Next to love, I believe life’s greatest purpose is found in the work we do.

There are some caveats to this…

The work we do must also be the work we learn to love. It will not always be easy. It may often be hard. It should be fulfilling.

Your work may make you a millionaire - a billionaire even. It may take you to far flung corners of the Earth via private jets and expensive lunches - paid for by someone else on the proviso that your signature on the contract will provide them similar riches.

Or, as in my case, the work you love - that you derive the most meaning from - may simply require you to sit at your late Grandfather’s desk and type away at your laptop for hours on end, while drinking enough tea to put PG Tips on standby.

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I’m so grateful I’m able to write, and up until recently at least, make a respectable living from doing so. Even better, I get to do it while my other great love - my girlfriend - sits just a few yards away doing her work.

When I first started I’d write for anything and anyone. Thoughts of a career plan didn’t enter my psyche - I simply presumed the ultimate success of a jobbing writer was to cover the bills with your words. I mean, it still is right?

Over time though I came to realise that unless I took my own writing more seriously and paid the profession the respect it deserves, it was unfair to expect potential clients and employers to afford me the same courtesy - both financially and in the quality of commissions I was trusted to work on.

That mindset shift pretty quickly helped me find a niche working on genuinely interesting projects, predominantly in healthcare - where alongside more generous remuneration I got to write about and witness first-hand the impact treatments, surgeries, and scientific breakthroughs were having on patients often fighting for their lives.

In an admittedly roundabout way, I’d finally found purpose in my work.

It’s in these uncertain times then, that writing this feels more emotionally taxing than perhaps anything I’ve written to date. Because while the world of a freelance writer has never been built on the steadiest of foundations, even an eternal optimist such as I has to admit that, somewhat ironically, the metaphorical writing is on the wall.

It has been for some time, but now it’s staring us right in the face in GIANT MARKER. Not just us creatives either.

Artificial intelligence has been in the social vernacular since the 1950s, though up until recently most of our layman understanding of it has likely been derived from sci-fi movies.

It’s also why most of us simply haven’t been correctly prepared or equipped to keep up with AI’s rapid (r)evolution.

On a personal level, I specifically remember being in a co-working space in late 2022, when a co-worker friend strolled to my desk and asked if I’d heard about Chat GPT - this new AI writing tool he was using that could potentially put people like me out of business.

At the time I was fairly dismissive. Probably a result of being in the midst of a well paid but incredibly stressful project for a multinational healthcare company. I remember counting down the days until that particular contract was due to end, then feeling aggrieved with myself for not having the courage to turn down a two month extension and take the time out I’d planned to focus on my own creative pursuits.

What is it they say - you never quite know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone? Yep.

One thing the last 18 months has most definitely shown me, is the halcyon days of stable contract work as a writer is a thing of the past. What’s replaced it is a rather uncomfortable, almost pre-dystopian type of environment more and more of the world’s workforce are soon going to have to come to terms with.

It took me probably a year to do so. But in the end there’s only so many unreturned emails - ghosted applications and LinkedIn doomscrolling one can commit to before you step back and realise there’s far more to life - and work - than this.

So while it does feel like starting all over again without at least having the choice to do so - I’m glad to have used this period of uncertainty in somewhat productive fashion. Qualifying as a coach to help support others seeking a simpler life has become a great passion of mine, and it’s gone hand in hand with prioritising my own creativity - both as a musician and writer now sharing more personal pieces on Substack and for the likes of Men’s Health.

I also have to say that although this is an extreme version we’re living in, a creative person’s working life is insecure by nature and so I feel fortunate to be one - knowing that I can and will adapt accordingly. It’s everyone else who uses computer or drives a taxi / truck for a living I worry about.

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It’s also why I believe the absolute lack of any meaningful AI regulation, or direct plan to support the tidal wave of unemployed people that will be coming soon on the horizon, will be the major failing of national Governments in our time.

Moreover, this theory of a universal basic income (UBI) I’ve heard floated by the likes of Elon Musk, that will apparently ensure financial security for humans whose previous work has become obsolete, reads like something straight from the pages of the most unrealistic of fantasy novels.

Firstly, who is supposed to provide this income? Presumably the already futile Governments, supplied by the few people running these tech companies that, currently at least, have the power to determine the present and future trajectory of AI.

These are the same people that stand to make potentially trillions of dollars along the way while effectively putting actual human beings out of work. Let’s be real here, whatever messaging their PR teams put out, the Mark Zuckerberg’s and Jeff Bezos’ of this world aren’t exactly renowned for their philanthropy - it’s unlikely the latest generation of tech industrials will be either.

