purchased by 929 people, generating total revenue of about $185,000. This is, to put it mildly, not what I expected when I made the thing, though of course I’m pretty happy about it.

At the same time it has created an interesting paradox in my day to day life. In the short term, the best thing I can do to make money is talk about Alexander Technique ideas on Twitter and mention the course from time to time. The informal pipeline of Twitter -> my website -> purchase the course seems to work pretty well.

But this is not a particularly fulfilling way of being, because this incentive — the sales now woohooo!!! experience — actually pushes me away from doing work that has a long term payoff.

I think I needed the extended period of space that this income stream has given me. It helped me quit my ill-fitting job, it let me set up as a digital nomad to travel the world, and it gave me the freedom to explore various ways to heal after I burned out in 2018.

I feel like I’ll soon leave this phase behind. There’s an increasingly strong urge to lean into ambition and step back onto the stage once again, only this time as a different and, in my humble opinion, much more authentic and powerful version of me.

It’s about time I write some sort of manifesto, but until then, here’s a taste of what I’m thinking.

I continue to believe that the challenges we face as a species — climate change, rising authoritarianism, geopolitical conflict, resource scarcity, low trust in our leaders, and more — are also opportunities for us to grow and solve them in ways that are not possible at the level of collective development that created them.

Despite a ten year career working on the object level issues of climate change and energy, the collective human development story is more interesting to me right now. I was a competent energy industry professional, sure, but by no means was I so good that I wasn’t replaceable or more useful than one of the many people just like me. I suspect my position in this other power law distribution could be stronger.

Given that, I think what I want is to gather people who are also interested in the human development story, create a space where we can explore and practice what we learn. Crucially, I would also want to encourage these people to go off into the world and apply what they learn in their personal and professional lives.

Put another way — and owning for a moment how grandiose this may sound — I want to help people access higher stages of development and to show up in the world to help solve those challenges from their new perspectives. Of course, this also means going on my own development journey, one that I know I am still relatively early on, and one which both excites and terrifies me.

I’ll write more clearly about this soon. In the meantime, if this resonates with you, please do let me know. There are things in the works.

Things I’ve made recently

I wrote an essay for newsletter bundle Every called “You can only respond to what you notice”. If you happen to be a subscriber, you can read it here. Also watch out for more on this 👀

Meanwhile, I made these things:

• Note: I’m afraid you’ll see my many faults

• Note: Needing things to be finished

• YouTube video: Life update: huge change, rut and vision

• Expanding Awareness note: Couldness as a way into aliveness

• Expanding Awareness note: Unscrunch yourself

I also did a Q&A with Khe He — How to leave a traditional consultant career to become a solopreneur with Michael Ashcroft. You can watch it here if you like.

Things you might like

• I’ve been getting more and more into the aforementioned Jonny Miller’s podcast. This episode with Joe Hudson is a good place to start. Jonny’s podcast is an inspiration for me to start my own. The idea of having a space to ask questions of extremely interesting people and share them with others is pretty compelling.

• The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a pretty out-there book, but my word is it doing a number on me right now. If you’re interested in human development models and are open to a bit of woo, this is a fascinating and terrifying book.

ONE MORE THING

Just before I finished this, someone in our compound here in Bali said “the monkeys are out”.

Then I discovered that the monkeys utterly messed up my (unfortunately outside) kitchen. No shame whatsoever.

Until next time! Be well.

Michael

This one was part of my ConvertKit period, uploaded back into Substack on 4 February 2023.

Hey everyone!

I’m here in sunny Oaxaca, Mexico, where I’ll be for another two weeks.

It’s been quite the change of pace from London and so far the focus has been on Spanish lessons, eating tacos and letting it sink in that this isn’t just a long holiday.

The question on my mind is… now what? And I’m excited to find out.

Not wanting to be that super annoying online marketer person

The part of the Internet I occupy contains a few kinds of people. Many of them are just humans hanging out and having fun, but a lot of them are also people whose livelihoods depend on selling their stuff to others, including their ‘audience’.

A while ago I was firmly in the first group, hanging out and chatting about stuff I like. For more than a year now, though, I’ve made my living selling things to people via the Internet.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for any amount of time, you’ll know that online business is not my background. In many ways this has been a good thing, as it’s helped me avoid some of the bad practices and mindsets that exist in Online Marketer World, but in other ways it’s holding me back.

The last two weeks have been an interesting example of some of the dynamics at play here. Since I’ve been in Oaxaca, I’ve been on Twitter less, and have generally felt less inclined to say “hey, I have this course you can buy if you want!” The effect was that sales dropped basically to zero for the last two weeks, until… I started talking about it again. At which point, 10 people bought the course in a single day.

