The Year of the Fire Horse promised to bring a “rare, fast-paced period of intense energy, bold action, and rapid transformation. Occurring only once every 60 years, this powerful combination of the independent, freedom-loving Horse and the dynamic, passionate Fire element favors innovation, breakthroughs, and decisive movement over hesitation.”

In the wake of rapid transformation, I’ve been trying to guess what big societal shifts may emerge from this era.

The emergence of AI, the acceleration of the climate crisis and global heating, growing income inequality (including relatively stagnant wages not keeping up with inflation) and fraying social cohesion are the societal compost from which strange new things will emerge.

It’s not all bad. Times of rapid transformation and instability can usher in some incredible and long overdue shifts. In recent history, the Gold Rush in Australia resulted in the Eureka Stockade, which gave us the DNA of the powerful union and workers rights movements, World War Two ushered in the modern welfare state, the chaos of the Vietnam War in the west resulted in social change including civil rights movement and women’s liberation, and in Australia the recession in the 1990s lead to huge political and economic changes under the Hawke/Keating government that rewrote the rules on monetary policy, national confidence and our engagement with Asia.

And now?

I think the current climate of global instability is going to result in a big uptake and interest in philosophical and spiritual life. Think meditation retreats, engagement with ancient philosophies and mystical traditions, a societal-wide reengagement with theology and renewed energy around our perennial search for meaning.

We are well and truly leaving behind the New Atheist movement championed by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.

A product of the early 2000s, the New Atheists were also responding to massive social upheaval - in this case, September 11 and religious extremism.

Reading Dawkin’s God Delusion when it came out, was revolutionary, such was its persuasive argument for the non-existence of God. I thought at the time, the matter was settled. Just like we were in a post-history era, we had entered a post-God era.

But times have changed again and all around me I see a hunger for transcendence and meaning. There is a reaching - collective and unmistakable, for something the current order has consistently failed to provide.

There are many reasons for this renewed interest in faith and spirituality but a one that springs to mind is the collective realisation that work and consumption do not provide genuine fulfillment. We are disposable in our jobs (AI is coming for them), the things we buy are obsolete or unfashionable or fall apart in shorter and shorter time frames (the enshittification of everything, basically) and scrolling and hours of screen time push us away from the necessary interiority and introspection that we need in order to feed and water our inner lives.

I don’t necessarily think church attendance will go up but I do think people will seek out experiences that provide access to this interiority and transcendence, away from the subjective experience of being an individual.

In short we want to escape ourselves, but not through distraction, instead through experiences that are expansive enough for us to see our true place in the universe. We want and need to be reminded, over and over again - that we are specks of sand. And we are all connected.

Right now, at this point in history we crave on some deep level, to differentiate ourselves from the machines that are likely to replace us at so many crucial access points (romantically and intimately, in our work, creatively, and in our critical thinking).

This differentiation occurs at the level of transcendence. AI can’t be programmed to transcend, or have an out of the blue, peak experience - at least not yet.

Humans carry the spark of the divine in them - and throughout history have chased and longed for transcendence, whether that be through rituals, plant medicine, ceremonies, mediation, prayer, fasting, visions, and dreams.

In ancient cultures, this transcendence was so integral, that rituals were embedded to ensure transcendent experiences occur at important life stages - such as puberty, and that transcendence occurred at a collective level.

(And then there is the Dreaming, a complete, sophisticated, living cosmology belonging to the oldest living culture on earth - Indigenous Australians).

In the Year of the Fire Horse, many of us now find ourselves marooned, adrift in a world of screens, where there is no natural end point to the scroll.

If we’re not careful we could be stuck here forever. It takes a lot of effort to get out - and if you don’t have a church or a culture or rituals to pull you back into the collective, you could live the rest of your life just bobbing along on the surface, all by yourself.

There’ll be a lot of charlatans in this new era, trying to sell the Old New Atheists some spiritual snake oil to slake their existential thirst. But there’ll also be some good people who emerge who help fill this gap, and some interesting and new ways of filling it.

Last night, as part of Now or Never festival in Melbourne, I attended an event with several hundred people at the Royal Exhibition Buildings. It was two hours of breathwork and then music from Yongul musicians Daniel Wilfred and David Wilfred - and it had sold out quickly.

People lay on the ground, covered in blankets - breathing together under the majestic dome. It was, in its own way - very 2026 way, a spiritual experience.

2001

In my mid 20’s, I already felt washed up. Two law firms behind me, unable to settle, I saw a legal recruiter, hoping to get placed in my third firm.

But there would be no third firm. Instead they offered me a job with them, as a legal recruiter, after having looked at my Myer Briggs personality test results. My results were so far away from the zone most lawyers occupy (attention to detail, perfectionist etc), that I knew the dream of being a lawyer was over. My personality had spoken.

Within a week, I had packed up my house and was moving from Queenscliff in rural Victoria to Sydney to work as a legal recruiter.

I got a 6 week sublet at an apartment in Paddington with a stranger and thought I’d give it 6 weeks before I committed to the city.

I moved at the end of summer, when the air was warm and fragrant, and in the late afternoons would crackle with electricity and sudden, almost violent storms. The footpaths of Paddington were covered in skin-soft frangipani blossoms, like a wedding procession had just passed through, and the trees were full of strange, loud, colourful birds that we didn’t have down south.

Sydney - particularly in 2001, was easy to fall in love with and I adored it at first sight.

I presumed the sublet would be some featureless box, but it was gorgeous - art deco with dark wood, and charming, strange-shaped rooms, looking out onto an enormous gum tree.

My new housemate was a formal young man in his early 20s. Dozing off on my first evening, he came home from work, into my room and loomed above me in a dark suit, leaning on the handle of an expensive looking umbrella, before sticking out a hand and introducing himself. Patrick.

We drank heavily at the Paddington Inn, spent all our money on imported Iranian seedless grapes at the posh grocer and made plans to one day make this six week housemate arrangement more permanent.

Everything in the city seemed like a dream, including him.

I had got lucky. Circles of friends expanded to include me. It didn’t matter that I had a job in recruiting that was hard to explain and boring, or that I went along to parties with only the thinnest connection to anyone. Along with the pleasant climate, an entire experience of ease was beginning to characterise my time in Sydney. The Olympics had been the year before and everything, and everyone was still shining in the refracted glow of success.

The only experiences of disorientation I felt was navigating the city (this was before phones). I was used to Melbourne, where the Hoddle grid made navigation a matter of logic. But in Sydney, it was hard to get my bearings, particularly if you tried to use the water as a marker. The harbour reared, twisted and turned in unpredictable ways. You’d think you’d turned away from it, and around the corner, there it was again, a sparkling, Hydra-headed vistas that took your breath away. Several times a day I just stopped and stared. It was so beautiful and unpredictable.

I stayed in Sydney, moving to East Redfern. Summer gave way to the mildest of winters. The ease - the luck - continued. I sat an exam and did a range of interviews, and landed a highly sought-after position at Sydney Morning Herald as a trainee journalist. I met people there that would become forever friends. I found a vocation that would, in one form or another - stay with me for the rest of my life. And over the years in Sydney I also got lucky with houses (I even moved in with Patrick again, to a place in Potts Point). The homes were mostly by the water, in the east - Bondi, Rose Bay, Tamarama. And they were mostly cheap. I had years of living precariously, as a freelancer, or focused on doing books, and somehow the city took care of me.

This luck - the ease - continued for such a long stretch that I thought it wouldn’t end, like riding a smooth, perfect wave that would never hit the shore.

Then this year, I realised with a jolt that it had been 25 years since that first night in Paddington. It wasn’t totally unbroken. I did stints in Canberra, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Castlemaine and New York. But I always came back. If things didn’t work out in the other places, or I was spat out, Sydney was a bath that was always warm, that always beckoning me to sink back in.

But in June of this year, when I booked a removalist, and packed up the truck heading back down the Hume, the break felt different. The perfect wave had finally hit the shore, the bathwater had gone cold, the dream run had ended. I could feel it. It was over.

Didion in her goodbye letter to New York, (Goodbye to All That) wrote, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

But I could see the end of my time in Sydney. It arrived abruptly at dinner one night three months ago, at a friend’s house in Bronte. It was Holy Thursday night, the eve of a long weekend, and an email arrived in the middle of dinner. (The lesson here is to put your phone away during dinner). It was an official email on government letterhead and forwarded by my real estate agent. Three months notice to vacate. I was being turfed. The owners wanted to move back in. (Really?) I’d been on a good deal for a long long time, riding some perfect Sydney wave, but now it - a whole era - was ending.

Staying in Sydney really was a simple matter of economics. And the maths didn’t math anymore. In 2026, could you be a freelance writer, living on one income, renting in a walkable Sydney neighbourhood? No, you couldn’t.

After I got my notice, I looked around for new places, but they were $300, $400, a week more expensive than what I was paying now in rent. People told me the deal I’d had for the last five years was ridic, unreal, still stuck in Covid era pricing. I had not been in sync with the market, and now I was.

Wake up! Wake up! The dream is over.

**

2021

Sydney entered its second lockdown on June 25 2021, a few days after I signed a lease on an apartment in Elizabeth Bay. It had been a nervous time across the country, with a new variant, no vaccine and a rise in cases. NSW had introduced laws about masking in May, and Victoria had gone into another lock down in June.

By the time I inspected the apartment, it had been empty for a while and the owners were prepared to drop the price.

The apartment building was art deco with a charming row of letterboxes, a board with residents names, and an attractive, sparkling foyer. The apartment itself had huge ceilings, thick walls, timber floorboards, an impractical bachelors kitchen with an ancient Kooka gas stove and tiles with images of native Australian animals. The building sat on the water’s edge, and a long window in the lounge room looked directly onto Sydney Harbour.

But the jewel in the crown of this apartment building was the harbour swimming pool.

The real estate agent had mentioned it as an afterthought (“oh, there’s a harbour pool”) but it wound up being the prime attraction.

I never even knew such a thing was possible for buildings to have their own private harbour pools - but apparently there are 78 private pools dotted around Sydney Harbour (compared to only 34 public pools).

It was Olympic-sized, with a wooden deck, private jetty and a changing pavilion with a sign that read Billyard Gardens ( the scene was depicted in a painting by the legendary Jeffrey Smart.)

