Summer has been lightsome. We were in various parts of the mainland UK for most of it. In the midst of rolling heatwaves, I experienced a small personal revelation: home, during summer, is the place on earth that I would exclusively like to be. All other times of the year are fair game for being anywhere, but Shetland in summer suits me.

Heavy idea disorder

The other revelation was about my own productivity, or more accurately, my unproductivity. I had plenty of time to do things while we were away, the lasses would even go out and leave me to “get on with it” - but those turned into some of the most frustratingly unproductive hours… ever.

In retrospect, I realise that those hours weren’t ‘free’. Being left behind from some lightsome adventure creates an imperative to produce work that is of at least equal value to whatever you’re missing out on. When that inevitably doesn’t happen, your mindset creeps toward the wrong place for the task; the more you try to brute-force it, the harder it gets, and that effect compounds against itself, until the lightsomeness disappears, and every idea feels too heavy to move.

‘Snatched’ time also isn’t the same as ‘free’ time, and it’s much harder to work with.

Returning to my old ascetic routine now feels chiropractic.

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Rhythm is everything

I’ve just finished reading We Need Your Art, by Amie McNee. She speaks about her routines, and how she discovered the “bare minimum” and “bare maximum” principles for her writing - she set herself ‘bare’ limits of 300 words minimum, and 1,000 words maximum every weekday. She hadn’t discovered this technique for her first novel, which took her six years, written sporadically; 3,000 words on a good day, then weeks or months of nothing - she was suffering from heavy idea disorder too. For her second book she kept to the bare limits, and finished it within six months.

There’s a similar theme among the legends.

In June I read On Writing by Stephen King. He works every day, starting at around 8am, targets 2,000 words, and is usually done before lunch. He produces a first draft in 3 months, from the same chair, with his papers organised in the same way. When he’s not doing that, he reads, voraciously.

Ian Fleming wrote each Bond novel from his house in Jamaica. He’d only work in stints of a couple of months each winter, 2,000 words a day - three hours from 9am with the shutters closed so he couldn’t be distracted by the outside world, then another hour in the evening. He’d put the completed pages into a folder, never to be re-read or corrected until a full draft of the novel existed. Casino Royale only took him a bit more than a month by this method.

Dickens worked from 9am to 2pm with his desk always arranged in the same way. Maya Angelou rented a specific hotel room with no pictures on the wall, and would work from 7am until early afternoon. Hemingway started at first light, then eventually stopped mid-sentence when he still knew what was coming next, so that he had somewhere to start the next day. Roald Dahl had two daily sessions - 10am to mid-day & 4pm to 6pm in a shed in his garden, sitting in a specific chair with a footstool tied to the chair legs, his legs in a sleeping bag, and 6 pencils which he sharpened before he started.

Rhythm is everything. It seems a boring, predictable routine of timing and setting is needed to make work that’s neither boring nor predictable.

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Nothing good allowed

When we drove North to catch the ferry back to Shetland, I listened to the Steal Like an Artist audiobook trilogy, by Austin Kleon. In Keep Going, the third book, Kleon suggests that if you want to break free from the paralysis of perfectionism, you should just intentionally make bad art. Amie McNee serendipitously suggested something similar in the very next book I read (We Need Your Art).

I’m really interested in trying this, but I’m not actually sure how it would work for writing. Bad sculpture or painting could still be fun to make and look at, but would bad writing be fun to make and read? Bad poetry could be fun. I’d love to try it though - maybe we could try it together?

Perhaps some sort of self-imposed restriction would be the key to making deliberately bad writing. Those automatic captioning tools in video editors often struggle hilariously with the Shetland dialect.

I could dictate something during only the hardest uphill parts of my cycle commute, and publish whatever the automatic captions come up with.

Kleon mentions a spectacular letter from conceptual artist Sol LeWitt to the sculptor Eva Hesse, where he advocates for doing something similar (the bad art, not the cycle-dictation):

“You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO. I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work - the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell - you are not responsible for the world - you are only responsible for your work - so DO IT.”

So, would anybody be up for having some lightsome fun with bad work? I’ll make an article here and keep it updated over the course of a fortnight with whatever comes in. Reply to this email or leave a comment if you’re keen to have some fun with that, and I’ll work out how to get things going. Nothing good is allowed!

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Two cures

So that’s two ideas for helping to shift heavy idea disorder and get going with a project: rhythm (of timing and setting), and making things lighter by doing deliberately bad work (which eliminates the sub-conscious imperative for perfectionism).

Lightsomeness makes more lightsomeness

In my last article, I mentioned the Instagram cycling project that I started recently. In the last couple of weeks, this has turned into such a lightsome undertaking. It’s also challenging some ideas I had about the value of social media (although admittedly not all of them - the algorithm is definitely still a machine that mines the ore of you, and it’s easy to find yourself chasing the cheap social media dopamine).

Every day now across the 28-mile cycle, drivers will peep as they pass, folk will wave out their windows, they’ll flash their hazards after they’ve carefully gone by, it’s great. Some people will even turn around and deliver a careful overtake just so they might see themselves get a good score on Instagram. Amazingly, I’m getting messages from fellow cyclists in Shetland who say that they’ve noticed an improvement in road safety too, which is the totally unintended but massively lightsome side-effect from something that just started as a bit of light-hearted fun.

This is lightsomeness making more lightsomeness – it really works!

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AOB

So with all this going on, there’s a few things related to this project that I’ve been thinking about.

Firstly, I’m thinking about trying to do something more for people who have supported this project as paying subscribers / donators. At first I thought the lightsome thing to do would be to just keep everything the same, everything accessible to all subscribers - but there’s something working on me in relation to that, and consulting the lightsome filter has been inconclusive. I’d like to do something for the people who have supported the crofthouse project - contributions have really helped with the costs of the concrete foundation work we’ve been doing this summer, which - a bit like Hemingway’s half-finished sentence - will really set us up for a good run at it next year once the weather improves again. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish it before the end of 2027!

Related to that, I’ve been thinking about ways that I can “unite the ecosystem” of different things I’m making and doing in different places (as suggested by my colleague Tom). The Instagram cycling project feels pretty different from the philosophy of lightsomeness… they’re both lightsome though, so there must be a way to connect them somehow. Similarly, I enjoy doing different kinds of writing - the essays, and things like this that are more like journal entries. Other kinds of creative writing too. It could all go here.

I’ve picked up a few (basic) video editing skills from doing the cycling reels, so I even wondered about doing some video stuff too.

I’d love to hear what you think.

And let’s do the worst work thing - nothing good allowed!

Mind and be lightsome tae een anidder!

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I’ve just had a couple of weeks partly-off, which was only partly-planned - the evening before Nena and the bairns left Shetland, I still wasn’t sure if I could spare the time to join them.

In the end, I surrendered the decision to the lightsome filter, which of course said “joining them is the lightsome thing to do”.

It has been great. But despite my best attempts, I’ve not quite been able to get the work monkey off my back, partly because I didn’t do a very neat job of self-establishing whether some of the purpose of coming south was about rest. I’ve always struggled to feel completely disconnected from work while I was on leave - I think it’s a function of the kind of jobs I’ve had, and I dare say you might know what that feels like.

Rest and futility

I’ve spent the cracks of the fortnight reading Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - if you’ve not read it, I’d recommend checking it out. The central idea of the book is that rest is not an absence of work, but a skill in its own right that needs to be trained and developed. Rest definitely isn’t lying around on the couch; it’s about consistent routines and working days, and serious, structured hobbies that Pang calls “deep play”. The book makes the case that rest is active and should be taken as seriously as the work that it restores you from.

The ideas in the book were squashed around a stone of an idea that I already had about how to rest. Tom (my Voar partner) mused a couple of years ago that “for something to be truly restful, it has to be futile”.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to completely accept this as a truism; that recuperation requires doing something that isn’t just relaxing, or enjoyable, but of essentially no purpose. For something to be perfectly restful, it can’t make you money, advance your career, or produce anything that anyone needs. The moment the activity starts being good for something, it creates duty, and stops being rest. That’s the practice I’ve experimented with anyway.

Tom described Rod Stewart’s model railway as an example of futility theory (that’s what we’ll call it now). Rod spent 23 years building the model city by taking it on tour with him so he could work on it between shows in the dedicated hotel rooms he would book for it. It had no reason, no reward, but it was described by Rod as the most supreme relaxation of his life - its only purpose was to be restful. He poured countless hours of life into something that would never really be of use to anybody, and certainly wouldn’t act to further his career, which is presumably why he kept it fairly quiet at the time.