But talk of universal income and social handouts dramatically miss the point.

When you take away people’s ability to work, you not only take away their basic means of survival. You take away their dignity too. And if you take away enough people’s dignity and ability to look after themselves and their loved ones - history shows that enough people will eventually react in the only way they feel they can still be seen or heard.

In a now almost comical coincidence, I wrote about just this kind of reaction in Abraham Charlson’s Song on my debut album At Night, the City Burns.

The real life Abraham Charlson was the youngest person ever to be hung by the British Government. He was twelve years old.

His crime?

Throwing a brick through the window of a factory in north of England during the Luddite protests of the Industrial Revolution in 1812 - the exact period this current era of technological advancement and work displacement is being compared to.

Except this time, as the experts say, there won’t be as many new jobs for humans to take up - because robots will be able to do them better and more efficiently.

For far more educated perspectives than I could hope to offer on what AI means for the future of work, I highly recommend reading the following Substacks:

• One More Useful Thing - Ethan Mollick

• Work3 - The Future of Work - Matteo Cellini

When I take a moment to consider the times in my life I’ve felt overwhelmed, or plagued by uncertainty about the correct path to choose, there’s a common link that threads these feelings together: too many choices. Too many decisions.

Well into my early thirties my daily to-do list would be full of tasks that made me feel ‘busy’.

But rather than have any profound impact, the menial nature of these tasks negatively impacted my ability to make the few important decisions that do contribute to a more meaningful and stable life.

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It seems I’m not alone in this. Decision fatigue is a phenomenon that increases every year - to where the average human now makes over 35,000 decisions each day - a 1300% increase on the 2,500 per day our ancestors once made.

Of course there’s very little about 21st century life that bears resemblance to what early humans were experiencing. But the key priorities - like staying alive by securing food, water and shelter - and social impactors in terms of forming bonds and alliances with individuals and groups at their core remain the same.

The real power then lies in simplifying our lives by removing more of the non-essentials.

Busy for busy’s sake

Let’s also not be too sentimental about the past. Our lives have improved beyond measure compared to the conditions we had to face even one hundred, let alone one hundred thousand years ago.

One consequence of these improvements though is that we face more choices each day. Many of them are in place to keep us safe; like fastening our seatbelts before driving, or making sure we take the bridge option rather than walk over the train tracks.

But as Megan Reitz, mindfulness expert and Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford explains, aside from the choices that save our lives there are other reasons we prioritise mental (and physical) overload.

“We tend to equate busyness with success because our education system conditions us early on to chase short-term, tangible goals. The result is that we’re constantly competing - which for many leads to increased anxiety.”

The SPACE framework

Accepting busyness as our mind’s warped comfort zone is one thing. Taking steps to simplify is quite another.

Reitz and her collaborator, John Higgins, set out to understand why we prioritise being busy - and in doing so developed the concept of spaciousness, along with SPACE - a five-point framework designed to help people create more room for reflection and calm in their lives. It works as follows:

S - Safety

The more we create environments where people feel safe to be themselves, the less anxiety we experience. Without the pressure of maintaining a certain image or performing ‘busyness,’ our minds become calmer and more open.

P - People

We can’t always choose the people around us, but we can curate our social circles. We can decide which social media communities we engage with and prioritise relationships that provide space rather than increase anxiety.

A - Attention

We can train our attention through mindfulness and intentional pauses. These moments allow us to step back, breathe, and re-evaluate.

C - Conflict

Introducing elements of constructive conflict can disrupt habitual thinking. Exposure to different environments, fresh perspectives, or thought-provoking content can jolt us out of autopilot and into a more expansive mindset.

E - Environment

When people recall moments of spaciousness, they often describe being in nature. The physiological benefits of natural environments are profound, making minimalism and nature integral to creating mental space.

Social media brain drain

While SPACE is predominantly aimed at supporting people in the workplace - an environment not always compatible with the idea of doing less - its five principles can be just as useful in our personal lives. So if you are looking to simplify, you could do a lot worse than weave at least some of these elements into your everyday being.

Especially as outside of work, the challenge many of us face isn’t a lack of time but a lack of headspace. We spend our days wading through thousands of essentially irrelevant communications that are a direct, and inescapable, side effect of the consumerist culture we live in.