The swimming pool created a natural enclave between the three apartment buildings that overlooked it in a semi-circle. All of us had a view of the harbour - which also meant having a view of the pool. This exposed the rhythms of my neighbours - the dawn swimmers, the afternoon sunbathers, the men that took their virtual meetings down on the sun loungers on the deck, the dog owners, the people on the boats that paddled in of a morning to go to the supermarket up on Macleay Street and the elegant black seabird that sat most days on the jetty. The pool created a sense of community.

The pool also exposed the rhythms of the tides. The tides either cleaned the pool or dirtied it, depending on the direction the wind was blowing.

You would go down in the morning, unsure what you’d find. Would it be pristine or disgusting? Once I swam into a pile of rubbish that included a $10 note. Other times the pool contained old tennis balls, a thong, chip packets, large hunks of seaweed, coffee cups, Gatorade bottles, a cap.

The pristine days in the water were glorious, diving in at high tide to warm, clear water - swimming around schools of fish, flipping on your back and floating - staring up at the palm trees as they came into view, then returning back up the stairs and inside for a hot shower.

I loved living so close to the water. (I mean who wouldn’t?) On still nights I could smell the salt and hear the water move back and forth, and on weekends, the shouts and music from nearby party boats. The next day small bags containing cocaine residue would wash up in the pool.

Some days friends would come over and we’d sit on a blanket, feet hanging off the harbour wall, drinking wine, and watching golden hour by the water, until it was dark.

Other mornings we got the paddle board out and puttered around the bay. It was as if I was being let in on a Sydney secret, handed the keys to the harbour, and a whole new dimension of living in Sydney opened up.

The first two years, and the final year of my time in Billyard Avenue, I was a freelancer who worked from home (the years in between I worked in politics and moved between Sydney and Canberra, depending on sitting weeks).

Much of this freelance time, it felt like I had won the lottery and retired, seeing out my days in this gorgeous resort, hanging out in the garden and in the pool, wandering down to the marina in Beare Park for coffee. Despite being quite broke in those shoulder years, living article by article, my lifestyle was of the super rich. There were many idle hours - 2pm on sunny days, with a book and ice ratting around my cold brew coffee in a glass tumbler.

But as a renter, I was on borrowed time. And the feeling like I’d snuck in through the palace gates never quite left me. All of it felt too good to be true.

2026

The area (including Potts Point and Kings Cross) had long been the home of writers and artists because of these cheaper smaller apartments. The diversity made it a great and affordable place to live - but in my 5+ years there, that was changing.

The dedensification was occurring, with one bedroom and studios being knocked down to create one very large expensive and luxe residence for only one or two people.

For example - the Chimes, an 80-unit building in Potts Point is currently being replaced by 13-storey tower containing roughly 34 luxury apartments, sparking protests from locals and the City of Sydney over the loss of affordable housing.

There are still lots of writers and artists around the place but fewer younger ones can afford to move into the area. Unless you have sewn up a good deal years ago, there’s no more new good deals to be had. People I talk to about this shrug and say, “That’s Sydney, that’s the market.”

**

I was born in Melbourne and had the formative years of 18 - 24 in the city, in the nineties. Because I was young, those years seemed longer and more densely packed than the five - six years that just passed with the ease of a breeze in Elizabeth Bay. They were also some of the best years of my life. The city may have been ostensibly struggling then (there was an economic depression and a heroin epidemic) - but if you were very young, the edginess was the point. In those years we were obsessed with the photographs of Bill Henson because we could see ourselves and our city in them; moody winter light, racing around the industrial landscapes, being young and new. In the darkness, merging with it somehow.

Now - decades later - in my first week back in Melbourne, I stayed with a former housemate from those years. She dropped me off at the station one morning, on her way to the school run and I took the train to Flinders Street Station. It was a still, foggy, grey morning, as I stepped out walking across the intersection through thin blades of cold, gold light, I suddenly felt a peculiar, although not unpleasant sensation. It was of time absolutely collapsing. The Sydney years were a dream, and I was back there in the 1990s, my friend, the station, the winter gloom, nothing changed. The interval of time in between vanished like a spire in the fog, like a figure in a Bill Henson portrait who disappears into the darkness at the centre of the frame. The sensation was vertiginous. I was home. I had never left.

The swimming pools, and bags of Iranian seedless grapes, and the schooners of beer at the Paddington Inn, and the nights on the 27th floor of the SMH, watching the Balmain ferry pull into Darling Harbour, cutting laps through the schools of fish in the Billyard pool, lockdown days in Beare Park, all the books I wrote in that apartment, all those nights being lulled to sleep by the creak of boats in the harbour, seemed like they had happened to a different person. It was a dream.

Wake up. You’re home now.

It was difficult to be completely silent because one afternoon, lying on the grass by the breakfast hut, a bug crawled into my ear. I was contemplating the unique, yet also - paradoxically - replicated, patterns on each blade of grass, when I felt it.

It was unmistakable - a living thing, a thing with legs, crawling into my whorl. What or who?? was stamping down the circular staircase of my whorl? I could feel it crawling. Whatever it was, it was alive and moving deeper towards my brain. It was horrible!!

So, I let out a blood curdling scream and leapt up from the grass, cocking my head deeply to my left shoulder and then sort of shaking it , as if afflicted by a sudden, severe palsy, as I attempted to dislodge the bug. Arghhh! Arghh!

All the meditators around me - also engaged in up close nature contemplation (grass gazing, tree hugging) looked around slightly dazed. I had broken the sacred silence.

It was Day 2 and we were in that delicate phase of the silent retreat where people were ‘dropping in’ - that is, the chatter in their minds had started to subside and they were, for the first time, experiencing true deep silence, where there is nothing between you and the world - no barriers, no duality. You contemplate things as they really are.

According to the rules of the retreat, none of them could break silence to ask me what was wrong. But then again, none of them looked like they wanted to.

They were all frozen - by their tree or blade of grass - as I hopped around on one spot, moaning now and slapping the right side of my head, like I could dislodge the bug purely from the reverberations that traveled from one side of my skull to the other.

There is lore around silent retreats passed down from one meditator to another, that unhinged people are attracted to meditation retreats, and the intense silence and being in your own head without distraction can bring on a psychotic episode.

Of course retreats try to screen these people out but there’s always one or two that slip through and have a crack up on Day 2.

So that’s what it looked like. I had been lying on the grass, completing the uniqueness, but also the sameness, of each blade of grass, when without warning had let out a blood curdling scream and was hopping around the garden. I was having a psychotic episode - clearly.

Two vegan chefs appeared, and moved me away from the meditators, into the kitchen.

I explained what was wrong in a whisper and they lay me awkwardly on the ground, on my side, like someone who has just been pulled from the surf and needs to vomit up seawater. One of them was heating up a shallow pan of olive oil - and was preparing to pour it into my ear . Wot??? Huh???

They approached me with the pan. Arghhh.

It was like the whorl was a wok - and they were going to sautee the bug in me, like a piece of tofu. They were also whispering - as the next group meditation session had started in the room next door.

“It’s going to feel weird,” they whispered.

“It already feels weird,” I said. And it did. I don’t know if any of you have had a live bug walking around close to your eardrum but the sensation is both physical and auditory. It feels and sounds intensely intimate.

But the sensations would get worse.

Gently - one of the cooks began spooning warm olive oil into my ear cavity. I fought the strong urge to flip the direction of my head, so it would drain out.

They kept spooning - filling up my ear with the warm, thick yellow liquid. I was starting to smell like an Italian restaurant. I imagined the bug struggling against the fluid - but ultimately drowning - dying in my ear. I was also struggling against the liquid. I did not like it.

They kept spooning - olive oil was trickling down the side of my face, like an oily tear. The sensation of the bug crawling around in there was replaced by the woozy, queasy feeling of the liquid being where it should not. One of the chefs had a hand on my shoulder - restraining me from moving.

In the end, there was no moment of triumph. We didn’t see the bug emerge - slipping and flopping onto the towel they held below my ear as if it was an animal I had just given birth to. Instead after 30 minutes on the ground, they decided the bug was probably dead, and sent me back to the communal showers to get the oil off my skin and clothes.

**

The meditation retreat did not go well after that. My episode with the bug had broken the spell. I was on the verge of dropping down - but having a bug in my ear had brought me right back up to the surface. It disgusted me on a visceral level and now - when I was meant to sit there for hours and days - - thinking of nothing, I instead was thinking about the bug. How could I meditate with it still in there?

I would have a chance though - to meditate deeply, over the course of three days, a year later, in more unusual circumstances.

And it would not cost me $900 to do so. It would be totally free.

So - let me set the scene.

It’s a year later.

I had spent the Friday night in Wolloughby at the house of my friend Sharon and my godchildren - 7 year old twins Matilda and Jack.

On Saturday morning they were going up to Palm Beach for the weekend, returning Monday night. It was a long weekend.

I had stayed at the house many times. It was one of those places where you snib the door shut and it locks when you leave it.

“I’ll head back to Bondi and just lock up on my way out,” I told Sharon. “After I have a shower.”

Sharon’s house - which has since been demolished - was on a big block on Eastern Valley Way, next to an aged care facility for deaf and hearing impaired.

I said goodbye to Sharon and the twins, had a shower in the upstairs bathroom - but when I went to exit the bathroom, wrapped in a towel - the door handle came off in my hand.

I realised to my horror that I was stuck inside, with no way of opening the door. The door wouldn’t open without a handle . Nor could I just hold it in place and use it to open the door. A part seemed to missing or broken.

I was locked inside the bathroom!

Trying not to panic, I took an inventory of what I had in the room. There was a bathtub, a sink and a shower. No toilet. No phone. No proper clothes - including no socks.

There was a small window - above the bath - which I slid open. I cried out for Sharon - thinking she may be walking up the drive. But the car had gone - and they would not be coming back for 3 days.

Maybe a neighbor could hear me scream?

My stomach dropped when I realised it looked out onto the old people’s deaf facility. They could not hear me scream.

I did another inventory of the bathroom.

I had seen enough Macgyver to know that I was too large and clumsy to exit out of the second storey window above the tub. If I could squeeze out the narrow window (a miracle), I would surely then fall to my death.

But I had also seen enough Macgyver to know that he didn’t always do the obvious thing. He did the smart thing.

What I needed to do was fashion a key from something in the bathroom - that would grip the mechanism that would open the door.

I ripped apart Sharon’s husband’s razor until I just had a thin blade. This could be used to turn the handle if I positioned it right. The only problem was my hands were too large to fit into the door knob cavity and insert the blade. Instead I ended up covered in cuts and blood as I tried to fit it to the groove where the handle had been.