Absorption > mastery

At first I thought Pang’s ideas were in conflict with futility theory. His deep-players were often building real skill in the things they did for rest. I had a small existential crisis before realising that he wasn’t suggesting the pursuit of mastery was the thing that’s driving the restoration in deep play - people were becoming good at their serious play activities through the benefit of nothing more than consistent practice. Rather, the restoration he was describing came more from absorption - from being completely committed to the thing whose stakes are isolated from the rest of your life. This is another key idea that’s shared between futility theory and deep play - that perfect restoration requires doing something where the stakes of that activity are isolated in some way from the rest of your life.

So why should uselessness be restful? Does meaning not come from purpose, and is life not made good by what it’s for? Maybe, but meaning and purpose are different than rest, restoration. I wrote last month that “to make something, is to mean something”. Meaning is of course one of the most important things to find, but the big risk is that if you don’t build deliberate rest around that pursuit, you could burn-out from the very thing you feel you’re meant to be doing.

If you opt to do something for rest that could pay off in money or a result that you could be judged on or measured against, then a corner of your brain keeps an eye on the outcome. You can’t fully put down an activity if some part of you is still hoping the activity amounts to something, so it loses an essential element of its restfulness. Choosing to do something that’s futile is the only way to make sure that every part of you is completely off duty, and to eliminate any remnants of obligation.

I’ve experimented with different kinds of rest, often small projects that organically crop up - much smaller than Rod’s model. For about 20 years, I’ve recorded music that basically nobody will ever hear – it’s not very good, and it’ll never be published or uploaded anywhere. But the act of making it is deeply restorative. I used to record music with my good friend Ewan – a supremely talented musician. We’d write and record numerous tunes in a night (think Frank Zappa at his most surreal), and then on other nights, we’d listen to them and analyse them. We must’ve recorded 4 albums worth of songs that would only ever be heard by the two people that made them – there was never an intention to share them, so it was futile from the very start. Like Rod’s model, I now recognise this to have been a project of almost pure relaxation, completely isolated from all other stakes of life.

Futility can die

But futile projects can lose their futility, if you’re not careful. I recently got one of those action cameras that I could stick to my bike helmet to film my 50-minute bicycle commute. I decided to edit the footage down to only the moments where a car overtook me. Later, I decided to score each overtake “oota ten”, in the persona of an aloof adjudicator. I had great fun making these videos, and for a while it was perfectly, gloriously futile.

I uploaded them to Instagram, and quite quickly, people started to watch them, and without realising what was happening, the futility started to be replaced by something that had some (very small) stakes. I could see how well each video was performing. I could optimise the format to get more interactions. Before long, I had over a hundred thousand views. The local radio station got it touch. People were suggesting that the act of rating local drivers was improving cyclists’ road safety.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s loads of fun, and I can’t wait to get back to Shetland to make more of them, but the act has moved from the realms of pure pointlessness, to a thing that has some very small stakes attached, so it no longer fits perfectly into the category of rest.

In the lightsome manifesto I wrote about the machine that mines you (the ore) for your attention. The same machine can come for your rest as well. There’s Alanis Morissette levels of irony in the fact that I fed the cycling videos - the very things I’d made in an effort to step away from the attention machine - right back into it.

So now I realise that you need to be more deliberate about the pursuit of rest. Maybe learning something with no conceivable application. Reading for the sake of it is great - classic rest. Go up a hill, or go off in a boat.

The futility checklist for perfect rest

• Do you want it to make you money?

• Does it advance your career?

• Can you be measured, rated, or judged on it?

• Does anyone else actually need what it produces?

• Are its stakes woven into the rest of your life?

If you answered “yes” to any of these, then the activity isn’t futile, and it probably won’t fully rest you.

The prescription, therefore, is to find some project or activity that’s perfectly uselessly futile, protect its uselessness, make sure you separate its stakes from the rest of your life, and whatever you do, don’t upload it to Instagram!

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I’ve always found it strange that we count years in arrears: you’re born zero, and only once you start your second year, do you turn one. For most of my life I’ve advocated [to no one other than my internal monologue] for scrapping the whole ‘milestone’ convention in favour of a ‘level’ one, like a computer game: you’d start on level one from the day you’re born, turn two the moment you start year two. When the universe stops Daniel-ing, I want the record to show how far I got, not to look back at the last milestone I hurtled past.

Today, though, for the first time in my life, the established convention is serving me well - I can spend the year perfectly truthfully lying that I’m still in my 30s. A surprise birthday present from the ancestors, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that it makes no sense.

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Anyway, here are five lightsome things that I’ve learned so far:

1. The equilibrium of sufficiency

What sufficiency looks like is yours to draw. For me it’s an old, whitewashed house no bigger than we need; a garden that grows vegetables, sheltered by trees; a small boat I can use to catch enough fish to keep us going; a shed to fix things, and a room to read and write in; enough steadiness for the bairns that they can pursue their own sufficiency, in their own community, or further afield if they want to; a few good friends, and a well examined life.

In a stressed-out world with finite resources, the idea of dedicating a life to grabbing more than one’s fair share feels pretty unlightsome. There’s something kind of beautiful about the equilibrium of perfect sufficiency. I’m not speaking about some sort of ascetic poverty, because poverty is unlightsome too, but the accurate pursuit of what you need for a good life.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a zero-sum game; you can still build money-earning pursuits that act as your means of realising the equilibrium of sufficiency, and I’d actually advocate for that as one of the most satisfying ways you can get there – doing it under your own steam.

I spent most of my thirties aiming way beyond sufficiency, and to an extent, achieved that at the time. I was an engineer, got promoted into corporate roles, ran businesses, got the MBA.

But the pursuit of wealth and status for its own sake, with no purpose under it, felt shallow, then increasingly repulsive. I used to think that money and status was the ticket to getting the most out of my time on planet earth, but I learned it was the opposite; the cost of it was that you missed far more than you caught.

When Kahneman and Killingsworth finally settled their long-running argument about money and happiness in 2023, they found that wellbeing does rise with income - but on a logarithmic curve. You have to keep doubling your money to feel the same small lift, and for people who are already unhappy it mostly just buys a bit of relief rather than joy.

So it isn’t quite that money can’t make you happier. It’s that more money has a terrible exchange rate with happiness. With that in mind, it becomes an absurd and inefficient thing to build a whole, finite existence in the pursuit of money and status, particularly when the equilibrium of sufficiency is arguably the best available outcome.

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2. Freedom is wealth

Freedom isn’t absolute, it’s a gradient, and most people have more room on the gradient than they might think. You can be in a salaried job, doing important and fulfilling work, and find real liberty in it. The trick is recognising the limits of what you can give to a job, before it starts to feel like an inequitable exchange of freedom.

I was 35 when I stepped away from corporate employment - the ladder and the chain - for something closer to the work of a survivalist: my own venture. The yards have been hard, and I could’ve earned far more, far more easily by just staying on a comparatively comfortable corporate ladder and climbing up a rung at a time. I traded that option for periods where I wouldn’t pay myself anything at all, just to keep the thing I was building moving forward.

But, holy shit, the freedom has been absolutely spectacular. When the bairns have a daytime concert at the school, I just go. I take far fewer days off than a corporate job would have given me in annual leave, but I never feel it, because building something feels natural in a way that working often doesn’t.

It feels like I’ve unlocked the ability to see a new spectrum of colour or something. I couldn’t go back now. Some things have never been tougher, true, but it’s revolutionised my sense of what I want - and what I want is this.

3. Find your taste

There’s one particular moment, when you’ve experienced just enough of a thing - it could be anything, it could be an author or a particular band - to declare: “I love this.” Knowing yourself well enough to know what you love, and the ever-running business of collecting those things is peak lightsomeness.

The music I love - and the way I use it for soundtracking - mashes together in a way that’s probably unique to me. If I’m travelling, I’ll have that album by Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaValle downloaded for the flight. I only ever listen to Pantera when I’m alone in the car, and audiobooks when I cycle. I only wear black Levis 511 jeans, but not when I’m cycling. I like the drumming of a snipe’s tail feathers in the late summer air and sea pinks on a road verge. I’m in awe of the work of Robert Macfarlane, and it’s a toss-up between No Man’s Sky and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 as the most perfect computer game ever made.