Social media pours petrol on that fire. Much of what we’re shown isn’t meaningful, necessary, or even wanted. It’s simply an extreme version of information overload designed to keep us scrolling.

The science is also pretty blunt about what happens next. Endless clicking and doomscrolling deliver short-term dopamine hits that fade almost as quickly as they arrive. Before you know it, you’re left with that familiar low-level guilt that comes with watching 447 memes in a row - instead of dedicating a little more time to doing the things that make you feel good at a deeper level.

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3 tips to simplify your day

If you really are at a point where you crave a less frantic way of living, alongside following the SPACE framework there are a few key choices you can make to reduce decision fatigue and simplify how your day looks.

There’s no need to overhaul your life either. A more productive approach is to set your priorities each morning by doing three things:

1. List the five most important things you want to achieve today

2. Rewrite the list in order of importance

3. Then ask yourself: what can I remove?

Getting back to the important stuff

The key in the final tip above isn’t to postpone or delay - it’s to actually remove one or two things from your schedule and see how (or if) it truly affects your day.

This is where Greg McKeown’s 90/10 rule from Essentialism I previously wrote about can help: if a task isn’t a clear 9 out of 10 in terms of value, it’s probably a 3 - which means it’s either delegated, deferred, or deleted.

What’s also helpful to remember is that in a world built to pull our attention in every direction, simplifying isn’t about becoming a productivity machine - it’s about protecting your bandwidth. It’s the practice of stripping away the noise so you can make the few decisions that really matter to your life.

Even more than the science behind it, the story of human evolution fascinates me.

From starting out high up in the trees over four million years ago to walking on the moon in the twentieth century - and most likely Mars in this one - our collective journey through time beats any script to come out of Hollywood.

What’s bound us together throughout has been our ability to think, act, and above all collaborate creatively.

Walking into the fire

It began with bipedalism. Learning to walk on two legs ensured we had a clear and immediate advantage over our four-legged counterparts within an animal kingdom that included rival predators and prey. This newfound physical adeptness also meant we could travel longer distances - satisfying our natural curiosity to explore what else lay beyond the horizon.

But the further we travelled, the more sustenance we required to adapt to new and challenging climates. Understanding how to control fire thus became one of the most vital cogs in our evolutionary process; a skill that not only kept us safe and warm - but eating cooked rather than raw meat provided a far more energy-rich diet that enlarged our brain and rapidly improved its activity - leading to the development of shared language that drew our deepening social structures ever closer.

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The creative (d)evolution

Fast-forward a few hundred thousand years and creativity remains fundamental to the personal, social, and professional relationships we share.

Why is it then, that most of us now view creativity as a luxury rather than an essential part of our survival toolkit?

In essence, because our ancestors bore the brunt of the hard work. Out there in the wilderness of the Paleolithic period, early human survival depended on collective creativity.

In today’s world, despite far too many still living in poverty, the vast majority of us no longer really need to think, or even work that hard to survive. From clean water, to supermarkets and sunbeds providing artificial Vitamin D, most of life’s essentials that once required us to hunt, fish, and venture outdoors into dangerous surroundings are now quite literally handed to us on a plate.

Corporates vs the artisan

Improved access to basic necessities was a by-product of societal industrialisation. A two to three hundred year period where our creative brains were matched by an incredible resolve and desire to break new ground - and for a numbered few industrialists leading the way - to become richer and more powerful than ever before.

It’s this aspect of society’s evolution that I believe has impacted creativity most greatly in modern times.

For as our historically rural existence became urbanised, creativity too became more corporatised. No more exemplified than by the plight of the individual artisan, for centuries a revered and local expert in necessities such as clothesmaking, glassblowing, and toolmaking, who suddenly struggled to compete with big business.

Sound familiar?

20th century boom

It has to be said, there was a perfect storm between the 1950s-1980s where corporations and creative individuals collaborated perfectly to produce and promote some of the greatest music, film and literature we now consider central to popular culture and society.

But this was also a period where a working class group of Liverpool lads like The Beatles were granted the freedom to create. Often by business leaders not that much older than the artists they were representing - and therefore far more prepared to take risks themselves.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of today’s corporate world, where technology has won the race against individual and collaborative creativity.

AI is killing creative autonomy

Sure, the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence is something to marvel at in one context - but the creativity behind it really only belongs to a select few technologists and engineers. The rest of us, and especially those who previously made a good living as a creative, are being swept up and pushed aside - or told we better think about retraining as a plumber.