Bleeding now down my hands and arms - like that famous painting in the Prado - the Death of Seneca - who also died in a bathroom (after being ordered to commit suicide by Emperor Nero.)

I would not die like Seneca, in a bathroom. In Willoughby. Adjacent to a home for the deaf elderly.

But clearly the blade alone would not work.

The only other tool I had at my disposal was a bar of soap. This next move also had a Macgyver quality about it. I figured I could use the now bloody blade to chisel the soap into the shape of the handle - which would then insert neatly into the groove, and allow me to open the door .

As I stood in the tub (best place to drain the blood coming off my hands) and worked on carving my now blood drenched cake of soap with my unsafe and now very slippery blade - it dawned on me that this might not work. The soap - having been in the shower - and used by a family of 4 and their guests, had gone soft. It was refusing to be carved! Instead it was sort of fluffy and falling apart at the edges, refusing to yield to the blade.

I was starting to panic. I couldn’t spend three days and two nights in this bathroom. No way Jose! I would die. I put the soap down on the ledge (it slid off) and then in a surge of adrenaline - decided to ram the door with my body and knock it down. The only problem - I didn’t have enough room to really get a proper run up. It was only two steps between the shower stall and the door. I tried anyway - smashing and ramming the door with my shoulder which promptly started throbbing.

I tried yelling again for help towards the deaf nursing home but my cries were greeted by silence.

My panic increased. I rammed the door again. It wouldn’t move. What could I use as a bollard? All I saw around me were plastic bath toys.

I stopped and tried to breathe - be calm - like a meditator.

I went back to the crumbling blood-soaked soap. There was a world where if I jammed it into the door knob cavity now, while soft, the soap would harden and then maybe in the morning be able to be used as a handle.

I took the cake to the place where the handle had been and shoved it in. Instead of giving me something I could grip onto to open the door, the entire cake of soap just seemed to disintegrate into the hole.

It was a disaster!! Not only could I not open the door now - but there was wet soap everywhere flaking off, and sudding up the entire door handle area.

After a few more rams at the door, and shouts at the window, I realised this was it. No one was going to save me and I would be trapped in here for 3 days and two nights.

I had water. I would not die of thirst. I had no food, but that was ok. I could fast. People paid good money for an experience like this!

Lying in the bathtub - head on a folded towel, arms folded across my chest like a waxen martyr, I transformed my tiled prison into a meditation cave. I could take the time to properly go on retreat - in this bathroom. And finish what I set out to do a year before.

I want to share with you how it once was - because with the events of the recent weeks in Iran and the gulf, we may be going back there. And by there - I mean really expensive flights and a greater degree of friction getting to Europe from Australia.

I first travelled overseas in 1998. In order to afford the ticket and my expenses I had to take almost a year off and work 3 or 4 shitty jobs, moving from a morning sandwich bar shift, to an afternoon hand couriering documents around offices in the city, to evenings ushering at the Arts Centre. On the weekends, I sold pies and beer at the MCG. It was fine. It’s what all my friends were doing to pay for their overseas trips - and the grind was worth it for the big trip at the end.

In the late 90s, for many people overseas travel was not as common as it is today.

It was a big deal when a kid in my primary school went on a trip to Canada. They had to do a presentation on it, it was so exotic.

In 1998, the cheapest ticket I could find to Europe was a Garuda flight from Melbourne via Bali to Amsterdam. It cost a bit over $1700 and in inflationary terms the price hasn’t moved much - in fact it’s cheaper. I paid $1500 return in 2025, meaning the “real” price of long haul air flight had actually dropped by about 58.3%.

Because the flight was so expensive in 1998 and I was working so hard to pay for it - it made sense to go for a long time. I planned to go for around a year. Half this time would be spent working for the equivalent of $9 an hour at a pub in Dublin.

Along the way I would meet up with college friends, but as no one had phones and internet cafes were relatively new, I had just to turn up at a random place in say, a bar Madrid that had been prearranged 6 months before, and hope they turn up (they did, hours late).

I had an amazing trip, and spent all my money, to the extent that when I got on the plane to return home, I had to borrow money from the stranger I was sitting next to on the plane to pay for a hotel during the layover (hello, Matthew Flood if you are reading).

That trip was special for a number of reasons. But one thing that strikes me about it now - is that you can’t see around the corners. Waiting for my friends at that bar in Madrid, for hours and hours, I could not imagine a situation where one day, not far into the future, I would not have to wait for anyone at all. That I could track and message my friends at all times.

And that flights themselves would be cheaper, there would be an increase in budget airlines and the barriers to travel would drop significantly.

In those intervening years between 1998 and say - 2004, technology and globalisation would meet in a strange conflagration that suddenly there would be cheap and plentiful long haul flights, and the ability to never be out of touch with anyone, ever.

With the boom in budget airlines, buy now pay later schemes and easy credit, and social media Euro summers became normalised.

People didn’t have to justify a trip by going away for a year. They could fly across the world for a week or two.

And technology quantum leaps would mean you no longer just wait somewhere hoping your friends will turn up. You no longer have to tackle a European city without a map, and have to ask strangers for directions. You no longer have to mime a chicken sandwich (buk-buk, elbows flapping) or even learn a language, because there’s an app for that now.

The change is so profound, yet it just happened quietly.

So what does all of this have to do with the Iran War?

Things can change quickly again. Jet fuel costs are surging, and supply is not guaranteed due to the ongoing uncertainty of the conflict.

Global jet fuel prices have jumped from a pre-war average of $85–$90 per barrel to between $150 and $200. In some major hubs like Singapore, prices peaked at over $240 in early March.

The war has forced a massive reconfiguration of global flight paths with the airspace over Iran and several neighbouring countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Iraq) largely closed or restricted. This means airlines must fly longer, circuitous routes between Europe, Asia, and Africa - also increasing prices. These longer routes require significantly more fuel and additional crew hours, costs that are being passed directly to consumers.

There’s also hub disruption with the temporary suspension of operations at major transit hubs like Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi which has removed millions of seats from the market, creating a supply-demand imbalance that naturally pushes prices up.

Many carriers have already adjusted their pricing models to stay solvent. Qantas and Virgin Australia have both flagged or implemented fare increases of 5% to 10%, with frequent reviews expected.

And international carriers such as Cathay Pacific, Air France-KLM, and AirAsia have either raised base fares or reintroduced significant fuel surcharges.

Budget airlines and those that do not “hedge” (lock in) fuel prices in advance are the most vulnerable, meaning the cheapest “low-cost” seats are disappearing from the market first.

All this makes travel more unaffordable.

We may return to the days where you had to save up for ages to afford to fly to Europe, or only the rich can afford a Euro summer.

I saw a post on x.com last week - a picture of posh boy Freddie - played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Talented Mr Ripley and it said Aristo euro summer - empty cattle class.

Also on X - “Gen Alpha will talk about millennials flying for vacations the same way that millennials talk about boomers buying cheap homes.”

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to travel less. That first trip was the most memorable because I had to work hard for it, and was determined to savour every day of my time away.

*

There is a line in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises that reminds me of what we are experiencing now.

A character, Mike, is asked “How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways,” Mike says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The vibe shift, predicted post-pandemic, has arrived. But not in the form many expected. Just like Mike’s bankruptcy, it’s happened both gradually and suddenly.

The vibe shift came to mean a hard reset after the malaise of the COVID years. There were several false starts. 2021′s Hot Vax Summer. The return of the Indie Sleaze aesthetic the same year. And 2024′s Brat Summer. All fizzled out.

It was like waiting for the drop, a build-up of tension that demanded a release. Was this it? Could you feel it? Nah — I can’t feel it. Not yet.

But when the vibe shift arrived almost a year ago, at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, it was palpable.

The shift, originally predicated by Sean Monahan in the trend newsletter 8ball and later picked up in an article in The Cut in 2022 (“A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It?”) was not just about aesthetics or fleeting cultural trends. It was a profound transformation of the fabric of society itself.

From the rise of misinformation and AI to escalating political tensions, vast economic disparity, and the erosion of social bonds, the vibe shift is now understood as a deep, unsettling change in our collective reality.

The pandemic marked a pivot point and what followed was a coalescing of crises: Climate catastrophes. Political unrest. A cost-of-living crisis. The decline of institutions, literacy rates and in-person socialising. The mental health crisis, particularly among young people, who spent increasing amounts of time online, live-streaming wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And this month, closer to home, Jewish Australians were targeted in a mass shooting at Bondi Beach while celebrating the festival of Hanukkah. Fifteen people died.

The Atlantic has called it the “anti-social century”. More of us were more physically alone, for longer periods of time, than ever before.

The vibe shift ushered in a different set of material conditions, a shift in the economy and the ascendance of new cultural values.

But it didn’t end there. The values we thought were the anchors of our society turned out to be hollow or unstable. The emergence of startlingly capable AI arrived as distrust in institutions and the rise of misinformation and disinformation grew, alongside creeping authoritarianism in America.

It was difficult to know what was real anymore.

As we navigate this new era, it’s clear things will never return to the way they were.

We’re caught in a moment of intense, conflicting energies. Reality feels bent and broken. This moment is both paralysing and invigorating, full of risk and possibility. And it has me asking the question, how are we going to meet this moment?

Enter AI

Kyle Chayka writes a weekly column for The New Yorker about technology and culture and he agrees the first rumblings of the vibe shift began with the pandemic.

“[COVID lockdowns coincided with] the height of the internet existence,” says Chayka, whose column is called Infinite Scroll. “It was when the most people were the most online. That drove people insane. That triggered the start of the shift.”

If the pandemic softened the ground for a much more online existence, the rollout of ChatGPT was the real disruptor.

“The big change is AI and that came in 2022,” Chayka says. “It felt like a change in the air that suddenly destabilised a million different things at once.”

In 2022, ChatGPT went from a secret only a few people knew about, to “all of us being Pandoras that opened the box,” he says.

“ChatGPT is critical in how our perceptions of reality have changed,” he says. “Now we are asking ‘is this person I am talking to at the call centre real?’”

AI also didn’t just change the vibe, it changed our material world.

“We have to compete with machines more than ever before,” Chayka says. “It’s also flattening reality and uniqueness, making everything look and sound the same.”

But where AI will go is also so unknowable that for the first time in a long time, it is hard to imagine what the future will be like.

I date the vibe shift to a moment in time. It was late 2024, when being an offline person and undertaking digital detoxes seemed like a hangover from the 2010s, a quainter time.

In December, I had drifted back to Twitter, renamed X. I had not visited X for a while, but I missed what it used to be.