The process of finding and compiling the things you love runs through your entire life, and I think it’s probably one of the few things that has no reason to slow down as you get older. Adding to the compilation of your personal taste through your life and noticing as you do is exceptionally fulfilling work.

4. Read books

For such a high-information age, there seems to be a lot of low-information opinions. I’m convinced it’s because almost every form of media has become shortened, with the single aim of maximising emotional responses.

Books are the last place left where a person can do the long, slow work of unpacking an idea over hours, or days. A single book might hold years of someone’s examination into a subject.

When you read, a person speaks to you across time. There’s no purer way to tune, completely and privately, into another mind. It’s actually a kind of miracle, when you think about it: a person using nothing but shapes in ink on paper, sets off an action in your neurons that precisely mirrors the one in theirs - potentially hundreds of years after they scribed the thought. The precision of an idea, so carefully set out, beats the imprecision of an emotion felt through the incomplete information that we colour in with our own prejudices. Think how lightsome it is that we can do that.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive scientist, reckons that the circuits behind this kind of deep reading aren’t guaranteed or permanent - you only grow them by using them, and a life of scroll-and-skim lets them waste away.

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5. The 90s were peak civilisation

Sorry, no evidence or capacity to debate this - you’ll just have to subscribe if you agree! Thanks for reading, and be lightsome to each other 🙌

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Think of a person who has a knack for leaving a room brighter than they found it. It might not be the loudest or the funniest person, likely not the one with the most impressive career; not necessarily an extrovert, not necessarily an introvert - it’s the person whose presence uplifts you, instinctively.

In their presence, you become unburdened of a weight you’ve been carrying, and you turn into the truer version of yourself. They didn’t do anything in particular; but while you were near them, you seemed to pick up a bit of the same quality.

There’s a word for this: Lightsome. Lightsomeness.

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Lightsomeness is trust, warmth, generosity - and fun - fused into a way of being. Cheeriness is too shallow a word for the breadth of it, and it’s not niceness either - niceness is paint - a person can be relentlessly nice and still be mean-spirited. Nor is it agreeableness: full-spectrum agreeableness is the camouflage that lets a person say one thing and believe another.

So what does it look like? A lightsome person’s attention is turned outward, toward others. They extend the benefit of the doubt before you’ve done anything to earn it, and receive you as the best version of yourself. Everyone is treated the same; there’s no hierarchy of civility. They’ll tell you the truth, and leave your dignity intact when they do. People who disagree with them are not their adversaries. And it isn’t a mood - it’s more like a climate. Lightsome folk have shite days like everybody else; the point is that the overall disposition survives bouts of bad weather.

Lightsomeness works in the dark as well as the light. It isn’t the denial of the hard parts of life; it’s how the good parts are carried through them.

Underneath all of it is the thing you could tattoo on the back of your hand: be a source of warmth. Leave the people around you and the world you move through better than you found them.

I’ve written this manifesto because I believe that at this moment in human history, this is the most important and liberating quality a person can have - and that it’s being taken from us on an industrial scale. So this is about fighting that: about building a life out of consciously lightsome choices.

THE UNBUILDING

Burnout. Languishing. Doomscrolling. Polycrisis. Enshittification. Late-stage… everything. This is the lexicon of the modern era. In the history of language, we’ve never added so many words so fast to describe crises of meaning.

There’s a new velocity to anger, too. Somebody says something you disagree with online, and the airlock opens, and out rushes whatever warmth you might have extended to them. You watch disagreements in the comments spiral past the limits of civility; the other side are obviously folk with a fibre deficiency of some moral variety.

But it’s not just in the digital arenas. Here’s the feeling - expressed in Shetlandic - of the discontent that creeps into the real world:

Da hael stirnin lok o wis wir gittin caulder. First by ee degree, dan bi anidder. Bit du dusna notice wan degree.

_{The whole shivering lot of us were getting colder. First by one degree, then by another. But you don’t notice one degree.}

None of this is caused by natural disaster - it’s all manmade. Engineers and psychologists worked out that division is the most engaging (and profitable) thing; they figured out that outrage travels faster than warmth; and that the ire thrown off when folk turn against one another could be farmed. Facebook wrote it in an internal memo in 2018: their algorithms, they admitted, “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” At that point, it became the main purpose of the machine.

The unbuilding of institutions, economies and public wealth is its most visible work, but all of that only gained momentum on the back of something more fundamental: the unbuilding of trust. “The unbuilding” is the term that I’ve landed on for what’s going on.

Eventually, the peace that balances on trust starts to go, and so too does the collective agreement that there are lines we won’t cross, things we won’t do to each other. Each peace is built on the wreckage of some previous catastrophe, but if we ignore that, the unthinkable starts to become thinkable, and the moral contortion to justify it becomes its own arena for conflict.

After peace goes, eventually the law that held it does too. The law is the idea that power is not the only argument - that there should be rules above the strong. We live in an age where international law is being shown to be what economists call a “confidence good” - valuable only as long as there is a collective belief in it. Confidence goods look permanent until the common belief holding them together gives way to common doubt.

The danger of unbuilding trust is that everything else is stacked on top of it. I’m self-aware enough to know how this sounds - tracing a line from a facebook disagreement to the failure of international law - like finding a crack in the plaster and concluding the house is going to fall down. But the line is there, it’s just long. When we lose the capacity for everyday goodwill in small interactions, the bigger architecture of societies eventually begins to fracture. The erosion of everyday trust collapses civil trust, which is the thing that’s now visibly happening.

The whole apparatus I’ve just described is protected by a lie that you hear all the time: that coldness is just realism - a fig leaf for cruelty. That we have to be savvy, refuse to be a mug; that good faith is a luxury we can’t really afford, and that the people who long ago turned into stone-cold pragmatists were simply the ones who saw things clearly. Psychologists call this the “cynical-genius illusion”: we assume the cynic is the clever one, when the research points, if anything, the other way - cynics tend to do no better on tests of competence, and often a bit worse.

But lightsomeness was born in the cold and the dark, and it’s the tough-as-granite antidote to the age of unbuilding.

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THE WORD

Give a thing a name, and you make a way of seeing it.

In English, “light” is not one word, but two. One is the opposite of heavy - as light as a feather, light-hearted, making light of something - and it comes from an ancient root for weightlessness, the same root that gives us “levity”. The other “light” is the opposite of dark; it comes from a totally separate root, for brightness, and it surfaces in “lucid”, “luminous”, “lunar”. The two shared no roots for millennia, until some Anglo-Saxon collision forced them into the same five letters.

Lightsome is the rare word that took its inheritance from both. So to be lightsome has always meant two things at once: to leave a person lighter, and to leave them brighter. Unweighted, and warmed - which happens to be the exact two things the unbuilding is in the process of taking from you.

Shetland came to the word by two roads. Lichtsome, the Scots form, carries the weightless light: glad, cheery, unburdened - a lichtsome hert, a lichtsome step.

But beneath the Scots, and older than it, lay the Norn, the old Norse tongue of the islands. It suffered a juddering extinction - its last native speaker was gone by 1850, its last fluent talker by 1925, and the last rememberer by 1956. A whole language went into the ground, but it left fragments behind in the way the islanders still speak.

In Norn, ljóss meant “bright”; ljósum, meant “by the light.”

So the word reaches us carrying a different light in each hand: the weightless one from Scots, still spoken today, and the bright one from Norn, which has gone now.

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THE REBUILDING

So how do we get it back?

The unbuilding isn’t one enormous, centrally-coordinated programme. It’s made entirely of millions, billions of individual acts. From a distance it looks like an unstoppable force. But the rebuilding is made of small acts too - the cure is the same size as the disease. We’re not outgunned, because we’re just as numerous as the thing we’re up against, because it and we are of the same material: ordinary people.

It begins with a total, bloody-minded refusal to give anything at all, to contempt - to unlightsomeness. When the airlock opens and you feel the warmth start to rush out of you, set your foot against the door. Refuse recruitment. It’s a tiny thing, but the whole machine runs on participation, and you can simply choose not to participate.

Refusal, though, only holds the line; it doesn’t rebuild. To rebuild, you have to add something – a brick. And the most concrete way to do that is to make something. Put a thing into the world that wasn’t in it before.