AI is also making it easier for humans to pretend they’re being creative. Not only has Chat GPT given many an excuse to no longer concern themselves with writing an original sentence - much less a Substack article - but I’ve seen first-hand as a musician how AI is replacing the songwriting process.

Recently when I was recording my third album, an artist came into the studio next door to record an ‘original’ song. It turned out that individual’s entire contribution to the songwriting process involved them prompting an AI tool to write a three minute, country-pop number in the style of Taylor Swift.

Let me be clear, I hold no personal grudge against this person. Their song was (worryingly) very good and they were completely sincere about the role AI played in its creation. They may just want to consider hiring a good copyright lawyer should Taylor Swift’s team come calling.

My greater fear is actually that this behaviour - when individuals and teams essentially rely on robots to do the hard creative work that for millions of years has been central to our evolution - has quickly becoming the norm. This is especially problematic across the creative industries and other sectors where power, money and greed will always take priority over ethics, originality, and connection through creative collaboration.

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Taking back control

So, how do we balance the relationship between human and artificial creativity? As always, by taking control back through individual and collective autonomy.

Albert Einstein himself said that “the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination” - and in this world of remote working, social media brain drain, and the struggle to find genuine job satisfaction against the need to pay the bills - now more than ever we need to actively dedicate time in our day to being creative without the aid of artificial intelligence.

This doesn’t have to mean creating your magnum opus. Much like dedicating time to exercise helps keep us fit and healthy, giving yourself sacred creative time each day towards something you’re genuinely interested in will stimulate you mentally - and help you feel more empowered as you become better at it.

Building creative habits

Daily creative habits you might consider include:

• Writing with no plan for 15-30 minutes at the beginning of your day

• Journalling for 10-15 minutes before you sleep

• Learning something new and practical that doesn’t constantly require a computer - e.g. a musical instrument, a new language, or DIY

• Collaborating on a creative project with others who have shared interests

Do the thing

The key is not to concern ourselves with perfection, but to instead embrace the repetition of our creative habit(s). More simply, forget the outcome and just do the thing.

It’s also important to remember that being creative is not always about pure joy and expression. Sometimes it’s hard.

It should be hard. The more serious you get about it, creativity can also be challenging emotionally, and on occasion will lead you down a mental cul-de-sac upon where you question any number of life choices.

These thoughts and feelings are not to be shied away from. They are part of our existence, and much as they did for our human ancestors, they make us stronger, more resilient and thus better equipped to deal with the tougher aspects of life - certainly more than any amount of advice Chat GPT could ever prepare us for.

Most of us have a bucket list of musical legends we need to see before we or they die.

With Bowie gone, Elvis long since promoted to rock and roll’s great gig in the sky, and David Gilmour seemingly content to leave Roger Waters in permanent exile from any Pink Floyd reunion, I was beginning to think I’d missed my chance with Nick Cave.

Thank the heavens I hadn’t.

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The setting couldn’t have been much better either. Vieilles Charrues, tucked away in the Breton countryside just forty-five minutes from my French in-laws’ house, is one of those festivals that makes British music fans question where everything went wrong.

Ninety euros bought us two days of music beneath clear skies and enough quality acts to justify the journey several times over. Compared with the increasingly eye-watering cost of British festivals and arena tours, it confirmed once more how much we’re having our pants pulled down back on UK shores.

Ticket prices, however, aren’t really the point. Neither, I should add, is this piece any kind of review.

As a performer, I have little interest in awarding stars to concerts or debating whether one song should have replaced another in the setlist. Musicians - but especially critics - spend far too much time reducing performances to technical appraisals, and that my friends is most definitely NOT my bag.

The Bad Seeds are of course highly accomplished players, but technical proficiency only gets you so far. Like all truly great bands, it’s the way they give themselves completely to the songs that makes you feel truly alive when it matters most - right there in the heart of the moment.

No doubt the skill is front and centre too, but this is a band in the service of something much larger.

And when you watch Nick Cave perform you do indeed watch him surrender. Yep, this is a sermon as much as a rock concert.

He arrives dressed with his customary funeral-director elegance, all black suit, swept-back hair and impossible angularity, somewhere between an Old Testament prophet and Edgar Allan Poe’s favourite descendant. Within moments though, all notions of theatrical costume disappear.

Cave isn’t playing an eccentric character. Whatever exists inside the songs appears to consume him as completely now as it did forty years ago.

That, perhaps more than anything, explains why he has survived while so many of his contemporaries have quietly become heritage acts.

