“What about your phone though?”

The fact that this line gets deployed this way is a little surprising given that it’s literally the claim that “all consumption is unethical”. If someone says “Consuming X is wrong”, and you reply with “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, then you’re actually agreeing with them. If you think all consumption is wrong, you must think the consumption of X is wrong, because X is included in everything.

Yet, the gravity of this is never recognised appropriately. You’d think conceding something you’re doing is wrong would lead to some sort of reflection, and maybe some plans to change your behaviour - but instead it’s said with a shrug, as though there’s nothing else to do or say. The wrongness of consumption is just accepted, which is bizarre because the people that say this line tend to moralise on other issues. Presumably they would not accept an acquiescing shrug when discussing some other harm.

This weird response makes me pause and question what it is people even mean when they say this line. I suspect the points people are trying to make are a mixture of a few readings, and they all strike me as either false, or irrelevant when weighing the morality of a specific type of consumption.

“There is no consumption under capitalism without harm”

One way to understand “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is that “There’s no consumption under capitalism without harm”. The evidence of this is that everything sucks, and you can probably find someone getting screwed over somewhere in every supply chain. Pretty much all supply chains lead to the developing world at some point, and these people get paid measly wages and often have awful working conditions. On some occasions, full-blown slavery is used. The clothes on our backs, the coffee in our mugs, and the very laptop I am typing this from have some level of harm involved in their production.

This is all plausible, but the problem I have with this reading is that “causes harm” and “is unethical” just don’t mean the same thing! Unethical doesn’t mean “causes harm”, it means “unjustified”. It means the action is wrong; something that you ought not do. Something that you are erring by doing. “Causes harm” is too wide a net to cast for the term “unethical”, because there are plenty of actions we can take that cause harm but aren’t unethical.

We cause harm to an attacker when we defend ourselves. We cause harm when we step outside and incidentally step on insects. We cause harm when we vaccinate our children. If a mad scientist was going to blow up the world unless I pin-pricked a stranger, I would be causing harm by doing it - but doing it would not be unethical! In fact, the unethical thing would be to not pin-prick a stranger and let us all die.

So, if this is what someone means when they say “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, I suppose the appropriate response is “So what?”. Plenty of things can be ethical or unethical with varying degrees of harm, so simply stating that harm is ubiquitous doesn’t do much to inform our behaviour. How much harm is this action causing, and what are the benefits? Is this action worth it? These are the more interesting and relevant data points. Merely saying an equation has some negative value in it doesn’t tell you what the whole evaluates to.

“Consumers aren’t responsible for their purchases, the system is.”

One other reading is that none of us are responsible for our purchases. Certainly, this is the way the phrase “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” gets deployed, because it’s rarely used as a call to arms to improve our purchases. Instead, it’s leveraged as a get-out-of-jail-free card for whatever form of consumption happened to be getting criticised at the time.

Firstly, the main problem I have with this reading is that it’s such a drastically different sentence to “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” that it makes you wonder why the person saying it isn’t just saying what they mean.

Also, it’s just clearly false. There are plenty of examples of transactions that constitute wrongdoing. We all agree, for example, that buying slaves is wrong, and slave owners are responsible for it. Paying for revenge porn, fur coats, and hitmen are all rightfully maligned. If someone criticises me for paying for these, it would be absurd for me to turn around and say “but it’s capitalism’s fault”.

This is because we are still responsible for the marginal harm our decisions cause, even if we’re part of an unjust system. Imagine I was part of some system that forced me to either kill one person each day, or kill two people in exchange for a donut, and I consistently chose the latter. It’s both true that it’s the system’s fault that I need to kill anyone at all, and it’s my fault that the extra person is dead. The fact that I’m a subject of an unjust system does not equalise my choices and absolve me of wrongdoing: just as being under capitalism does not mean I’m not morally culpable when buying something excessively cruel.

“Okay, maybe consumers are responsible, but our focus should be on systemic change”

Definitely an argument people use, but notice we’re getting really far away from the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” now. I’m trying to cover every possible meaning, but if this is what someone means when they say the phrase, they need to start taking responsibility for communicating in soundbites that are only loosely related to the point they actually want to make.

Maybe this one is true! Obviously, though, it doesn’t absolve us of consumer responsibility. Hiring a hitman is still very wrong, even if organised crime is a problem best solved systemically.