Write a page and stick it up on your Substack (yeah, I see the irony - use the machine to climb out of the machine - but Substack seems lightsome). Plant some tatties. Draw. Make music. Paint the fence. It doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t have to be any good, and you don’t have to show it to anybody if you don’t want to. It only has to be real and made by you.

It used to take real effort to consume; at some point - probably around the 2000s - that flipped, and a fork appeared in the road. On one side: consumption. The hours of life poured away on the feed. Mined, extracted from, you are the ore. On the other side: making. And the instant you put the phone down and make something real with your hands, you walk clean out of the mine. You can’t be contempt-mined while you’re putting up a shelf. The machine has no purchase on a person whose hands are busy making something.

And a made thing is the exact opposite of the unbuilding. This, I’ve come to believe, is where the missing meaning went - the meaning so many of us hunt for: it’s not vanished, but buried under a thousand hours of being mined, when it was waiting the whole time on the other side of something made. To make something is to mean something. It’s the difference between being a person and being a resource.

But why would painting a fence or planting tatties matter to the broader architecture of trust? Because physical creation anchors you back into the heavy, slow reality of things that take time and effort. It needs patience, persistence, it forgives mistakes. It beds-in an outlook that’s the exact opposite of what the unbuilding needs, and every time you do it, you’re training that muscle. By engaging with the physical world, you can restock your own reservoir, and shift from being a node in a reactionary outrage loop, to a generative, more-easily-lightsome human. And that person, recruits others.

The longest (and probably most widely cited) study of human life ever run - Harvard’s Study of Adult Development - has followed the same people for more than eighty years, and found that the single strongest predictor of who ended up healthy and happy was not money or status. It was the quality of their relationships. The researchers name the active ingredients in almost the same words this piece opened with: warmth, trust, and the sense that you can count on one another. A shame they didn’t have “lightsomeness” to articulate it. The warmth you give away, it turns out, is the thing that decides whether your own life is any good.

So just do that then. Refuse the cold; make something; give it away, and do it again, and again. It’s contagious. If you do it long enough, you’ll become someone who tacks upwind of the age of unbuilding, not a casualty of it, not even a survivor of it, but a builder against it: stubborn, load-bearing. One of the places where the full force of the unbuilding comes up against something it can’t move, and breaks. You are hove-to, and on the lea side of you, the world is more lightsome than it is on the weather side.

Now multiply that by every other person who decides to do the same thing, and that is how you defy the unbuilding.

Be lightsome to each other.

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The days are full of moments like that – experiential things that happen on the edges of other things and go unarticulated. Like being in a room, while somewhere just outside of it, you can hear the people you love occupied by their own busyness – it’s practically a universal experience, but I don’t think there’s actually a word for it. As I write this, I can hear my daughter practicing her piano in the other room. She isn’t playing it for me, and I doubt she’s thinking about me at all. It’s lightsome to be near the edge of other people just getting on with things, particularly when it arrives as the sound of their contentment.

When I was a bairn, we’d go for holidays into Foula – a remote west-of-Shetland island, a small one, only a few square miles. It’s the island where my grandfather’s line comes from. Through the days, we’d fish for trouts and eels in the burn, and in the evenings, half of Foula would pile into the small house we were staying in and play music until the morning.

I remember being a bairn and falling asleep inside that sound – fiddles and mandolins and singing, the thud-thud-thud of feet on the wooden floor keeping time, the smell of pipe smoke from Uncle Ken.

The feeling of all your limbs being heavy as you’re lifted and carried through to a room next door, and the door left open just a crack, so that the orange candlelight and the music could come in after you. The whole room next door enjoying the thing that most closely defines lightsomeness, and you on the edge of it.

Then, one day you look up and realise you’ve turned into a grown-up, and the arithmetic of that means that a lot of the people from the other side of that door are gone now – nobody will smell the smoke of Uncle Ken’s pipe again. That realisation sometimes feels a bit heavy in passing moments, but it’s not a tragedy – it’s the universal truth of life. And the feeling left behind by the lightsomeness of those people is so exact that I can still, all these years later, get back inside the thought of it anytime I want – I can smell the pipe smoke, and I can hear the room.

Years later, I found myself on the other side of the same thing: carrying a small, sleeping girl in from the car after a lightsome gathering on another island, her head heavy on my shoulder – the particular weight that only exists in a small child who has completely surrendered to sleep. The act of laying them down, still in their clothes, and pulling the door not-quite-shut behind you on the way out.

Now she’s too big to carry in without waking. She’s in the next room, playing the music to herself, which is leaking under the door and into the room where I’m working. The same noise of somebody I love getting on with her own life. I’ve been on every side of that door now, from the one being carried, to the one doing the carrying, to the one sitting listening.

Today is one of those rare totally still summer days. Everybody has gone out now, and I’m the only person here. I’m sitting with the window open a crack, and out over the calm water I can hear the tirricks and shalders, some cheeky stirleens “tirrin” around the house, and the lambs bahs, all layered up over one another across the hill. And somewhere, way out of sight in the vast sky, and almost out of range of hearing, I can just make out a laverick singing, so faintly I’m not even sure if I’m imagining it.

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If any of my work about lightsomeness brings you enjoyment, and if you’re able to, buying a subscription will contribute to the restoration costs of an old Shetland crofthouse, which will one day be our family home.

Thanks for your support. 🙌 Be lightsome to each other!

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I’ve only experienced hallucinogenic fever a few times in my life. Not to be dramatic, but I think Gandalf described them best:

“Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as a life age of the earth.”

When you linger for prolonged moments on the periphery of consciousness, ideas start to bleed into each other, and don’t really make sense. In the absence of any spiritual epiphanies, it’s usually not a very productive state.

I had been planning to write the Lightsome Manifesto this week, so that I could make it the pinned article, one that I could keep referring to, but the liminal lurgy has battered me. I didn’t really have the capacity to tackle any of the other themes from my list of ideas, so I thought I’d just do some lightsome free-wheeling this week instead.

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When I think of purgatory I think of two people: Dante of course, and an author, Nikolai Gogol, who was born in Ukraine in 1809, author of Dead Souls, a triumph of Russian literature. The reason I think of Gogol, is because Dead Souls was meant to be a modern three-part response to the Divine Comedy – and the second part was meant to be his Purgatorio.

In 1852, after ten years’ work, Gogol was experiencing crushing creative block. On the night of the 24th February, he burned the manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls. For the next nine days, he refused all food, until he eventually departed his mortal coil. He’d allowed the act of creation to become too heavy.

Creative block feels like it comes from a void of ideas, but it’s actually the opposite. It comes from the difficulty in choosing one thing to focus on and then see all the way through in the presence of a universe of possibilities. It’s creative blockage.

These words are partly a personal incantation as I write them. I’m sitting here on Saturday, looking out at the sea, and down at the four-and-a-half-thousand words and sentence fragments among the noise that I’ve accumulated, in the cracks of the week.

So, I just need to settle on the one thing. That’s the truism: you pick the one thing. Whatever you can uniquely do that wouldn’t exist without you – writing, gardening, fixing something – choose it, ride the momentum of having chosen, and keep it light.

After you get going, the only other thing that can derail you is the pursuit of perfection. Possibility paralysis again – the possibility that doing it differently, might make it better. But unless the thing you’re doing is the last thing you’re ever going to do, you might as well see it through to conclusion for the possibility that the imperfection might just be the thing that makes it great.

The urge to create is (probably) at least 175,000 years old, and it’s foundational to being human – it’s literally the distinguishing feature of our species. An absence of opportunities to create, in whatever form that takes, is – I think – the root of much of our dissatisfaction with modern life. We’ve built a world where it’s easy and addictive to consume and a little bit embarrassing to make, at least at first; the default posture has become the frowning hunch-backed scroll which eats the time we’d otherwise spend making things. Creating things is lightsome, provided you keep the weight of doing it as light as possible.

This week, rather than spiralling down a Gogol-hole at my own inability to make the Lightsome Manifesto, I opted to keep things light. I wrote a lot with pen and paper, and I enjoyed the act of doing it. I like the Pentel EnerGel 0.5mm needletip pens with black ink. I like writing notes and observations in an A6 Stalogy notebook – the paper in it is thin like bible paper, and there’s a satisfying thing about seeing the previously written text ghost through the other side of the pages. For more careful writing – things which I probably won’t burn – I use an A5 MD Midori notepad. I like the cream-coloured paper they use, the transparent vinyl protective cover you can get for them that makes it feel like a schoolbook, and the slightly thicker line halfway down the page.