There comes a point in many long careers when musicians begin performing memories rather than songs. The audience doesn’t necessarily expect anything different. Everyone agrees to recreate an earlier version of themselves for ninety minutes before going home satisfied that the past has been faithfully reproduced.

Nick Cave refuses that bargain.

The songs may be old. The near 70 year-old man singing them remains timeless onstage.

His voice carries decades that weren’t there when he first recorded “From Her to Eternity” or “Tupelo”.

Listen to the way he inhabits “Jubilee Street” now and it becomes obvious these aren’t museum pieces being carefully preserved for nostalgic consumption. The swagger of “Red Right Hand” - forever entwined with Peaky Blinders - arrives with all its menace, carried in the weight of a man whose life is an emblem of triumph over turbulence, accompanied by immeasurable loss and reinvention.

Behind their leader, the Bad Seeds don’t so much accompany the songs as construct the world in which they take place.

At times they create an almost orchestral wall of sound; at others they leave enough empty space for a piano note, violin phrase or human voice to feel enormous.

They can move from restraint to violence in a heartbeat, yet the music never feels merely chaotic. Every eruption has shape and purpose.

Colin Greenwood of Radiohead now occupies the bass position live, an understated presence amid the theatre unfolding around him. There’s something quietly satisfying about watching a musician from one of the most significant bands of the last thirty years standing among the Bad Seeds without any need to draw attention to himself. He simply locks into the music and supplies the depth beneath it all.

Then there’s Warren Ellis, long-haired and scraggly-bearded, looking as though he has recently emerged from several months living ferally in the hills.

He attacks the violin in much the same way Jimi Hendrix attacked the guitar - not as a delicate classical instrument but as something to be bent, provoked and occasionally set on fire, at least metaphorically.

One moment Ellis is drawing a thin, aching sound from it; the next he is generating a shriek that seems capable of tearing a hole in the Breton sky. He moves between violin, keyboards, guitar, loops and effects with the concentration of a committed scientist and the appearance of a man conducting an electrical experiment that could go badly wrong at any second.

It would be easy to mistake it for madness. Perhaps it is, but it’s the productive kind of madness that every creative partnership secretly hopes to find.

Ellis has become Cave’s closest co-creator, but the relationship works because it exists within the larger organism of the Bad Seeds.

Nobody onstage appears to be waiting politely for their turn in the spotlight. The musicians listen, react and push against one another. The result feels less like a singer backed by a band and more like a single volatile machine - one capable of tenderness, menace, humour and colossal noise all at once.

Unlike those other kinds of sermons, there is only trust and remarkably little ego on display, despite personalities large enough to fill most festival fields.

Cave can throw himself into the audience, stretching towards strangers who reach back as though participating in something almost religious, because behind him the Bad Seeds continue building the cathedral. The band holds the performance together while making it feel as if it might fall apart at any moment.

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As we stumbled in a gaze back to our tent - past the French youngsters losing their drug-induced minds to thumping EDM - what lingered with me long after the amplifiers fell silent wasn’t Cave’s charisma.

Nor the setlist, nor even the extraordinary energy of a man in his late sixties who performs with the kind of urgency the younger version of himself from The Birthday Party would tip his hat to out of respect.

It was simply the reminder that artistic longevity has little to do with staying relevant, and everything to do with staying curious.

The Bad Seeds have never stood still because Cave has never allowed the group to become the curator of its own museum.

Every album risks disappointing somebody in the pursuit of finding somewhere new to go. Some experiments inevitably resonate more than others, but that is almost beside the point. The willingness to risk failure remains intact.

Perhaps that’s the real difference between a legend and a survivor. One protects a legacy. The other continues building it.

Hello, greetings, and a big and hearty welcome to There Goes My Soul - a bi-weekly newsletter about living creatively by doing less, but better.

I’ve been thinking for some time now about starting a Substack - but like many writers and creatives the thought process of doing so seemed to take up more mental space than actually writing the blooming thing.

Why is that?

Why, when it comes to doing the things we have the greatest passion for - or know will bring us longer-term fulfilment - do we so often get in our own way?

Procrastination certainly plays a part. Many of us will be familiar with the ‘instant gratification monkey’ Tim Urban refers to - otherwise known as that devilish little voice inside that tells us eating crisps and watching YouTube will serve us better than going for that run, working on that business plan, or… starting that Substack.