Despite all the problems of old Twitter, it was a place that was more enjoyable than not. As theorist Richard Seymour wrote in 2019: “It rewards quickness, wit, cleverness, play and certain types of creativity — even if it also rewards darker pleasures such as sadism and spite.”

Re-engaging with the platform after Elon Musk took over was disorientating. Every post I made seemed to vanish without likes or engagement. All my friends were hidden by the algorithm or in exile on other platforms or logged off completely.

Norms around how you speak about diversity — migrants, different shaped bodies, religion and women — had been completely thrown out the window. You could say the worst things and be rewarded with attention, rather than deplatformed and cancelled.

My feed also offered very little Australian content. I had stumbled into a digital approximation of Trump’s America: long threads about lifting and protein, claims about a link between autism and junk food, the dangers of vaccines and the “long con” of renewable energy. Users wrote threads about the virtue of stay-at-home wives and how many of modernity’s ills could be placed at the feet of ambitious women.

With its pornography, carnival barkers and supplement salesmen, being on X felt like being in a dystopia.

And I wasn’t imagining it. Time and time again, Musk used the platform to amplify right-wing views, whether that was attacking Australia’s eSafety commissioner, British prime minister Keir Starmer over immigration, the EU over tech regulation or promoting far-right anti-immigration figures like Tommy Robinson.

Back in December 2024, I wondered is this how the world actually is? Were those appearing in my timeline human or were they bots?

And what was a more accurate reflection of the world? Old Twitter which was filled with people who I had relationships with in real life as well as online? Or this place called X, filled with people I didn’t know, who may not even have been people at all?

I logged off, a little dazed, and headed straight for a party.

What the f*** is real?

Arriving, a friend asked me how I was. I was OK, I replied, but still disorientated from my time on X.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I said.

It was dawning on me that this feeling of not knowing reality was — for me — the vibe shift.

AI had polluted my clarity, in part because it was so uncanny and real that it was very easy to be tricked.

Hey, did you see Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket? Did you see the emotional support kangaroo trying to board a Qantas flight?

My friend at the party understood. This mild form of derealisation was becoming a common experience that was at the same time completely isolating.

Someone poured me wine. We talked about Luigi Mangione who at that time had just been arrested for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Was that even him caught on CCTV or someone else?

We talked about Trump and Musk and ketamine — and how DOGE just seemed to emerge from thin air. We talked about the war in Gaza and the strikes on the hospital. There were reports that it wasn’t a hospital. There were many reports that it was.

I tried to ground myself by looking into the faces of old friends and hearing their familiar voices.

This was the start — for me — of a feeling of temporal instability. Not unstable in myself, but that I couldn’t get a purchase on anything. What the f*** was real?

Kyle Chayka from the New Yorker told me he observed the sensation as: “Is the person I’m texting right now using ChatGPT? Is my Hinge match being charming or are they using ChatGPT? Is this a real conversation I am having?”

I had over many years as a columnist, written end-of-year round-ups that tried to make sense of the world over the past 12 months.

2014 was the year of Malaysian Airlines and ISIS.

2017 was American Carnage and #MeToo.

2019 was the year of catastrophic fires, Greta Thunberg and Fleabag.

2020 global pandemic.

2021 everyone was exhausted from the pandemic and watching Squid Games.

Yet by 2025, reality was no longer a shared experience and the world can no longer be captured so neatly by a few key phrases.

Now, what is real for me, may not be real for you.

Silos are blooming

First there is the issue as to whether the content is real or fake. Is it misinformation, AI, a troll spreading mischief?

Then there is the splintering of content and people into silos.

The kind of monoculture that existed in the 20th century and made it easy to categorise epochs, eras and trends, has been fragmented by streaming services, social media, and personalised algorithms.

Yet at the same time, confusingly, these fragments share a similar aesthetic and reflect the monopoly of just a few big tech platforms. BlueSky looks like X. Reels look like TikTok. Threads look like X. (No-one wants to look like Facebook.)

Yet we long for a time when things were unique. There are Instagram accounts that are shrines of nostalgia for the quirky and unusual design aesthetic of the past: a font on a movie ticket stub, the curved handle on a beautiful park bench, the elegant slant of your grandfather’s cursive handwriting, the care that went into distinct signage and details in a hand-sewn dress.

Now, Chayka says, everything is a bit samey: “Every podcast broadcast on YouTube looks the same, it’s the same format. Zohran Mamdani’s videos looked like TikToks and Subway Takes, and soon every campaign will look like Zohran’s.”

Even cafes, restaurants and shops across the world share much the same aesthetic: signage in sans-serif font, subway tiles, beige long benches and plenty of pot plants.

“We crave physical environments that are conducive to digital experiences, so they must be comfortable, not too demanding, allowing for a seamless digital experience,” Chayka argues. “While our digital reality is more individualised through algorithms, our physical spaces are less so. We crave homogenised physical spaces, to be comfortable looking at our phones.”

He wrote about this phenomenon in his book Filterworld.

While our physical reality binds into a sort of globalised beige, our online reality is a shrine to the subjective.

With the decline of traditional media and journalism, we are experiencing the disappearance of a singular and unassailable vision of what is what, what is designated as true, and sanctioned guidance on how we should think critically about things.

Newspaper editorials — a relic of the 20th century — are disappearing not just from newspapers, but from relevance. People like to do their own research and make up their own minds, gathering information from sources that not long ago would have been considered flimsy or even inaccurate.

But what does it mean if we no longer share the same starting point about what is real? A shared reality with divergence of opinions, customs and views has always been considered a crucial building block for a flourishing society.

If there is no consensus, how do we navigate the world together? How does anything get done?

The world keeps shrinking

By late 2024, reality was shifting in other, strange ways. As the impact of the vibe shift intensified, people started looking different.

The widespread use of GLP-1′s like Ozempic, developed to treat diabetes but frequently now used for weight loss, have meant there were some friends who I struggled to recognise after they lost large amounts of weight, quickly, on the drugs.

Then there’s MAGA face — a new look that came in with the second Trump presidency. Jaw implants for men, and fillers, Botox, hair extensions and heavy make-up for women. It’s not meant to be subtle. It’s a signal of the type of politics you follow.

If you didn’t go under the scalpel you could give yourself a MAGA face, or younger face, or slimmer face, or whiter face, just by slapping a filter on your social media photos.

But how could you feel grounded if you looked into the faces of old friends on their social media pages, and didn’t know if their face was real?

Time and time again I had that funny feeling we had tipped into something new and bad. Perhaps all these current crises didn’t exist in isolation but fed into one another in a way that strengthened some of the more bleak forces at work and further stimulated the vibe shift.

Let’s say the pandemic made you spend more time online with apps and notifications that are deliberately designed like a pokie machine, to keep you on there as long as they can.

Predictably, you become an addict, which means that you don’t get out in real life enough, and relationships outside your screen stagnate.

You become lonely and your mental health suffers. But because of the cost-of-living crisis you don’t go and see a therapist (or maybe you couldn’t afford a social life IRL and dinner out) and so you end up seeing an AI bot, which has come along just in time to provide you the companionship and understanding you so desperately crave but couldn’t access or afford.

That is how your world keeps shrinking. Each new development with technology further ensnares us in this new reality.

Multiple forces ensnaring us means that it’s easy to feel trapped in this moment, in this new, bad vibe.

The roaring 10s

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick (follow his Substack!) writes about vibes from his home in Barcelona and publishes his thoughts on his popular and influential Substack — the Trend Report. He believes times are reminiscent of the Great Depression.

“The 2010s was like our roaring 20s, and I think we are in the depths of what has come after, that’s what we are in now, a new low,” he says.

“The 2010s was a great era of an amazing excess and that came crashing down. That is what the vibe shift is getting at. The 2010s were a luxurious period.”

Fitzpatrick lists the excess: “It was like ‘I can take an Uber everywhere’, Prime overnight shipping, capitalist luxuries, cheap travel, everyone getting Botox. You could afford the luxuries that previously were only for celebrities. Everyone felt they were richer than they were.

“Things have changed. Income inequality means a corporate worker may have to pick up an Uber shift to make ends meet. Everyone is working harder for less money in real terms and worries about losing their job to AI.”

Fitzpatrick says people are more and more likely to calculate if they can afford to go out to see friends and worse: Maybe, they wonder, I don’t even have friends.

But for Fitzpatrick, the job losses that look set to happen with AI can provide moments for connection.

“Having to drive Uber and work in a supermarket because your creative dreams to be a writer or illustrator were killed by AI, shows you that ‘I am disposable too’,” he says. “That puts you in solidarity with the people who have also been discarded by capitalism.”

He argues that rejecting the comfort culture of the 2010s and improving conditions for the working class allows us to “harness this moment”.

The death rattle

If I had to isolate what I have been searching for in these vibe shift times, it’s not hope, its clarity. I want to know what reality is.

Right now, as social media draws us into information bubbles more quickly and more dramatically than ever, it’s important to seek and understand what’s real. To not be numb or fed a lie or “waterboarded with information” as writer Jia Tolentino put it — but just to know it and act rationally.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not fact. Everything we see is perspective, not the truth,” warned Marcus Aurelius almost 2,000 years ago.

The Stoic philosophers from their ancient perch during that same era, believed we should strive for facts. That we should separate perspective from truth and realise they are not the same thing.

As AI rises, that distinction is more important than ever: if we can’t agree on what reality is, how can we operate effectively in the world?

Rather than drift into the soothing, smooth, fake world of artificial intelligence, or the frictionless and reassuring communities on social media that don’t present us with unpalatable truths, we can choose reality.

We may not be able to control what is happening in society right now, but we can make being able to know what’s real in the world a priority.

Alongside imagining a society gone to ruin, as dystopian literature and television has its moment, we must embark on the task of imagining a future that saves itself. A society healthy enough to take us out of the algorithm and the frictionless experience of the digital and into the unpredictable and messy realms of lived human experience. This is not a return to the past, but a way of living with technology that doesn’t diminish or destroy our lives in the real world.

Both Kyles I spoke with were optimistic that there would be a backlash to this current vibe. That when we wake up to its fundamental anti-humanness we would be disgusted and enraged at the tech companies and the forces that brought us here. That we would throw our phones into the sea.

“On the other side there will be a total rush for an offline experience. Going to a party, climbing a mountain, seeing your friends — anything that is not reliant on experience though a screen,” says Chayka of how it might go.