I read a little bit this week too, but not as much as usual. Lost in Thought, by Zena Hitz, is the book I’ve just started – which turns out to be an argument for the life of the mind as a thing worth having for its own sake, and not because it’s useful. I also ordered another 6 books from eBay – I like cheap used paperbacks that you can buy in bundles to save on postage to Shetland.

None of that was the Lightsome Manifesto, but in a week where I feel like I’ve had the shit kicked out of me, that’s OK, I think. Finishing this short piece of writing and pushing it into the world makes me feel better for having carved out the time to make something, imperfect as it is.

If any of my work about lightsomeness brings you enjoyment, and if you’re able to, buying a subscription will contribute to the restoration costs of an old Shetland crofthouse, which will one day be our family home.

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Thanks for your support. Be lightsome to each other!

I’ve also added voice-overs to my previous articles, which will hopefully allow busy folk to get on with other jobs while listening to them.

I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon to find a few seedlings on the kitchen worktop - Livingston daisies and Alyssum - and, sticking out from the re-purposed cardboard pot, a note in my Grandfather’s hand explaining how they liked to be planted. It’s the time of year where he tends seedlings, many of which will go into his own acre.

The note with the flowers was characteristically specific and instructional: “In full sun. Space 20cm. Height 8cm.”

He and my parents had let themselves into our house for a coffee while we were out, and were gone again before I got home from work. They hadn’t come to see me anyway - they’d come for the open day at the school. Grandad, who’s a retired teacher, was interested to see where his great grandbairns were learning. There was just enough time for a quick game of chess with my eldest daughter, before they had to head north again. She excitedly told me as soon as I came in the door: “it was nearly a draw!” A simple afternoon, but also the whole meaning of life.

A few days earlier, Tom deposited a book on my desk, having read the last thing I wrote about trees and deep time. The book is Jean Giono’s short story “The Man Who Planted Trees”.

Giono’s shepherd, Elzeard Bouffier, spends the better part of forty years planting a forest on land that isn’t his, in a dead corner of Provence. He singlehandedly plants an entire forest, hundreds of thousands of trees, during the period of the two most destructive wars in human history.

Giono wrote:

“When you remembered that it had all emerged from the hands and spirit of this one man, without any technical aids, you saw that man could be as efficient as God in other things besides destruction”

It’s another example of the advance credit of goodwill - nonreciprocal generosity - that, in some small part, defines lightsomeness. Kindness extended first, on no security, to someone who may not have earned it, and who may never repay it. I covered that last week.

This week I’ve mostly been on the receiving end of this kind of lightsomeness: the seedlings; the jar of homemade marmalade my wife’s aunty brought from Thurso; the trampoline that my neighbours brought down the road for our bairns now that theirs have outgrown it; the book from Tom; the pots that my aunty wanted to rehome. Small things, none of them owed, and none of them really repayable.

And yet, when I examine my own instinct for how to respond to generosity, it’s arguably an ungenerous one: reciprocity - to immediately start working out how I can pay the giver back. It’s as if the moment the gesture arrives, an account opens in the back of my head and some part of me enters the debt on a ledger.

I think it’s because unanswered kindness can feel like it leaves you in a posture that you’re trained to dislike, which is one of owing something. But that debt is a mirage, because a present that you pay back isn’t actually a present at all: it’s a trade. As soon as you settle it, you’ve turned what was a warm gesture into a transaction, and everybody’s level again.

In many ways the thing that feels strangest is simply to accept generosity with both hands, don’t open the back-of-the-head account, and then pass the generosity on to somebody other than the person who gave it.

“I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” is the far end of the same spectrum that the imaginary generosity account lives on, and that mindset isn’t actually what grows good societies.

I have an old friend from Ireland, Paul, who has a maxim that I like. “Sure, I’ll see it in the long grass,” he says - it’s his response to the particular situation where somebody tries to immediately repay his generosity.

“I’ll see it in the long grass” is a refusal of reciprocity in the knowledge that, in time, it’ll come back around to him. It defines his basic faith in humanity, and the belief that generosity spreads on a societal scale, rather than on an individual transactional scale.

[As an aside, there are lightsome people everywhere, but the Irish surely have among the highest naturally occurring concentrations of lightsomeness of any people.]

Paul’s faith in other people turns out to be well placed. When researchers traced real acts of generosity through real networks of people, they found that a single one rarely stops with whoever receives it. It takes root and comes up again and again in others - out as far as the friends of your friends’ friends, in people the first giver will never meet. Three degrees of separation - the long grass is real!

While this kind of everyday, unrepayable generosity seems impossible to measure, its closest (more measurable) cousin, charitable giving, is in retreat. The Charities Aid Foundation reckons the share of us in Britain who give or sponsor anything, has fallen in a single decade from around seven in ten, to barely half.

In the US, it’s slipped from two-thirds at the turn of the century to under half. Fewer folk are giving, while those who do give, give more. This is likely a function of changing economies and wealth distribution, but the researchers noted that “giving is no longer a habit in this country.”

We tell ourselves we repay people out of gratitude, but having spent the week ruminating on it, I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. I think we sometimes feel the desire to repay people to subconsciously avoid the small weight of owing something, and to get back to the comfortable place of being all-square. Bookkeeping like that isn’t really lightsome – it’s not the same as Paul’s carefree faith in generosity of everyone.

When you start thinking of generosity as a thing that a society does, rather than an isolated act that ends between two individuals, you start to realise that the feeling of owing something is actually the good part. The sense of being slightly in debt to the community around you is the thing that keeps you tuned outward, and thinking about where an act of kindness could go next.

Debt is probably the wrong metaphor actually, because as soon as you start letting the long grass do the accounting, you’ll probably find you’re about as solvent as a person can get.

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If any of my work about lightsomeness brings you enjoyment, and if you’re able to, buying a subscription will contribute to the restoration costs of an old Shetland crofthouse, which will one day be our family home.

Thanks for your support. 🙏 Be lightsome to each other!

What was the most lightsome act of all time? What constitutes maximum lightsomeness?

Last Sunday, I took my daughters to a volunteer-run community garden. The garden is the product of thirty years of dedication to the singular idea of creating a beautiful place that’s for everybody; a 20-acre oasis of giant wooden vegetation on an island that’s otherwise hostile to the concept of trees.

There’s a great proverb of mongrelised origin that goes something like: “a society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit.” That idea is at least two thousand years old. Cicero quoted the poet Statius Caecilius (b. 220 BC): “he plants trees which will be of use to another age.”

According to research into the origins of this proverb, the idea that tree planting is evidence of a contribution to a great society actually seems to be a relatively recent addition, with that particular angle first being recorded in a testimony given to US Congress in 1992 by a doctor who couldn’t remember where she’d gotten it from.

The thing I like about the idea that this proverb encompasses is that one single individual and one single tree are the smallest possible units of the act - anybody could plant one tree - and a whole society is the biggest possible benefactor of the result. That span, from one to the many, and from now to the far future; that seems like the ultimate span of lightsomeness.

Seven generations

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who are the Iroquoian-speaking native people of north-east North America, have a guiding principle of long-term thinking that is known as the Seven Generations principle. The principle is essentially that for every choice you make (as an individual or a society), you’re compelled to think about the consequences of that choice on the next seven generations. This idea isn’t written down, and it isn’t part of the Great Law of Peace that established the Confederacy close to a thousand years ago. Instead, the principle has been passed down orally for centuries alongside their constitution.

Chief Oren Lyons - the 96-year-old Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, widely thought of as one of the most senior indigenous voices of the modern era - has said: “if you don’t have a moral question in your governing process, you don’t have a process that’s gonna survive.” When I read this, it reinforced for me the relevance of the “is this the lightsome thing to do” filter – a much smaller moral question in a governing process, but the principle he describes, nonetheless.

In a keynote address delivered by Chief Oren Lyons in 2021, he discussed the instructions of the Great Peacemaker - the founding figure of the Haudenosaunee tradition - which have been passed down orally over the centuries:

By this measurement, the seven-generation obligation stretches over half a millennium into the future. It’s serious advance credit of goodwill, extended to people you’ll never meet, or know, and who’ll probably not know anything about you. It’s pure lightsomeness projected outward through time.