This basically shows you how dependent my livelihood is on people buying my course, largely via Twitter. I’m very fortunate to be in this position, of course. But I do need to sell things if this enterprise is to remain viable.

It feels like I am caught between those two worlds, neither able to ‘just hang out’, nor willing to go full “Money Twitter”.

And, as I sit with this, it’s clear that neither of these should be my goal. If the only options I give myself are “lean into a way of being I don’t like” or “do nothing”, it should come as no surprise that I’m not moving.

The question I should be asking myself instead is: “what would it look like to continue down this path while remaining true to myself?” Or, put another way, rather than trying to emulate other people who are 10x further down the road, what would ‘10x me’ look like?

For now, it seems to involve creating a ‘sales’ tweet that is pinned to my profile and talking more about things related to the thing I am selling.

What comes next I think will be something like sincere play. I continue to tread on new ground, for me, and it’s clear that the thing I don’t want to do is copy others. I want to create my own paths. not follow those laid down already!

Reframing why I work

On a related note, I’ve noticed that I have some interesting anchors around money.

For full transparency, I’ve earned around £4000 per month after tax in corporate land since I was 27 (I’m now 34). Aside from a several-month dip in 2021 as my new business scaled up, I am now back at £4000 a month after tax.

The main difference now is that I work much less and more flexibly, which is nice. But despite the good salary from 28-33 ish, my background is not a wealthy one, and I don’t have much in savings. Getting the money together to buy a house seems like a pipe dream, for example.

So, now that I have a business I can grow and time to grow it, surely I should press on past that £4000 and save more and more, right?

In theory, sure, but that’s not what’s actually happening.

Instead, it seems as though I’ve got myself back to my familiar financial homeostasis and am now working less. This is a good position to be in and I’m grateful for my good fortune, but what interests me is that, clearly, money itself is not what motivates me to work, at least beyond a certain point that feels familiar.

I’ve never been someone to pursue money for its own sake. The only reason my income anchor is where it is is because I moved up the corporate hierarchy in particular kinds of jobs. But beyond that, I don’t really understand the drive to make as much money as possible, which many people seem to have.

All this opens up a question… if more money isn’t intrinsically motivating, what are my new motivations to keep going? I know I have greater ambitions, but what are these ambitions aiming towards?

Two ideas come immediately to mind.

The first is the desire to help more people through my work. There are now more than 700 students in Fundamentals of Alexander Technique, and I’ve been getting more and more comments suggesting that the ideas I’m teaching are helping people. That is extremely motivating. The ambition then becomes “how do I reach the next 10,000 people?”

The second lies in the recognition that having resources means I can do useful things with those resources. This sounds obvious, of course, but it’s one thing to know this in the abstract and another to have a clear idea of what I would do if I had those resources. For example, I could give generously to causes that matter to me, I could create grants and competitions for things I’d like to see in the world, or I could hire people in my communities who need a little help setting up on their own.

Reframing my work in these terms is MUCH more motivating than thinking about the financial reward. In fact, I am reminded of the quote from Viktor Frankl on happiness, from Man’s Search For Meaning:

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

It seems to me that you could substitute ‘happiness’ or ‘success’ with ‘money’ and it would still be just as true.

So as 2022 rolls on, I am going to focus on discovering who “10x me” looks like and exploring how that version of me can be of service to more and more people.

It’s been a while.

The last time I wrote to you was on 2 November last year, when I told you I was embarking on a year of nomad travel.

Well, as I write this, I’m on the plane to Mexico City, currently over Lake Superior from the looks of things.

What I’m doing hasn’t really sunk in yet, if I’m honest. Sure, the last week involved a frenzy of packing, saying goodbye to friends and family and savouring our final moments in London for who knows how long. But it’s not like I’m actually going to be living in Mexico for the next three months, right?

Actually, yes, it’s real. It’s happening. Adventures await!

Why haven’t you been writing, Michael?

Seasonal depression, mainly.

It happens every year, and even though I’ve become familiar with it and know it’s coming, I’m still caught off guard by how the structures of my life collapse between December and February. Turns out that sunlight is pretty important.

So it was that, and also that I managed to score a wonderful own goal that blocked me for a while. In the last newsletter I announced a pre-sale of a course course Playful Creativity, which I want to make "because I want to help people unlock the natural, sincere and earnest capacity for play that I believe is our birthright."