Already we are seeing the return of the novel, of reading challenging books — with popular initiatives such as Dua Lipa’s book club — alongside a broader resurgence of analog hobbies, including vinyl records and film cameras.​

“I think people are logging off, this is what’s changing. People are realising that social media is not what it used to be and you don’t get those community rewards,” Fitzpatrick says.

There was an in-between moment last year where friendship apps were getting a lot of buzz.

“And then people realised that they didn’t solve things,” Fitzpatrick says. “Dating apps are collapsing, people are living life in a way that is IRL.”

Everything is temporary. Even this.

What if this vibe shift was a dark but crucial reordering before a new Enlightenment? Those of us imaging utopias can see it. We are already touching grass, trying to break free and hoping to see you all on the other side.

“What we are witnessing and experiencing is a death rattle, the dam that needs to break,” Fitzpatrick asks. “The real vibe shift will come next, creating more economic equality, where we can use technology to see the greed and we can check it. Where we can see injustice because we have millions of screens showing what’s happening.”

Zoom out, he says, and these are the best of times.

“There are so many solutions to so many things, there is so much tech progress, there is so much medicine,” Fitzpatrick says. “We are living in the spoils. We really are living in the best of times.”

We just have to remember to get out there and live.

Last week, a mere two months into 2026, and the chaos of the era had sent me back into the arms of the bad site.

All social media is bad in its own way. But X.com is the worst. It’s also proving the most difficult to permanently quit.

Since Elon took over, and the old Twitter died, now has been a time of monsters on the timeline.

I no longer see the accounts of anyone I know. Instead I am served up a sort of daily gruel of life hacks from grifters selling life coaching and protein powders. Or rage bait from trad wives. Or AI slop from fake accounts.

There’s really no reason to be on the platform - especially since much of the content seems to be created by AI and misinformation is so widespread and unchecked that it creates confusion, not confirmation and clarity.

Yet in the last couple of weeks I’ve gravitated back and found it compelling in a way regular news and social media are not. It’s so moreish that hours can disappear as I run out of tweets to read on the ‘For You’ page. So moreish that this morning I ordered a device called Brick that will block it on my phone, as I lack the self control to stay away myself.

So why return to a site that cut its moderation and safety teams by 50 percent and incentivised users that posted inflammatory or rage bait content? Why return to a site where it’s difficult to tell if the news is real or fake?

Because it has become the best place to get fresh information about the huge shifts we are seeing in AI.

There is a lot going on in the world but I think the most transformative change our society is facing, is how our world is going to be reordered and disrupted by AI.

I would have expected to see more content and analysis on AI in mainstream media this year, but more than one senior journalist in the Australian media has complained to me that stories about AI are “ratings poison” - and that no one wants to read about “machines taking our jobs”.

Refresh any news website and it’s more of the same - cost of living pressures, house prices, Trump and now war in the Middle East. All important things, but the story that will result in the most systemic changes we’ve seen in our lifetime is undercovered.

Yet over on X.com - the discourse may be overheated much of the time, but there’s a real sense of following a revolution being created.

Many of the people in the tech industry who are designing the AI are posting real time thoughts, updates, fears and predictions.

Part of the reason you are more likely to see AI industry insiders post on X (including posting long essays) rather than on other platforms is because the community was there before Musk took over Twitter in late 2022.

The people who actually build these systems, researchers at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, academic labs worldwide have established Twitter presences. You can follow Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist at Meta), Demis Hassabis (CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel laureate), Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, and dozens of other figures who are literally building the technology and read their unfiltered thinking in real time.

That critical mass makes Twitter/X the obvious place to go for real information, which attracts more people, which attracts more researchers to post there.

The last couple of weeks on X.com were significant in AI news for a number of reasons.

• The discourse around the shift in the technology from AI chatbots to AI agents and what this will mean for the future of work (as Anthropic CEO Dario Amoudei said, “The public is not aware of what’s about to happen… it’s as if a tsunami is coming at us and its so close we can see it on the horizon.”)

• The clash between AI firm Anthropic and the Pentagon over safety concerns (Antropic were the ones concerned about safety, not the government)

• The viral essay first published on X by Matt Shumer called ‘Something Big Is Happening,’ which compared the current A.I. moment to the early days of Covid-19, when people didn’t know what was about to hit them.

Just as in the early days of the pandemic there were wild and disparate reports coming from corners of the scientific and research community - so too does X.com perform a service of sorts by presenting not necessarily a neat, coherent or rational view of what’s happening in Silicon Valley (the sort of digest you might read on a news website) but an evolving and disparate array of news and analysis on a topic, that is starting to cohere into a more full picture of where AI is taking us.

Just like with the pandemic, the early days of something new feel like a wild ride and while doomscrolling X may not be the most relaxing way of getting insights into this new epoch, it does provide a sense of just how seismic shifts in 2026 will be.

Years ago, I went on a painting trip to the Northern Territory. The organisers would take artists by four-wheel drive and through hard-to-locate tracks, to places of incredible natural beauty. The artists would then set up their easels, find a pretty spot - and spend the day painting.

I couldn’t really paint well, I was there as a travel journalist to write about the experience for The Australian.

But I loved spending time with the artists, seeing what caught their eye, and how they digested and then depicted it. My favourite person on the trip was a woman in her 90s. Margaret had grown up in the days where women weren’t encouraged to be artists. But it was something she pursued all her life - from taking paints and brushes down to the Yarra River as a young girl, to trips like this to the desert in her 90s.

In our downtime, back at camp, Margaret would wander off and come back with flowers, stones, a feather - and make the most beautiful arrangements of these objects outside her tent.

In many ways they were more beautiful than her visual art. She had a way of placing objects side by side, or in a shape that made them stand out and look suddenly beautiful.

These weren’t big, flashy paintings but small works of art on the ground that were easy to walk past without noticing.

But once I noticed, I became entranced and looked forward to each new day, where there would be a new work on the ground. They enhanced the otherwise utilitarian camp.

In the night, the arrangement would be disturbed - by wind, by an animal - who knows.

This art work was super temporary - lasting a day, and made purely for her own pleasure and out of the impulse to create, to reorder and out of some very deep and old creative impulse to make something beautiful.

I think about Margaret often when I spend time making things that don’t get seen by anyone.

Sometimes it’s a diary or journal entry - but now and then it’s much more significant work.

For every book I’ve published - or been commissioned to write (I am now up to 6 books) - there is an equal number of books I have written that have not been published.

This shadow catalogue is as meaningful as the books they have been published. Almost the same amount of toil went into these books that never saw the light of day, as the books that have been published (minus the editing and promoting time.)

As to why they didn’t get published - one was a book of connected short stories, written at a time when getting short stories published is hard (it is still difficult), another was a family saga written during the Covid lockdowns that had a big structural issue with point of view (ie who is telling this story?), that was hard to fix. There was a novel about a man accused of child sex offences set in London, that was too grim to really continue with. There was a non-fiction book on digital nomads. There was the first book I ever wrote - The Mop Has Eyes, which was read by a few publishers back in the early 2000s, and had some interest but ultimately was deemed but not quite good enough to be published.

Some fledgling writers I speak to, find this an intolerable state of affairs. What is the point of writing if it’s not published? Imagine toiling for years on a book, only to abandon it because it had unfixable structural flaws, or because it didn’t align with market trends.

But I think of Margaret and her flowers, the joy of creating something that is ephemeral or something that may only been seen by the creator.

The urge to share creations - particularly stories, is strong. I also write so I can be read by others. But I also write because an idea has caught my attention and I can’t stop thinking about it. Writing a book is a way of teasing out an idea, working out your position, or in the case of a novel, inhibiting a character or point of view that is very different from your own.

Last week I committed to spending the first part of this year exploring via this Substack the things that make us properly human, that can’t be replaced by machines. And I think one of the things that sets us apart is what Margaret was doing, and what I am doing. We are creating for no specific purpose other than to please and satisfy ourselves.

There’s no money attached. There’s no outside metric. There’s no review.

Just the pleasure of creating for creations sake. In these times, when there is such pressure to hustle, when everything we do is designed to be seen, rated, ‘liked’, perhaps creating something just for ourselves is an act of defiance.

I tracked in a long read for the ABC in December some of the broader cultural trends that have coalesced in2025 to create a vibe shift and change not just the feeling of what it’s like to be alive today - but also altered the material conditions of how we live. I urge you to read it, if you haven’t already. (Spoiler it’s long - at 3500 words).

This year promises to be full of turmoil, huge societal shifts and instability - just like all the years of the 2020s. In 2025 I read a lot about AI (including the fascinating Empire of AI by Karen Hao) - and think it is a fundamentally transformative tool that will radically shift how we work, live and relate to each other.

In my own social circle, at least one person has identified as being in a romantic relationship with an AI, and I think there’ll be more to come. They describe their AI partner as being supportive and “always there” for them. It’s hard for us fallible humans to compete with 24/7 always on support.

In the face of this coming wave, this year I’m interested in what makes us human and distinct. We have complex inner lives, imagination and creativity and we thrive when we are in community with each other, acting according to agreed upon social codes.

Part of this Substack in the first half of 2026 will be looking at what makes us thrive, and trying to bring that to the forefront of my own life.

Some of the things that I am going to explore in terms of what makes us thrive include

• The importance of manners and public civility, that is, treating strangers well, and with respect

• Seeing the present (scary) moment as part of a cycle in history that is not novel but is entirely predictable if you study the past. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.’

• The need for a belief system - but also the importance of flexibility and independent thinking within that system

• A community - or several communities.

I’ve just had a week at the beach with my family and old school friends in Port Fairy, a small beach town four hours from Melbourne. It was a week where I spent most of my time outside, slept deeply each night, and left feeling reconnected to some of my longest relationships.

I was hardly on my phone and didn’t think much beyond the present day or what we were doing for dinner. Holidays are good like that. They remind you that you don’t need much to be happy, and that relationships (the relationships that are right in front of you, not the parasocial relationships on your phone) are the things that are the most important.

But I’ve also seen enough Januarys to know that by the time March rolls around, so many of the insights and good intentions formed at the start of the year are forgotten.

With the turbo-charged newscycle, it’s more important than ever before to not get sucked into the noise and drama of the year, to remember what’s important, and the ways in which you resolved to live, when life slowed down in January.

The various poly-crisis that have been bubbling away since Covid times remain unresolved - housing, income inequality, Gaza, the war in Ukraine and US unpredictability in trade and global affairs.

So it’s with some caution that I try to predict what 2026 will bring (anything can happen!) but here are some broad social trends I think will manifest in the next 12 months.