Cathedral thinking

Roman Krznaric, in The Good Ancestor, describes an idea he calls cathedral thinking, which is the tradition of starting buildings, knowing the builders will not live to see them finished. This presumably distinguishes it from crofthouse thinking, which is where one embarks on a resoration project which they hope to complete before they die of old age (more on this particular endeavor at the end!)

The most well-known current example of cathedral thinking is probably the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Gaudi took over its construction in 1883 and worked on it for 43 years, until he was hit by a tram in 1926 [an event he may have survived, had it not been for an unlightsome disparity in medical care – they initially thought he was a tramp and it wasn’t until the next day when the chaplain from the Sagrada Familia recognised him, but by that stage it was too late for him to benefit from the extra care which was available to non-tramps].

All the way through the project, Gaudi understood that he wouldn’t live to see it finished. When asked about the pace, he is supposed to have said: “my client is not in a hurry.” The building is still under construction today, a hundred years after Gaudi’s death.

In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, anarchists burned Gaudi’s original plans and models; the next generation of architects rebuilt the design from fragments, photographs, and the recollections of his apprentices.

I think this might be the form of lightsomeness our era is in most danger of losing. We’re arguably better at the small kindnesses to the person in front of us, but we don’t seem to be so good at the bigger longer-term acts.

The climate problem

Climate breakdown is a kind of deep-time lightsomeness problem. Underneath it is the same moral question that the Haudenosaunee have long accounted for: are we willing to pay a price now, that we ourselves will not see returned, so that generations of people we’ll never meet will be born into a world that’s fit to inherit?

Most folk, if asked that in the abstract, would answer “yes” immediately - of course we’re willing. But the deep-time lightsomeness required to actually do it is harder to construct than any smaller lightsome acts that humans might be asked to muster for other present-day beings.

That’s shown in the fact that we have, collectively, been slow to act in the face of the massive evidence that human activities are destabilising interconnected ecosystems. It’s not that we’re inherently bad (well, in intent, rather than effect) - it’s more like evidence that the ancient muscles of deep-time lightsomeness that the Haudenosaunee have diligently exercised, have atrophied under modern conditions.

Over the last three-hundred years, we’ve built a million institutions tuned to next-quarter thinking, next-election thinking. But we’ve built hardly any tuned to next-century thinking.

Ten thousand years into the future

And so - you guessed it - onto nuclear semiotics.

In the early 90s, the Sandia National Laboratories commissioned a team to address a problem that I think is one of the most interesting challenges of the modern age. The problem was that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico was about to start storing nuclear waste in salt caverns about 650m underground, and the nuclear waste would be lethal for at least ten thousand years.

The site needed to be marked in such a way that future civilisations - thousands of years into the future, and who may not have any remaining cultural memory of nuclear physics - would know that they shouldn’t dig or drill holes there.

Ten thousand years is twice the age of writing itself. It’s older than agriculture in Asia and the Americas. How do you leave a message that can survive the collapse of civilisations, and with it, scientific understanding, the birth and extinction of entire languages, and the loss of every cultural reference that we take for granted today; red for danger, arrows for direction, numerals for quantity… skulls and crossbones?

Two parallel teams were assembled, A & B, to work on the problem: an anthropologist, linguist, archaeologist, environmental designer, materials scientist, artist and architect were all recruited.

The report they eventually published in November 1993 (which has become colloquially known as the Sandia report) is 351 pages long, and is full of fascinating analysis and endearingly crude sketches.

The move that the report eventually converged on was to make the WIPP site itself the message, and the meaning of the message would be inherent in the site’s form. They described it as a “gestalt message” - a unified message made up of many parts, which together conveys greater meaning than any of its individual elements.

The proposals were wild. Ideas included building physically imposing structures, such as a Landscape of Thorns - a forest of jagged stone shards, taller than a person, spreading across the desert in all directions; the team recognised that they’d struggle to guarantee its durability over ten millennia - the concrete would inevitably crack - but they included it in the report anyway, in their own words, “because of its strong emotive character.” The Spike Field and Spikes Bursting Through Grid were other similar ideas, vast plains of concrete spikes thrusting from the ground at hostile angles.

The Black Hole would be “a masonry slab, either of black Basalt rock or black-dyed concrete… an image of an enormous black hole; an immense nothing; a void; land removed from use with nothing left behind; a useless place… exceedingly hot part of the year… a massive effort to make a place that is fearful, ugly, and uncomfortable.”

There were other ideas like Forbidding Blocks, Exploded Rubble Landscape, and Menacing Earthworks. They even looked at whether structures designed to resonate in the wind could make sounds which identified it as “a place of great foreboding.”

The construction itself needed to be made from “materials of little value,” with workmanship that “should not bestow any value through the elegance of craft or artistry.” A monument to a thing the builders specifically did not want to dignify.

In the centre, there would be reading walls of granite - deliberately curved, so that the stones couldn’t be easily repurposed - carrying messages in multiple languages at four levels of complexity, with blank spaces for future languages to be added, accompanied by pictograms of progressively horrified human faces.

But the level that the team spent the most time on is the part of the report that has become most notorious; they produced one of the most haunting and strangely awkward pieces of writing of the twentieth century - the meticulously crafted message that the entire construction should ultimately be designed to convey:

This was perhaps the most rigorous attempt our civilisation has ever made to keep strangers safe across deep time.

The Landscape of Thorns is unlightsome. It’s hostile architecture. It’s designed to make a person feel threatened and unwelcome. It imputes dread into the landscape on an almost incomprehensible scale. If you encountered it without knowing the context, you might interpret it as the work of an enemy.

But it’s not the work of an enemy; the harshness is its warmth. A small group of people, on behalf of a whole civilization, were willing to go to great expense in creating something that would survive millennia to keep strangers safe across a span of time longer than recorded history.

It’s actually… maximum lightsomeness.

Two thousand years into the past

At this time of year, I spend a couple of hours cycling back and forth to work each day - it’s the perfect opportunity to explore rabbit holes of thought. This week, I found myself wondering whether any long-forgotten civilisations in the deep past tried to do anything similar for us. Did some now-vanished culture sit down and try to work out how to reach forward in time the way Sandia did?

From the main road, I look east, toward the uninhabited island of Mousa. On it, is a two thousand-year-old broch. Nobody knows exactly what it was for.

It looks a bit like…

So what’s your equivalent of the tree; the small uncompelled thing you could do that nobody will ever thank you for, because the person it’s for hasn’t been born yet? How many generations out is the recipient?

I’m not sure what my thing is yet - maybe it’s a tree. Maybe it’s just as simple as trying to tread a bit more lightly; leave the car and take the bike, even in the rain. I’ll do that this week, and try to think of something that can go more profoundly into deep time.

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Thanks for reading the whole article. Now I’m going to ask you a favour: we’re restoring a small Shetland crofthouse from 1791. It’s probably a 2-year project. I’ll write new Lightsome articles weekly, and everything will of course be free - if any of it brings you enjoyment, and you’re able to, buying a subscription to the Lightsome publication (£3.80 a month) will contribute toward our restoration costs, helping us to bring a small piece of Shetland history back to life, and build our family home. It would be most lightsome of you!

Thanks for your support!

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That’s why I thought it would be good to release these on Sunday mornings - in the hope that you’ll be able to grab a moment with a coffee too, and start the day with something lightsome.

Anyway, I mentioned last week that I would write about lightsomeness and work, so here it is.

There only needs to be one filter

“What if we call it… Lightsome Energy” I suggested. “I don’t like it”, replied one of the other co-founders in our WhatsApp group. Fair enough, it was a shite suggestion.

That was back in late 2020. We didn’t know yet exactly the shape of the thing we were building, but we seemed to have aligned on the quality we wanted it to have. I realise now we had the value before we had the name, which, on reflection, was probably the right way round.

At the time, I was coming to the end of a long decade in the big corporate world of engineering services. The organisation I was leaving had 6 corporate values that were posterised and stuck on walls around the office - usually in the stairwells and bathrooms. Perhaps the research pointed to optimal value absorption occurring during moments of evacuation…

If you’ve ever worked in a world like this, you’ll know how it goes; the more senior a person in the organisation is, the more of their neurons get allocated to first memorising the values, and later attributing things that happen to evidence of their existence.

But when, inevitably, a decision lands on somebody’s desk that pits two of the core values against each other, the decision gets made by some other means - unfathomable core value jujitsu occurs. The reason this happens is not because anybody is being negligent or corrupt, it’s because a values document with six items isn’t actually a values document. It’s a wish list for how the organisation wants to project itself, with very little practical utility when it comes to making the difficult decisions.