And then — surprise! — I suddenly didn’t feel able to make the course, playfully or otherwise. Turns out that feeling like a fraud doesn't make you want to do the thing!

In fact, given this experience of inner conflict and shame around this, I’m actually confident I can do a much better job that I would have had I made it when I said I would. If you’re interested, you can read how I’m getting myself out of this hole in this article for the case study I’m doing with Rob Hardy.

All this to say that there have been some blocks, and those blocks are going away. And some, permanently, I think! Big claim, I know, but I think that’s just what Deep Okayness feels like now.

I’m gonna be writing a lot this year.

Although, wait, hold up — Deep Okayness?

I, too, appear to have attained Deep Okayness

I’m now over somewhere called “Dubuque”, which I choose to believe rhymes with Albuquerque.

There’s something pretty magical happening on the Internet. Normal people are smashing together various psychotechnologies and radically changing their experience of themselves and the world by cultivating a way of being that feels Deeply Okay.

I didn’t coin the term Deep Okayness, that was my friend Sasha. If you haven’t encountered his post — “How I Attained Persistent Self-Love, or, I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone” — it’s well worth your time and attention.

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe expresses itself, so why would I hate that? It’s the sense that, while I might fuck up, my basic worth is beyond question—I have no essential damage, I am not polluted, I am fine. — Sasha

This is not the place where I talk about how I did it, just to note that I did.

There is a distinct before and after to my experience. Where before there was a core of ‘bad’ and some level of self-aversion that manifested mainly through a nebulous sense of shame… now there is just… largely not that.

It’s not completely gone — I don’t think my experience is yet as strong as Sasha’s, but, like, that mind-turning-on-itself-and-creating-bad-feels thing is 80-90% missing. And life feels radically different, as though I was playing on the heroic difficulty setting before and just discovered that easier modes are available.

Okay, I’ll give you a sneak preview of how. Sasha says it himself: “find ways to bring more of yourself into loving awareness.” And, in particular, those parts that you couldn’t possibly believe are worthy of any love at all, let alone unconditional love.

More on this to come, obviously.

What if constraints are good, actually?

Now that I seem to have a stable sense of Deep Okayness, much of the world looks different. Things that seemed scary and bad before now seem inviting and good,

One of those things is ‘constraints’.

It feels like there’s a particularly Millennial mindset around wanting to have it all and keep options open. Each time we close a potential life path, a voice inside lets out an anguished scream, as if raging against an unseen oppressor.

I have very much been this person. The idea of staying in one job, in one place, in one relationship or, god forbid, having kids, has always come with a pang of resistance. It’s not that I was obviously avoiding these things or living as an unattached vagrant. I found fulfilment in those frames, I just didn’t  picture any of them as being final, although neither did I picture them as being not final either. Basically, my future was left open as a kind of foggy superposition of nothing and everything.

This trait had been slowly weakening in the last few years, but since Deep Okayness it feels like the transformation is most of the way there. Where before I may have known, intellectually at least, that long term commitments are probably good, now it feels intuitively right that making irreversible, option-limiting decisions is a vital part of a life well lived.

As I wrote in one of my earliest newsletters, art is made of constraints. Your painting is literally made of acrylic and canvas, and therefore isn’t made of charcoal and paper. You can’t make art without first deciding which media to use — and which not to use. Failing to make that decision results in potential, but no art.

I thought I was being clever at the time in generalising this idea out to my writing, which was made of my limited time available for writing, the lesson being that I should enjoy the kind of writing I could do given that context.

Now, though, it feels like I missed the obvious, grander insight staring me in the face: life itself is made of constraints. Instead of being impediments that hinder our experience of the world, constraints are the scaffolding that allow us to climb to new heights.

I don’t know exactly why the experience of Deep Okayness has brought this to life for me.

Perhaps I truly believe I have the capacity to navigate whatever challenges leaning into these constraints will throw at me. Perhaps I trust that I will no longer turn on myself as soon as things don’t go as hoped. Perhaps I know deeply that I am worthy of the good things that will come by wholeheartedly choosing my constraints.

Who knows. But, honestly, this feels like a much nicer way to be.

How many weeks do you have?

Quickly — without calculating — how many weeks long would you say your life is?

I’ll pause for effect.

…

…

It’s about 4000, assuming you live to 77.

How does that feel?

That question is the premise of Oliver Burkeman’s book 4000 Weeks, which I think played a meaningful role in helping me access Deep Okayness.

It’s a short book, ostensibly about ‘time management’, but it’s core message is not that you can become better at managing your time, but that, ultimately, you do not have the time to do all the things you want to.