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I do feel there’s something deeper though. In the technological arms race of our times, where our attention span is pulled in multiple directions at any given point of the day - alongside the fact more and more of us have portfolio careers rather than one traditional job title - pinpointing your raison d’être and minimising, then centralising your focus on the one or two things that really matter is becoming harder and harder.

This certainly rings true of my own lived experience.

The creative ick

Despite working as a copywriter for fifteen years, writing numerous articles for national publications and releasing three albums as a singer-songwriter - it’s only in more recent times I’ve felt comfortable referring to myself as a professional writer.

The primary reason for this discomfort was that in amongst all the writing-based work I can now look back on with a more meaningful sense of perspective, was a solid decade of flip-flopping between different jobs and unfinished creative projects.

Over time, that lack of structure and inability to see things through naturally led to feelings of uncertainty.

It’s also why on a more personal level, in recent years I’ve dedicated a fair amount of time to getting much clearer on what I want my own life to look like. In doing so I was able to consciously remove many of the things I deemed to be taking up unnecessary physical and mental space in my day-to-day existence.

Becoming an essentialist

My process for doing this was and remains based upon Greg McKeown’s 90/10 rule - which along with my own backstory I write about in more detail in my thought piece for The Independent - Essentialism: how the disciplined pursuit of less changed my life.

Becoming an essentialist, which I’d define as a more precise version of minimalism, has been life-changing in that it’s provided a framework upon which I now assess many everyday - and certainly more important decisions - from a clinical, science-based standpoint.

It’s an approach I highly recommend if you find yourself not being quite as assertive as you’d like. It’s also what led me to train professionally as a coach - where I’m now able to help individuals and teams get clearer on their own goals and desired outcomes.

Applying the 90/10 rule

In short, whenever you are presented with an opportunity or decision - you can apply the 90/10 rule as a way of getting clarity on whether or not it deserves your time and effort.

There are of course some non-negotiables to this: eating - sleeping - getting your children to school if you’re a parent.

But in the main, when we take a moment to step back and really assess the amount of decisions we make on a daily basis, it doesn’t take too long to realise most of them are nowhere near as important as we think.

Thus when applying the 90/10 rule to your own decisions, simply:

• Rate an opportunity on a scale of 0 to 100 based on your most important criteria.

• If you rate it lower than 90%, automatically change the rating to 0 and reject it.

• If you rate it at 90% or above, automatically change that to 100% and commit to it.

Cutting the crap stuff

In my own circumstance, the 90/10 rule allowed me to prioritise what’s really important by removing what’s not.

By understanding that my creativity, my personal relationships, my desire to be debt free and thus eventually financially free, and travel were the most important and driving forces in my life - I was able to very quickly push aside the, shall we say, less constructive ways of living that were stemming my productivity and general life fulfilment.

In my case and in no particular order, these behaviours included:

• Regular, recreational drug use

• No discernible career path

• Not staying on top of my monthly finances, incl. paid subscriptions

• A lack of commitment to health and fitness, incl. diet

• A non-committal approach to intimate relationships

Freedom in simplicity

Reading and reflecting on the above now in black and white, it doesn’t take a psychologist to identify why I coasted through most of my twenties and early thirties without any real sense of purpose. And, perhaps more significantly, why I struggled to stay focused on the areas of my life that provided true purpose - particularly my creative pursuits of writing and making music.

That isn’t to say it was all horrendous. I firmly believe there’s a time to coast and enjoy the feeling that sometimes comes with feeling untethered or attached to many aspects of everyday life.

That mindset can’t go on forever though - and I now realise the key is to simplify and get clarity on the few things that are most important to you as quickly as possible. Once these foundations are in place you really do have something to work with.

Committing to the process

Primarily, I want to write every day and thus Substack provides the perfect platform to do so. I also love the fact that Substack supports longer-form thinking - a much-needed alternative to the reel-heavy brain drizzle we’re bombarded with in other forms of social media.

But whatever your inner purpose, taking time to understand it, simplify, and then commit to it warts and all not only leads to greater fulfilment and contentment - but allows you to embrace, and dare I say enjoy the tougher parts of the process with a little more humour and humility.

After all, it’s only by sticking with it during the difficult moments that we benefit from that extra layer of armour that gets added to our mental fortitude.

Onwards we go…

So there we are - newsletter #1 of There Goes My Soul. Thanks for reading and please subscribe if you’d like to read more - I hope that over time we can build a like-minded community of readers interested in what living with purpose means to each of us.

James X