Emergence of a new type of class system in Australia

As Baby boomers go to the great beyond - so begins the largest wealth transfer in Australia’s history.

This will see a split in the younger middle classes down the lines of who inherits and who doesn’t.

Friends in low or average paid jobs will suddenly be bidding at auctions for multimillion houses, and buying them without a mortgage, and people you thought were your financial equals because of old class measures such as income and education but don’t have rich parents, will be left behind.

These people may have the opposite issue. Rising rents and the impossibility of securing affordable housing - means younger people supporting parents into old age because their parents failed to get into the housing market before prices eclipsed earnings.

There will also be a further wealth divide between city and country, Sydney and the rest.

If your parents bought in inner Sydney in the 70s or 80s - they are sitting on a gold mine, that may one day pass to you.

Analogue will be cool, too online will be cooked

Speaking of class systems - society will become increasingly divided around who has brain rot and is addicted to their devices, and who can walk away - not needing the phone, and not addicted to it.

It will become (and is already becoming) a flex not to need or use social media. You are not trying to signal anything to anyone, sell anything or display how great and interesting your life is. You are happy with people not knowing things about you, value privacy and you are secure in keeping great moments, personal news, accomplishments and holiday pics to yourself.

As screen time becomes increasingly linked to low literacy levels and poor mental health - living your life offline and not needing social media is the ultimate status symbol.

Mini retirements

In my own life, at least half of my friends could be described as burnt out. The number rises if you include care responsibilities - like child or elder care, on top of full time work.

The burn out looks like never feeling rested, wanting to take a holiday and “just stare at a wall”, being unable to enjoy social activities because they lack energy, and being constantly sleep deprived and feeling low-level sick all the time.

Increasingly self care won’t look like one week at a fancy retreat, getting a massage - it will look like having enough cash flow to exit the workplace for up to a year at a time to rest, recover, pursue hobbies, travel and read books.

The new luxury will be recognising when you get to a place of burn out - and being able to retreat and recover over a longer period of time without damaging your long term finances or career prospects.

AI relationships becoming mainstream

I wrote a piece for the Guardian recently about how romantic relationships between AI and people are not far from being normalised - and in response received emails from people in relationships with AI, thanking me for being relatively non-judgemental.

This type of relationship will be further normalised as take up increases. Already - according to Harvard Business Review, in 2025 the number one use of individuals using AI was for companionship and therapy.

And this week I heard a first - a blind gossip item about a famous Hollywood TV star who was in a romantic relationship with AI. Get ready for more of these couples debuting in 2026.

Already there is a trend for couples who get together later in life to avoid living together in part to avoid the friction of integrating two well-established, independent lifestyles (and also potentially losing control of your assets should the relationship end).

Relationships with AI further remove any friction. No fights. No disagreements. Your AI companion is there for you 24/7, saying all the right things, making you feel better all the time.

People are wanting to dump the psychic load of real life relationships - feeling like it’s too much hard work for too little reward.

This is a bleak trend - but it ties into some of the other trends mentioned above. People are tired. They lack the bandwidth for relationships - and they just want to be soothed.

And once again - the market will be there with its ‘solutions’ to our modern problems.

Upcoming (please come along!) Fullers Bookstore in Tasmania on Sunday November 16 and Balmain, Sydney on Wednesday November 19 at Roaring Stories.

But in addition to promoting my own work, I’ve also been reading and listening to a stack of great things. And writing a few things for the Guardian and The Monthly.

Here we are….

Reading

Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith

I couldn’t finish The Fraud, which was sad for me because I’m a huge Zadie fan. I just couldn’t get a grip on the story and it didn’t pull me through. But she has a fascinating mind and I love her take on the issues of the day, so anything she releases a book of essays, I am there for it.

Dead and Alive takes in how generational differences are exposed in the movie Tar, the important notion of ‘the commons’ in government and society, mortality and getting older and observations on the rightward turn in politics. This is a less exuberant and joyful collection than what’s come before. Some of her views are more tentative, and slightly less assured than previous collections Feel Free and Changing my Mind. In some ways, this reflects the changing politics of the time. Left centrist humanism has struggled to assert itself in the culture wars, and Smith’s often nuanced perspectives can read as tentative and unsure in these more strident times.

How to End a Story (Collected Diaries 1978 - 1998), Helen Garner

I went to Erik Jensen’s poetry launch a few weeks ago (for his excellent A Lick of Fireweed) and there she was Garner, with a backpack, just walking among us.

Now, with an international reputation and an incredible body of work spanning decades, it’s hard to believe she is a person, out there in the world, that you can stand next to at a bar at a book party.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Garner said the collected diaries were her favourite work (that is, the favourite of her own books). I love them to dip in and out of. The turns of phrases, her direct language, the sweet and singular observations, the unexpected turns (her crazy night out in diary 3 when she goes to a concert and gets stoned) - Helen is our Samuel Pepys combined with Virginia Woolf.

The publication of the diaries started as a lockdown project and ended up winning the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize prize this week.

As she writes “At dinner the surgeon asked me why I write with a pen rather than using a dictaphone or a word processor. ‘Why would I?’ ‘Because it’s faster and more efficient.’ ‘But it’s my life’s work. I’m not in a hurry.’ I was surprised to hear myself make that answer.”

The collection is a physically large book (and expensive at $60) but I think rather than being a traveling companion, in the years to come it will act as more of a reference book or direct inspiration to write better. I can imagine picking it up at random and dipping into sentences and various points of her life, at various points of mine.

Heart the Lover, Lily King

I hadn’t heard of this book or author, until it was recommended to me by Eamon at Potts Point bookshop. But he had me at “campus novel.”

Set in the 1980s, this is a brilliantly written, nostalgic, lovely story about friendship and love. It’s not trying to be clever or zeitgeisty. It’s not an issues book (which many campus novels are, including my first novel Wild Things). It’s purely a love story about a young woman who gets involved with two friends, Sam and Yash.

What I enjoy about it is the details. The descriptions of the houses she visits, her own student house without heating, the conversations she has with her friends - all of them feel really specific, unique and true. Just like real life! This is a special book.

What we Can Know, Ian McEwan

I love this book. It swings between the two timelines - the present day, at a dinner party where poet Francis Blundy is reading his work A Corona to Vivian, and the future. I found the future elements more interesting. The world has been badly destroyed

Now people exist in a sort of swampy, grey, watery world - where travel is difficult (there are no planes for example). America is one giant black spot, immersed in multiple civil wars and Nigeria is a superpower that controls the internet. I liked McEwan’s small details about the future. The people there seem to have smaller brains - they can only take in a small amount of reading at university. There is government controlled AI but it is on one computer and you have to book in an allocated and limited time to consult it.

By created a limited and depleted future, McEwan got me thinking about the decadence of our present moment.

Body Friend, Katherine Brabon

I did a panel with Katherine at the Canberra Writers Festival, and found the themes of her work - illness, doppelgangers, and cures - fascinating. Body Friend came out in 2023 and was short listed for the Stella prize. It explores the story of three women in recovery from an operation. There is the protagonist and Frida, who she meets at a swimming pool and Sylvia, who she meets in a park.

Frida represents a school of thought that says recovery comes through exertion, exercise and pushing the body. Sylvia is a proponent of rest, drinking wine if you feel like it, and eating richer foods. I read this book in two sittings - and despite most of the action taking place in the mind of the protagonist, it’s some of the best writing I’ve read at describing the often indescribable (that is describing pain).

LISTENING TO

On repeat the very sweet version of Modest Mouse’s Float On, by Ben Lee.

Ben is touring (again) - across regional Australia. A summer treat, if he comes to your town.

Pink Pantheress

On repeat also. Pain and Illegal are two of my favourite songs if I’m walking slowly and need to speed up. These songs make me do everything faster.

Deadbeat, Tame Impala

The new Tame Impala album got some pretty flat reviews - but I love the track Dracula and that feeling of “the morning light is turning blue/the feeling is bizarre.” Not quite up there with Let it Happen, but so catchy that I have it on repeat and am not sick of it yet.

And Lily Allen’s West End Girl

I can’t get this entire album out of my head. I am there at the self checkout, swiping my groceries, while bopping along to Pussy Palace (“didn’t know it was a pussy palace (x3)/ always thought it was a dojo” (x2)).

The album needs to be listened to from start to finish, and unfolds like a novel. And despite the insanely catchy hooks it is also one of the saddest albums I’ve ever listened to. It says something big and broken about men, women and marriage.

DOING

I’m studying to become a meditation teacher (exams in December!) - and getting in 120-hours training as part of the Meditation & Breathwork Teacher Training, run out of Bamboo Yoga School in Byron Bay. The goal is to spread my love of yoga nidra to everyone who is interested in experiencing it. It’s a wonderful technique that aids in sleep and relaxation.

TRAVEL

Bali - again, for the Ubud Writers Festival in late October, early November.

I’ve also been to Thailand, where I spent a week at a gym hotel in Phuket. I ate a lot of protein and worked out hard! I highly recommend Action Point if you need a reset or want to establish good fitness habits.

I’m writing this newsletter from Hobart, Tasmania, on the eve of my birthday (another birthday! They come around so quickly).

It’s cold and beautiful here, and as I write this, I’m in west Hobart looking across the Derwent and over to the mountains. It’s tranquil and the air and water are so crisp and clean that I feel extra alive!

You can create the most idyllic situation for yourself, the most perfect setting and if the book is not ready to come - all the silence, fresh air, views of the poplar trees on the hill overlooking the vineyards, the vineyards themselves - the long antique writing table by the window and the vast swatches of sunshine that light up the tiled floor, and the perfect market peach warming on the window sill, and the fact this is France and this is a writers residency - will make no difference. 

Which is to say I’ve had two weeks here, where the conditions are primed for creation, and I've written a few pages of notes, and around 2000 words of prose that can only be described as les mid-erables.

I’ve been to half a dozen writing retreats - either formal programs like the one at Varuna or self-imposed (becoming a hermit for a couple of weeks) and they can really turbo charge your productivity. 

So in France, when nothing was coming - it felt like it could be writer's block.

This is a scary thing for a writer - particularly if a contract has been made to deliver the work, an advance paid, and a deadline has been set.

The only analogous situation I could think of was a guy with erectile dysfunction who had planned everything just right for a romantic weekend away with the new love of his life - down to the last scented candle- and then when it became time to perform, just couldn’t get it up. Oh the frustration!

So this was me - in rural, isolated French splendour - unable to perform the task I was here to perform. The beauty seemed to mock me - to say - you can make everything perfect but you can’t do the work you came here to do. 