Going back to my old Millennial fear of cutting off options, Oliver suggests that to _decide_ — a word that has Latin roots meaning ‘to cut off’ — implies the crystallisation of a more narrow set of possible futures that challenges our assumption that we will live forever. That, of course, is scary, so we avoid it.

But we will not live forever. I myself have about 2230 weeks left, I hope.

And with that, from somewhere near Tulsa, I hope you have a great week ahead.

Michael

(In actual fact I finished and sent this at around 05:30 local time, because jet lag, that wonderful period where your body says: "yes, we are indeed tired, and yes, there is  indeed time to sleep, but lol, nope,")

Hello everyone!

I’ve been taking a little break from creating recently, but am excited to get some plates spinning again. This newsletter is a little life update as I start writing and making things again in earnest.

I’m embarking on a nomadic year

The big news I want to share is that, from February 2022, my partner and I will be embarking on a year of nomadic world travel, starting in Mexico for three months and then likely moving on to Austin, TX. The aim is to travel slowly, spending at least a month in each place.

This has long been a dream of mine and I’m enormously grateful that life has conspired to make it possible. Of course I plan to continue writing and making things! Hopefully I’ll figure out a mobile YouTube setup that isn’t an enormous pain to carry around.

I’ll share our location as we travel - I hope to be able to meet many new friends around the world.

Fifty editions of Thinking Out Loud

This is edition 50 of Thinking Out Loud, which has an air of a milestone about it. It’s also just over two years since I started writing online.

When I started this newsletter I had just started a new job at KPMG in the hopes it would help me recover from burnout at my previous job. I don’t entirely know what I was thinking, but I guess the absence of clear thinking was the thing I have been trying to fix.

Most of you know my story, so I won’t labour it again here, but I do want to say to anyone embarking on a similar path: what you want is possible. It may not be easy, but, for me anyway, it’s been well worth the struggles.

I’m coming to realise that part of what I want to do with my life is help others who want to pursue similar journeys. I felt various degrees of stuck for ten years, knowing that where I was wasn’t where I really wanted to be, but I never knew how to change my path.

If this resonates with you then please feel free to reply to this email. I’m really curious to hear your stories and, if I can help in any way, I’d like to.

Case study with Rob Hardy

I’ve been working with Rob for several months now in various ways. I was and continue to be his coach, while he has helped me grapple with some of the big questions surrounding what I want my fledgling business to look like.

Apparently what I’m doing with my business is unusual, to the extent that Rob, who is steeped in the practices of conventional online business, thinks it’s worth digging into and sharing. I should also stress that Rob himself is following an unconventional path, and if my ways of doing things appeal to you, then Rob’s work will also.

To this end I’m really excited to share that Rob and I are working on a case study following my own journey, which you can read about here at The Ashcroft Files (not named by me!).

I hope you enjoy.

Announcing Playful Creativity

I’m also excited to share that I’m working on a new email-based course called Playful Creativity. This is based on a framework I’ve been using with coaching clients to help them ‘get out of their own way’ with regards to creativity.

Here’s the context. For a long time I believed I just wasn’t a creative person. I sucked at art when I was at school and from there some kind of block emerged. Over the last few years I have slowly unwound this false belief. It’s not that I’ve become creative though; I’m figuring out how to get out of the way of my innate creativity.

I’m making Playful Creativity because I want to help people unlock the natural, sincere and earnest capacity for play that I believe is our birthright. That thing we had as children, but that so often has become hidden behind layers of effort, fear and internal struggle.

I believe good things will emerge if more people are able to bring a playful spirit to their own creative process, regardless of medium. Rather than seeing play as a frivolity to squeeze in occasionally around work, play is the fundamental mechanism through which we feel most alive and can access our capacities to create world-shaping things.

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts

My fundamental assumption here is that people are already naturally creative, it’s just that various things interfere with it. The course, then, will explore the nature of this interference and provides various tools to resolve it.

The idea of this course existing makes me happy, and that’s why I want to make it. I want to see more playfully creative people in the world and, selfishly, I’d love to be surrounded by people who have tapped into that way of being.

Stay tuned! I’ll offer a pre-launch discount for Thinking Out Loud subscribers.

Things I have made

Notes:

• Crabs helping each other out of the bucket

• Why I created a limited company instead of remaining a sole trader

More to come!

Things others have made

I want to give a shout out to the aforementioned Rob Hardy for creating his first YouTube video. This is a huge and vulnerable step and I applaud him for it. Go watch and subscribe!

And that’s all for this one. See you next time!

Michael