We eventually settled on a name for our business – “Voar”, the Shetlandic word for spring – and not long after that we settled on the wording of our one and only core value: “be lichtsome tae een anidder” (be lightsome to each other).

Very quickly, our value became the filter through which we passed all of our meaningful decisions: “is this the lightsome thing to do?” – if it was, we’d do the thing, and if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t. No poster was needed, and only a few neurons.

So herein lies the first lesson of lightsomeness this day: there only needs to be one filter. Not six. If you have six, you don’t have one. It doesn’t have to be “lightsome”, because the word matters less than the singularity of it. What matters is that you have a single question that you can ask of every meaningful decision (in life or business) and that the question produces an obvious answer that feels right, most of the time.

I’ve tested and can recommend using the lightsome filter specifically; it has been pretty transformational for my own sense of humanity over the past few years - you should try it too, see how you get on with it. Next time you have a decision to make, ask “is this the lightsome thing to do?” - then follow the yes.

The fine day policy

We have a thing we call “the fine day policy”. Those four words are the entire policy. The principle is that if it’s a fine day, we have an obligation to enjoy it. The work can wait, but at 60 degrees north, the weather can’t - so you have to grab those days when they come, even if it means dropping what you’re doing, and taking to the sea.

That’s essentially what the lightsome filter actually looks like in practice. It doesn’t do big dramatic work immediately; it does small work, repeatedly, over time.

It’s the decision to give the team a bit more when we have a surplus; to over-deliver (sometimes to a ridiculous degree) on projects, even although the client’s budget covers a fraction of what the work warrants; to sponsor community events, even when the marketing return is, at best… spectral; to make yourself look slightly chaotic or aloof by rescheduling an important client meeting because it clashes with your kid’s school play because you remember that life is a miraculous blink in a cosmic eternity and the point is to create your own meaning before you and everybody you know and love inevitably succumbs to the entropy of the endless void… [breathes heavily]

None of these decisions taken in isolation look like very much. Anybody looking over our books at the end of the year might tap the line and question why potential profits are converting into lightsomeness instead of dividends at such an alarming rate (our bank manager basically does this). But the lesson is that these small acts add up to become a serious long-term investment in a different class of assets: cohesion, reputation and resilience.

The first year of a lightsome company looks like a slightly more pleasant version of a normal business, but by the fifth year, it looks like a totally different species. The dozens of people who’ve worked or collaborated with us over the years all keep in touch. Clients keep coming back, without being able to articulate exactly what they like about working with us, but they know that something just works well about it.

Suppliers too. Suppliers pull out the stops, which in turn strengthens our ability to deliver good things for our clients. Last week I emailed a supplier who had previously shown me their “hopes and dreams” board, which is where they put hopelessly optimistic requests from clients, that are generally impossible to fulfil. The subject of my email to them was “HOPES & DREAMS - HELP!” And guess what happened - they pulled out all the stops, and lightsomeness prevailed. I’ve seen this happen in loads of places, where individual beacons of lightsomeness within bigger, less lightsome organisations are just able to get things done that others can’t.

The trust experiment

When we hired our first employee we devised an employment contract that maximised their autonomy around how and when they wanted to work. No minimum hours. No maximum hours. Nothing that gives the employer the ability to dictate when or how long they’re required to work. We put that choice entirely in the hands of the employee. And it works amazingly - their part of the business runs like a Swiss watch. Sometimes we rearrange meetings so that they can go and work with their animals, and that’s all there is to it.

When I described this to other business owners in our early days, I’d sometimes get a pained look. “What’s to stop people taking advantage?” The answer is: nothing. There is nothing structural stopping anybody in the company from doing six hours of work a week and pocketing a full salary. The only thing stopping it is that nobody wants to.

Douglas McGregor noticed this sixty-six years ago when he wrote The Human Scale of Enterprise. He described two operating assumptions, which he called Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X assumes the average employee, left alone, will work as little as possible and is indifferent to the needs of the company. So you manage through control, surveillance, reward and punishment. Theory Y assumes that workers - given the right conditions - are self-motivated, find meaning in good work, and operate in service of the things they’re committed to.

McGregor’s fundamental finding was that the choice becomes self-fulfilling. “Force breeds counterforces”. Manage as if Theory X is true and you produce Theory X employees. Manage as if Theory Y is true and you produce Theory Y employees. A lightsome company runs on Theory Y by default.

The cohesion machine runs on trust, while the extraction machine runs on the opposite. Most organisations sit somewhere on the spectrum between the two. I’ve visited some cool boutique consultancies in the Nordics that are closer to cohesion machines, and plenty more large businesses that are closer to extraction machines.

The opposite of trust, in an organisational sense, is surveillance; time-tracking software, approval chains for small expenses, manager-approved holiday requests for adults in their forties. At its most extreme, it’s the presumption - baked into the architecture of the organisation - that employees are coiled springs of pie-eyed imbecility who will sporadically make choices with lurching unpredictability that harm the business.

The rigs and the commons

Before the agricultural improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries swept it away, Shetland organised its subsistence agriculture under a system called run-rig. The arable land of a township was divided into long (sometimes s-shaped) strips, and the strips were periodically reallocated among the families. The point of the periodic reallocation was that nobody would end up holding all the good ground while their neighbour was stuck with the shitty barren bits. If your neighbour’s strip was poor quality, you’d carry a bit of their load, and the yield would be shared. That’s how people survived.

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It was, by modern standards, inefficient. That’s exactly why the improvers got rid of it. They wanted enclosed fields, single owners, productivity. They got all of those things, but they also got the Clearances, absentee landlords, hollowed-out countryside, and a lot of Shetlanders emigrating to Canada, the US and Australia.

That efficiency was paid for in the cohesion of a way of life that had existed for centuries and then suddenly didn’t.

In 1968, an American ecologist called Garrett Hardin published an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons, arguing that any shared resource would inevitably be destroyed by individual self-interest. Everybody would graze more and more sheep on the common pasture, and the pasture would collapse. The essay became one of the twentieth century’s most influential justifications for enclosure and privatisation of commons. Elinor Ostrom spent the next thirty years showing it was wrong - documenting forests, fisheries and irrigation systems sustainably managed for centuries by the communities that depended on them. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics for it. Commons survive, she found, when the people inside them are able to govern themselves.

The improvers had a way of looking at run-rig and seeing only the inefficiency. What they couldn’t see, or maybe just didn’t care about, was what was being lost on the other side of those improvements. I suspect a great deal of businesses would look at the modern lightsome company the same way. They’d see the money you’re leaving on the table, but not the team that has stayed, the clients who kept coming back, the deep, rich culture of the organisation, and the version of the place you live that exists - in a small part - because the lightsome business decided to behave like part of a place rather than an extractor from it.

The cost of unlightsomeness

In “there are no lightsome arseholes”, I set out six things lightsomeness is and four things it does. The cost of unlightsomeness is what happens when an organisation runs each of those in reverse. Attention turns inward, goodwill is withheld, people behave differently with seniors than they do with junior staff, honesty becomes cutting, and the warmth disappears.

You can see it in folk’s faces, and in the way people perform a version of themselves at work. Maybe you feel like you’re performing a version of yourself - I’ve certainly done it before. People who are themselves diminished produce diminished work. They stop volunteering ideas. They stop disagreeing with the boss, because disagreement costs them something; there isn’t psychological safety. They stop taking the kind of small creative risks that, in aggregate, are what makes a company actually good at what it does.

In Voar, we’ve built small rituals against exactly this. Before we kick an idea around, somebody will usually say “this is a safe space for shit ideas” - which sounds flippant but its actually quite an important statement, because it signals that the cost of a bad idea in the room is lower than the cost of the idea that never gets said. When somebody challenges an established way of thinking the reply is “good challenge” – we use that as a genuine invitation to keep going. These are tiny verbal rituals that are like little stakes in the ground preventing the slide toward unlightsomeness.

Studs Terkel, who collected oral histories of working people in the US for most of his life, put the purpose of work in the best words I’ve found so far:

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor.”

The unlightsome organisation reduces the first half of each of those pairings. It provides bread but not meaning, cash but not recognition. It produces, over years, the slow grind toward torpor that Terkel documented in dozens of his interviews. And eventually people leave - usually long after they’ve already checked out, and come to identify as a Theory X employee.