The sunlight and long, blue nights in this part of the world extended the hours which I was not writing. 

During the long walks I took in the hot, late afternoons I contemplated all the words I hadn’t written that day. 

I tried writing a different project. I tried reading several books at once to swim in other voices, in the hope that it would unlock something. 

I sent voice mails to writer friends, begging for advice. 

To waste even a day here being unproductive seemed sinful, unforgivable. I had flown halfway round the world to produce what I anticipated would be around 2000 words a day. Instead I refreshed a blank page and then read news websites or scrolled down the Reddit homepage, or I paced the large, sunny room frowning and having negative thoughts about myself.

I’ve been writing books for more than 25 years now. In a few weeks, my fifth book (The Seeker and the Sage) will be published.

But for every book published there has been at least two that have been started, and sometimes substantially progressed, before being packed away, abandoned and forgotten. And many which didn’t make it past the note-taking stage.

These abandoned projects just didn’t have the juice to be fully formed. Sometimes I discover that within a few weeks, other times I’m working on something for years. 

I know by now - or I should know - that writing some books, you are not fully in control of the project. The muse is mischievous. It’s not like journalism which is produced to the beat of a deadline and emerges from external things - a story outside yourself that you are reporting. 

A novel (which is what I am trying to do here in France) is a much more mysterious beast. It brews in the subconscious. It is informed by parts of yourself that are hidden or shameful. Your strange obsessions and buried desires.  It has a much closer relationship with the psyche, dreams, subtler energies that the more blunt and happy craft of journalism. 

And sometimes when you are ready to write, when your rational mind is saying - “hey I’ve cleared the calendar and renewed the license to Scherivener"  - a more mysterious part of you replies (or rather is silent - it is hiding), with “great, but I’m not ready yet.”   

So that was where I was at. I also knew - after a few days of self flaggellation, that being harsh towards myself wasn’t going to work either. 

My novelist friend Victoria Gosling had some great advice - use the residency for the dreaming phase. Don’t have a daily word limit.

Instead I had to let go and see what happened. I had to let the inner, subtler part of the creative process direct me. 

So it directed me on long walks, it directed me to eat a lot of food, it directed me to drink a lot of wine and talk to others around me (mainly visual artists) about their process and work.

I gave dreaming a good go. I don’t know if it will unlock the book (a book that I thought would be simple, but I now realise contains complexities) - but it made me feel less anxious and stressed. 

I went on long walks, long bike rides, long lunches. I got to know a lot of people I didn’t know last month. I made new friends. I attended Thursday night soirees with people from the village where I mixed my white wine and my reds too much, tried to speak French and organised candidates for the upcoming Mayoral election. In short - I had a good time. 

And while I was having a good time, while I released the whip I was holding to flagellatte myself for not producing.

Instead, I am trusting that something in some corner of my subconscious is spinning out the start of this next creation.

Hello from remote and wild west Bali - where I am sitting around not doing much of anything. I’m staying in a small village by a black sand beach, that’s way too dangerous to swim in. But it's a great place to walk, find unusual shells and just chill. 

So - around once a month I will depart from the usual essay to more of a newsletter format about what interesting things I’ve been reading, seeing, listening to etc. 

Love to hear your feedback about what’s on your radar. 

Reading: I’m reading so much at the moment because I’ve been on holiday. At the start of my break - with my brain scattered and kinda sore,  I was looking for books that I could pick and put down, and jump around in without having to start from the start. So books of essays and journalism by my favourite writers have been the tonic. 

This month I reread AA Gill’s collected travel journalism and David Foster Wallace’s essays. 

AA Gill - although widely loved (and also loathed) in the UK, is more of a journalist’s journalist outside his homeland. His addiction memoir Pour Me had some cut through, but it's his collected travel writing that really hits the spot. He is what I, and so many of my journalist friends aspire to be: savage, funny, smart, incisive and fearless (he could also be cruel - which I don’t like so much). There is also a touch of jealousy reading him. What publications can afford to send you anywhere these days - let alone to some of the most remote places on earth? But the writing is beautiful and there is a sense that you are travelling with him. What a fantastic trick to play - to bring someone along with you through time and space, even long after you are dead.

As for DFW, he is having something of a cultural moment again. If you find his 1000+ page novel Infinite Jest too daunting (more on that next newsletter) then these essays are a great and accessible place to start. The cruise ship piece - A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never do Again, is a classic.

And although not essays - I also packed and read, This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay. Set on a labour ward, it is laugh out loud funny and fits the bill for fun reading for a fried brain. 

As I became more rested later in the month, I was able to take on more challenging books. 

I’m currently reading (for the first time ever) John Le Carre. My mother is a huge fan - and advised me to start with The Spy who Came in from the Cold. It is clinical and brilliant - but requires focus to try and keep track of the crossing and double crossing in the Cold War spook world. 

I am also delving into two different AI books. The Empire of AI by Karen Hao tells the story of Sam Altman and Open AI. For many of us, it’s like one day there was nothing and the next day super powerful AI was here. But behind the scenes at Silicon Valley there has been an intense and competitive build up. This is the story of that build up. 

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman is more of an overall look at how AI fits into the world history of tech advances. Good overview, so far.

Podcast: I’ve been loving the Lamestream podcast, which critiques Australian media. Always thought provoking, with a great selection of stories. Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell come prepared every week to do a deep dive into so many stories. How is the Australian media covering mass killings in Gaza? What does the Triple J hottest 100 say about the lack of new Australian music being played? What’s up with the lack of new and younger Australian talent on our screens? With so much of news and culture undergoing rapid transformations, disintegrating before our eyes and being remade - this podcast is excellent in trying to get a grip on what’s going on. I became a supporter last week, as it's clear there’s a lot of research and energy that goes into making this and these guys are very much independent.

Watching: Adam Curtis documentary on Afghanistan - Bitter Lake. Late to this 2015 work but it filled in some many blanks I had about the history of Afghanistan and why any western incursion was bound to fail. Curtis had access to some extraordinary footage and has made a work of depth and beauty. It doesn’t try to ‘explain’ why the war on terror went so badly for the US and its allies but the viewer is left with the impression that something in the land and its people make it unconquerable. 

Listening: Music is a big part of Bitter Lake. I have the soundtrack on repeat. The first track - Come Down to Us by British ambient/electronic musician Burial has me mesmerised. I love listening to it when I'm travelling  as it seems to interact with the outside world in a way that’s dreamy and romantic. 

Travelling: I just had 2 nights in Jakarta. Not nearly enough time. Jakarta has a daunting reputation: lots of traffic, lots of pollution and lots of people. But how can the second largest city in the world (only after Tokyo) be anything but thrilling?

I stayed in the south of the city and arriving late and leaving on a Sunday meant the famed traffic to the airport wasn’t too bad. The food is incredible, the climate was warm and relatively mild and the street life changed from one moment to the next. In an incredibly hectic street surrounded by motorbikes and seemingly no system, turn a corner and there’s a long green corridor of trees, and a man on bike cycling past, his bells ringing, selling snacks from a cart. 

Next time… longer. 

Thinking: Spending time in Indonesia it strikes me that people just look happier than they do in Australia. What’s that about? My friend Jewel points me to studies that say Indonesians have consistently high levels of happiness and wellbeing. They are masters of just hanging out with their friends and in my month here, I rarely see a young person on a screen. They are hanging out with friends, flying kites, riding motorbikes. Hanging out, not being rushed, good food, time with friends just shooting the breeze, being outdoors….that’s what I want more of in my life.

That’s it. That’s the game. I won’t lie - it was my favourite game. 

Right now - I am stuck in the game, in the world of Lazy Girls and can’t see how I’m going to find my way out. 

I’ve gone away with a big to-do list and a book to write (goal - 1000 words a day!) and intentions such as ‘read the massive Karen Hao book on AI’ and ‘do a daily 90 minute yoga class. ‘

Instead what I have done, for almost two weeks now is sleep in, get up late (around 10am) and spend much of the day immobile, staring into space, before going to a yin yoga class (they are the ones where you barely move, instead just drape yourself over a bolster.) 

By 7pm, I’m tired again - and so I go to bed. Everyday for two weeks. I’m not sick but I don't feel particularly alive either, at least not in a human way. Instead I feel like plant or a tree, sentient, but barely. I can spend hours on my back staring at the pattern against the sky made by a fern. Thoughts come and go but I can’t seem to hold them. 

I have entered a strange space - where all the doing nothing seems instinctive, and all the hours of rest are being gobbled up by my burnt out mind and body - like a thirsty person gulping a canteen of water. So far I’m not sated.

Over the 2 years and nine months I worked in politics and I was always tired. I often wish politics was something I had done in my 20s, as the job (particularly in sitting weeks) guzzled energy like an AI data centre. 

But I started decades later - and now at the end of it - I feel like an old iPhone whose charge is on 1 percent. 

So, I’m sitting here in the heat, staring at a thicket of bamboo, as the hours pass. But really I’m plugged to some sort of dock - maybe nature’s dock - of sleep, slowness, rest and an almost terrifying sort of mental emptiness. 

There is another unsettling thing about going into this deep state of rest (and could be subconsciously why we resist slowing down) - and that is we may become stuck there in this spaced out zone. There’s no money to be made as a Lazy Girl. No productivity attached to spacing out.

That feeling of finally allowing your body and mind to relax and unwind creates its own momentum where it starts to slow down and the fear is  - it can never crank back up again. And so we stay on the treadmill of being busy.

All the stories I read about energy depleting illnesses - long Covid, chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, are the stories of lethargy that is relentless and greedy. It’s not replenished by rest or starting at a tree for hours at a time. It is just a grinding tiredness that is without relief and without end.

And so the thinking goes - better to never stop, then stop and be unable to start again. 

*

Then there is the capitalist system that we all toil under. In it - rest is only useful if it allows us to refuel for the next bout of work. A small measure of rest is seen as good, as it allows us to work more productively when we return refreshed.

But increasingly there are not even these refuelling stops along the journey. Rest is for people who don’t need to work all the time, and therefore is for the privileged (and not for the poor, who may have lots of time but cannot truly relax due to financial stress.) For the middle class, the cost of an average capital city mortgage and childcare means both parents must work full time jobs. Everyone I know in this situation is tired.  They have accumulated years of rest-debt.

Capitalism doesn’t just infiltrate work. Even time off - holidays - have been commodified by the need to document and publish images on social media of ourselves doing stuff. But how do you document rest? How do we document doing nothing?