The financial cost eventually shows up through the customers and the suppliers; they notice when it starts to feel transactional. Over time the unlightsome organisation finds itself spending more and more on business development and customer acquisition because the customers are neither arriving nor staying of their own accord. Recruitment spend climbs. The slide is often the result of a small handful of individual actors, occassionally at the top of a company, more often a level or two below. The good news is that it’s recoverable, with the right interventions, and maybe a little bit of recruitment that places finding a lightsome candidate as the top priority in the business building / re-building process.

Building lightsomeness into your own work

Installing lightsomeness isn’t easy, but it is achievable, and the obstacles are mostly internal rather than external. Here are four things you can do to build it into your own work:

1. Pick the filter; one question, and make it short. Make it something a new employee could understand on their first day. Make it something you can ask of every decision. The filter is the spine. I’d advocate for “is this the lightsome thing to do?” because this is about building a lightsome company after all, but you can pick whatever suits your own setting.

2. Keep using the filter, especially when it costs you something. The filter that only works when it costs nothing isn’t a filter. It’s just handwavy… bullshit. The first time the filter tells you to do something tricky and you override it because it’s more convenient or cheaper or delivers a better short-term return for you or your shareholders, you’ve failed.

3. Remove the apparatus that prevents the filter from working. Most conventional companies have layers of process designed to slow decisions down, on the assumption that slower decisions are safer ones. Slower decisions are usually worse ones, because they’ve been f*cked up by committee until they’ve lost whatever sharpness they originally had. If your filter is sound, you can act on it faster than you currently think is safe. The thirty-second decision is what becomes possible when you trust the filter.

4. If you’re the owner or a leader, you have to be first to pay the price. The price might mean - in cash terms - that you get less. There’s also a kind of psychological cost because the lightsome company isn’t built around a leader; it’s built around the filter. The founder is the first servant of the filter, the person whose job it is to absorb the cost when the filter generates a decision that someone has to absorb.

If you’re not a leader in your organisation, you probably do have a little less organisation-wide leverage, but you’re definitely not powerless. You can install your own filter in your own work. You can ask the lightsome question of your own decisions. You can, over time, become a small pocket of lightsomeness inside a conventional organisation, and pockets of lightsomeness have a way of expanding when they’re not repressed. And if you really have to, you can always leave - because working inside an unlightsome organisation costs you something every day, and the cost compounds the same way the lightsome dividend compounds, just in the opposite direction. Some of the best people I’ve worked with were doing exactly this kind of pocket-of-lightsomeness work, in organisations that maybe didn’t deserve them, and were better for having them.

Here’s the other important thing: lightsomeness wants to spread. It’s not like some kind of hothouse plant that’s a nightmare to keep alive. It’s more like rhubarb. Put rhubarb in the corner of your garden and three years later you’ll probably have an abundance of rhubarb.

The same thing is true for lightsomeness. One person starts using the lightsomeness filter in their own work, a colleague copies it without realising, and a year later there are more of you - and it’s good for your organisation and good for your soul in basically every conceivable way.

As a parting thought; you’ll probably make somewhere between five and fifty meaningful decisions this week, in work and outside of it. Pick one. Ask the lightsome question. Follow the yes. Easy peasy, you can do it. And thanks for reading!

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We’re restoring a small Shetland crofthouse from 1791. It’s probably a 2-year project. I’ll write new Lightsome articles weekly, and everything will of course be free (the lightsome choice!) - if any of it brings you enjoyment, and you’re able to, a paid subscription will be put toward the restoration costs, helping us to bring a small piece of Shetland history back to life, and build our family home.

Thanks for your support. 🙏 Be lightsome to each other!

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Picture a crofthouse, 200 years ago. The stone walls are three feet thick, and they’re keeping out a raging Atlantic storm. You’ve had six hours of grey daylight, but it’s dark again, the sea is black, and the land around you is barren. The laird is an…

Family and neighbours are inside the house. The same handful of faces you’ll see every day for the rest of your life. People used to gather together like this, in the dark months, around whatever light there was. They’d make music in the face of shared hardship, and they’d dance. The room was four walls and finite, and there was nowhere to go but toward each other. And out of that condition came the most concentrated essence of a thing Shetlanders can capture in one word: lightsomeness.

Picture the room we’re in now. No walls and infinite. Billions of faces, and you know almost none of them. You can judge anyone without ever actually meeting them, with no cost. It’s the most populated room in human history, and it’s both the loneliest and the most tribal.

This room has been engineered, deliberately, to do the opposite of what the crofthouse did. The modern room incentivises polarisation and conflict, because that’s how the techno-lairds extract their rents. Social media isn’t just an absence of lightsomeness - it is its antithesis, built line by line on the inversion of every condition that ever produced it. But we sit in it anyway, for hours every day, and wonder why we feel less… lightsome.

But the quality isn’t gone. The crofthouse is gone, but the spirit of it isn’t. It survives in some places, in some people. So, I’ve decided to write about it, and try to keep it alive in the infinite room.

The word comes from a small group of treeless islands in the wild North Atlantic, where its quality has been imbued with the culture of 23,000 people and our Nordic ancestors. It has carried Shetlanders through hardship for centuries; through feudalism, throug the long winter darkness, through loss, the ferocious climate, and the ravages of the modern world.

For the past five years, I’ve been studying it and trying to live by it, and I’ve built a business almost entirely around the idea.

Our business has one single written value: Be lightsome to each other. For every decision, we ask “is this the lightsome thing to do?” If it is, we do it. If it isn’t, we don’t, and find a better way.

I’ll write more about why this approach has been so powerful for the culture of our organisation in my next article.

Another useful way to find the edges of an idea is to hold it up against concepts it isn’t.

Hygge:

The concept that became a massive lifestyle export for Denmark is about creating cosy, intimate atmospheres. It’s a thing you can make; a set of aesthetic conditions. Lightsomeness is different. It can be the quality of a person, a moment, or a place. It can be about how you conduct yourself in any atmosphere, including difficult ones. Hygge is a lifestyle concept. Lightsomeness is a disposition, and a moral concept.

Ikigai:

The Japanese idea of your reason for being is about purpose: the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Writing about lightsomeness might just be my ikigai, but they aren’t the same thing. Ikigai is fundamentally about the individual. Lightsomeness is the opposite. It’s outward facing, about the quality you bring to others. You could have rich ikigai and still be an arsehole. There are no lightsome arseholes. You could be deeply lightsome without ever finding your ikigai.

Ubuntu:

The ancient African humanist philosophy is probably the closest equivalence. “A person is a person through other persons” and “I am because we are.” I think it’s probably based on the same fundamental human truth that lightsomeness is. Both are deeply communal, and both refuse the western individualist frame that has become so corrosive. The difference is, I think, that ubuntu is more deeply philosophical; it’s a statement of what a person is. Lightsomeness is more descriptive; it speaks about a quality that people and moments have, and others don’t.

There’s also a beautiful echo in how old these roots run. Ubuntu traces back to Proto-Bantu, six thousand years old. Lightsome - through its Norn (ljósum, “by the light”) and old Scots (lichtsome) ancestors - traces back through the idea of light itself, which runs all the way to Proto-Indo-European, six and a half thousand years ago.

Today there are plenty of English near-misses, including the much shallower Merriam-Webster entry for “lightsome” but it still takes a stack of words to build something a Shetlander would recognise as embodying all the qualities of lightsomeness.

In the early days of our business, my colleagues and I tried to define lightsomeness in a policy document (I know, what dullards we were), so that employees could understand what “be lightsome to each other” actually meant in practice. As soon as I tried to write it down, the paragraphs felt inadequate - they actually started to feel unlightsome. I’ve been puzzling over that ever since, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the word resists simple description. You need to paint it with examples.

The tightest version I’ve managed to come up with so far are these ten elements: six things lightsomeness is, and four things it does.

I’m going to get into specific aspects of lightsomeness in future articles. But for now, that’s the scaffolding of the idea.

I’ll write new articles weekly. Everything will of course be free (the lightsome choice!), but if any of it inspires you, and you’re able to, a paid subscription would help my family to build our home. We’re restoring a small Shetland crofthouse from 1791, and I have this idea that I’d like it to be “the house that lightsomeness built”, so that’s the mission! It’s probably a 2-year project, so I’ll keep you posted on how the restoration is going! Anything I raise here will go towards that.

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Thanks for your support. Be lightsome to each other!