We have become so talented at suppressing the need to rest and incorporate rest - that when the rest state asserts itself, it can feel like sickness. Really it is just a reset. 

We’re meant to rest a bit and work a bit, each day. The two states ideally should coexist in close proximity. (Many hunter gatherer societies spent about 15 hours a week ‘working’ to get their basic needs met, the rest was leisure). 

Exhausting yourself with work and performative leisure for years, then being unable to function for months or even a year after, is not the type of homeostasis the Greeks had in mind when they talked about everything being in balance. 

But a combination of the relentless economic system we find ourselves in, the societal values that elevate our working lives above our resting lives and ‘always optimising’ our leisure time so it can be packaged for Likes on social media have driven us to exhaustion. 

Maybe the next generation of people, whose working lives will be liberated by AI and will have more time to rest, will back at this time without rest. with horror. 

He had relocated from Canggu from LA and had been working on a program where you journal to an AI - and then it acts as a life coach, keeping you accountable and setting you goals. 

I was intrigued. I wanted to do something similar with a Stoicism project I’d been thinking about. But instead of telling AI your problems, my project connected you with people  - real people. I wanted to focus on solutions for men. Men helping other men with their problems.

This guy recoiled. There was no way he would share his problems with another dude. It was too personal - no, the good thing about an AI coach or a bot therapist was that you could tell them anything, and no one would know. We swapped handles and I contemplated the reach of his project. The death of paper journals, human life coaches - and maybe even the need for friendship and intimacy itself?

*

After Canggu I went up to the remote mountains to stay at an eco lodge with my friend Mel. She wanted to space out so hard up there that she forgot her own name. We set about emptying our minds. It wasn’t too hard. There was bad wifi at the lodge, none in the room and apart from visiting nearby farms -  not much to do. The only book in our joglo was the Accelerationist Reader - a dense collection of essays on the rather prescient philosophy, which calls for the ‘drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, and other processes of social change to destabilise existing systems and create radical social transformations.’

Up here in the mountains - away from the traffic jams down south - the book was a strange, discomforting companion. 

The days passed in a pleasant fugue state. We could have been anywhere - but we were here, staring out at a canopy of green, eating macrobiotic food, reading about the need to speed things up.  There were fewer tourists up here and not many digital nomads. We met an out of work yoga teacher in the sauna (“there is an over-supply of yoga teachers in Ubud,” she told us), where she and her friend sat in the heat and played the Tibetan bowls and I broke the meditative, sweaty trance to talk about the mushroom murder trial back home. 

*

I have been thinking about digital nomads and Bali. The feeling of ‘this is a cool, aspirational lifestyle’ has morphed (or milkshake ducked) to a trend that is not just bad for the inhabitants (loneliness, alienation etc) but terrible for communities and the local economies.

Infrastructure for digital nomads in say Canggu (the AI guy was a digital nomad) make living and working frictionless. There is the promise of a cheap massage at the end of a long day at your desk, and a decent Melbourne coffee at the start. But the strain on Bali’s resources - including water, is immense.

I see Bali as a second home - but of course I’m part of the problem. The problem is there are too many tourists, too many nomads. But the problem is also the economy is heavily reliant on tourists. In 2019, tourism accounted for 61% of Bali's GDP, and since the introduction of a visitor tax (around $55 AUD per person) , millions of dollars are pouring into the country’s coffers before tourists have even left the airport. 

Ask a Balinese person who works in the tourism industry about life during the pandemic and they look genuinely freaked out and tell you about having to go back to their village to work on a chicken farm, rice field or digging roads.  

Things are back to normal now - in fact better than normal. In 2024, Bali welcomed 6,333,360 foreign tourists, marking a significant increase of +20.10% compared to 2023 which stood at 5,273,258. 

But there is a growing sense of precarity every time I visit the southern part of Bali. Where is the tipping point? When will it occur? How much is too much?

*

Down from the mountains, back in Ubud - I see the signs of decline everywhere - but maybe only because I have been looking for them (and reading the Accelerationist Reader). 

On a sweet, small path with overhanging blossoms and views of the volcano - a woman in athleisure, wearing earbuds, roughly pushes me aside, as I’m reading the community noticeboard for upcoming ice bath workshops. 

At an expensive vegan cafe - a woman at a nearby table, maybe in her 40s sitting alone - contorts her face as being told to suck cement from a straw. Her face is pulled and pained. She’s taking a selfie. She puts the phone down and goes back to looking contemplative, even sad. She picks up the phone, checks the photos and does the whole thing again - different angles, getting her drink in the shot, getting more cleavage. 

I can’t look away. Sure, I’ve seen people taking selfies before but this seemed somehow emblematic of something bigger. It spoke to the gap between what we present as ourselves as being on-line (hot, on holidays, in a vegan cafe in Bali) and what is our actual reality (alone? bored? disconnected?). In Ubud that week, I sensed as a palpable force, the loneliness of the digital nomad - alone with a phone, earbuds in, eye contact avoided, a screen between you and them.

*

Perhaps when I started coming here 11 years ago - I was someone else’s dog barking, someone else’s tipping point. Maybe they saw me in the Savannah Moon cafe near the Palace - doing something vain or stupid or just not within keeping of the place - and decided it had all gone to shit. 

I shouldn’t judge. (Yet I do). I wonder if the accelerationists predicted growth would look like this.

Say you, me and 10 other people are invited to a dinner or a party. Half the group are strangers. If you are a conversation-starter person (as I am) there is an increasing lack of common stuff that you know will bring everyone in, will include people of all political persuasions and energise the occasion. After asking people how they know the host, there’s a lull. It feels awkward. Low level panic sets in. 

Thank goodness when a showstopper murder trial comes along. 

The Erin Patterson trial was one such common cultural moment that everyone in Australia (and according to a friend of mine in the music industry - it was also a talking point in LA and the UK) had a view on. Did Erin deliberately poison her four lunch guests with deadly mushrooms? Or was it a horrible mistake? 

As it was a situation that didn’t involve us directly, it was possible to view the case at a remove, and talk about it without worrying about either taking or giving offence. 

At these gatherings - using the trial as an icebreaker, I would kick off with my position - that Erin was not guilty and the poisonings were a dreadful accident. This view would elicit screams, vehement disagreement, passionate rebuttals. These conversations didn’t leave anyone feeling angry, depressed or alienated - in fact it was the opposite. We were passionately defending our positions but also able to hear other points of view. Sometimes minds would be changed - both ways. 

I enjoyed talking and speculating with friends about the trial - and deployed it successfully on a few occasions as an icebreaker with large groups. But this also came with a queasy feeling. Three people died. Another was horribly ill. Hearing what pain they were in - and how horrific their illnesses and deaths were - made it our talk seem trivial, purient, even mean. 

And then there’s the accused. Erin Patterson is a real person, with an inner life as vivid and real as yours and mine.  Days of cross examination about, for example, her bulimia felt gratutious and an infringement of her privacy. Listening to this evidence felt like eavesdropping.

It’s not just the accused. Her children are real - and now are living without their mother. They are not entertainment - yet their tragedy became our entertainment. 

The trial not only gripped and entertained a whole nation, it provided some weird but highly effective form of social cohesion -  a service in these dark times. 

These days there’s so much we cannot talk about without drama, offence or conflict. Discussing a murder trial in contrast felt like being back on solid ground. Writing about the pleasure of a certain type of murder trial, Orwell wrote this, published in 1946.

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? 

For Orwell - a ‘good’ murder trial has elements in common with the so-called Mushroom Murder trial. In the essay, he contrasts the “domestic poisoning dramas” of the past with the more “meaningless” and “brutal” crimes of his time, such as the violent “cleft chin murder”. 

One can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall….having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison.

In Australia - we’ve been gripped by murder trials before. In the Lindy Chamberlain case in the 1980s, the nation transformed into a harping Greek chorus of condemnation, ridicule and dislike for the accused - and famously got it wrong. (Watch Fred Screpsi’s film Evil Angels to see Australian’s as nation of gossips. He said of John Bryson’s book of the Chamberlain trial - “By about 150 pages, I became appalled at how little information the people who talked so much about it [the case] actually had … I was outraged and angry at myself because I’d participated in this process’.)

Turning murder into entertainment is easier and more palatable on the soul, if you turn the accused into a monster or at least someone who has enough inhuman qualities that they become a sort of hybrid vehicle - a good mother, yes, but also a sociopath. It’s easier to gossip and laugh, if she’s presented as being without emotion and expressionless as the verdict is read out. If a deep dive into her past can create a narrative of her as weird and friendless. The lack of motive is easier to absorb if she is presented as delusional. 

The judge suppressed some photos taken during the trial of Erin Patterson being driven to court. There are six frames taken by a photographer for AFP - and they are hard to look at (although look at them we must as they are now published in almost every news outlet). 

They depict a person in the throes immense suffering. Her hands fly to her face, her face is contorted. She appears to be crying out. She turns away, but can’t run away. It is someone utterly trapped and in pain. 

It is the photographs - with their primal and immediate qualities, that invite something that all the reporting, podcasts and gossip couldn’t do. Feel a twinge of empathy and compassion for the murderer.

Hi friends - Thanks for subscribing to my Substack. You may know me from my Guardian columns - including Brigid Delaney’s Diary, or my books - This Restless Life, Wild Things, Wellmania and Reasons Not to Worry. Or my Netflix show - Wellmania. Or my cameo on the 2021 series of Celebrity Apprentice Australia. 

In the 20 plus years I’ve been writing - one preoccuptation that has emerged as a theme is ‘what is the current moment we’re in - and how are we meeting it?’

The last three years I have taken a break from my own writing - as I worked as a speechwriter in the Albanese Labor government.  But during this time, the ongoing current moment has been INTENSE! The world is getting stranger - and the need to make sense of it has an urgency I’ve not felt before.

I look forward to returning to my favourite preoccupations with you - and trying to make sense of it all,  with my Substack The Chaos Era, which will launch next week (July 9 2025). 

Expect a mixture of essays, humorous columns, reflections and news about my upcoming book - The Seeker and the Sage, which explores how Stoicism can help us grapple with life’s big questions. Frequency…..will aim to be weekly - but it will be all KILLER NO FILLER  - so you won’t be reading something that I’ve pumped out just for the sake of a deadline. 

I’ll be spending time crafting each piece - because I know your time is precious and you don’t want to be reading rubbish. 

In the comments, let me know what you’d like to read from me - and I look forward to tackling these times together. 

Brigid