“All purchases are equally bad”

Why do people say “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” after seeing a specific form of consumption criticised? One answer is that they think it means all purchases are equally bad. Buying meat is bad for animals, but then buying fast fashion is bad for the planet. However you move, someone is hurt, and we’re not in a position to make a choice that’s better than any other.

This is also wrong. The chance that every available purchase harms other moral patients to exactly the same degree is close to zero. There will obviously be variation, and in some cases the variation is large. Buying 1kg of factory-farmed chicken has the expected impact of months of torture. Buying 1kg of tofu has no comparable expected impact.

“No really, all consumption under capitalism is wrong”

Now, maybe the previous sections are misguided because I’m hearing one thing but perceiving it as something totally different. Maybe when people say this they really do mean that all consumption under capitalism is unjustified. It’s wrong, and we ought not consume anything.

This is a beefier claim, and it at least gets the language right, but it leads us to some weird places. The most obvious one is that literally everyone in the world commits a grave evil every day.

I don’t take this to be a reductio on its own. I think eating meat is a serious moral failure and pretty much everyone does that. If you look at history you’ll see large swathes of people engaging in what we now recognise as atrocities. If anything, people engaging in horror en masse is the norm, not the exception.

However, to consider if something is unjustified, we need to inspect what the available alternatives are to us. For example, in Sophie’s Choice, Sophie needs to decide which of her children gets killed by the Nazis. Obviously, it’s awful to sentence one of your children to death, but her only alternative was having them both killed, so I think most people would say she did the right thing in that moment.

Similarly, while factory-farming is a horror show, if there was no viable alternative it’s possible we could justify it. Part of what makes it wrong is that we all have an easy alternative at hand, which is eating plants instead (yes, maybe that’s not true for some edge cases, but it is for the vast majority of us).

So, the wrongness of consumption is informed by the accessible alternatives. It’s only wrong if there’s some other option we can choose that’s better. If all consumption is out, though, the only alternative is to not consume - which I guess means dying?

No really - I’m not trying to be facetious. If it’s wrong to consume anything, that means that we ought not consume. However, not consuming anything seems to condemn us to death. Even if you went off grid and joined a commune or whatever, you still need to buy gear, seeds, materials, etc. I don’t know how someone could possibly survive without ever taking part in a single transaction, besides through theft.

Stopping all consumption would also have awful effects on workers, such as losing their livelihoods, living in impoverished countries, and them starving to death too (because presumably it’s also wrong for workers to consume under capitalism. Otherwise, there would be some form of ethical consumption under capitalism).

Controversially, I think mass suicide through self-inflicted starvation is worse than buying things. If consumption under capitalism is choosing one kid to give to the Nazis, abandoning consumption all together is giving away two. However, if the only alternative to consumption is worse than consumption, then I think it’s fair to say that consumption under capitalism is in fact, not always wrong. At least some purchases of ours are justified.

It’s at this point that people might say “There’s an alternative to consumption under capitalism and death, and that’s socialism!”, but notice I said that the wrongness of consumption is determined by its accessible alternatives. Socialism isn’t an accessible alternative when you’re at the supermarket; you can’t just buy something socialistly.

I don’t mean it’s impossible for countries to become socialist, and maybe we can contribute to that transition, but in the meantime ordinary consumers can’t simply choose to be socialist as an alternative to their consumption. Whether or not you live in a socialist country is out of your control - but if the only alternative to consumption under capitalism is death, or having a systemic change that is out of your control, I’d argue it’s generally permissible for you to consume under capitalism - meaning it’s not unethical.

I should say I think it’s wrong to consume some things. The phrase “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” seems to attempt to equalise every purchase. You criticise factory-farmed meat, and then someone points to your phone and shirt, and seems to imply that every purchase is as bad as every other. Again, this is clearly off-base.

It’s worse to pay for a hitman than it is to buy an apple, and it’s worse to buy factory-farmed meat than it is to pay for a taxi; clearly, there’s a range of badness at play here, and it’s plausible some purchases have benefits big enough, and costs small enough that they’re justified. However, even if you disagree that at least some purchases are justified under capitalism, you probably think we should have some moral guardrails on our purchases, otherwise you’d think it’s okay to pay someone to push over old ladies and lay them out in a swastika or whatever.

This range matters, and pretending it doesn’t exist results in major harms to others that can easily be avoided. Even if you think all purchases are bad, to equate them all is lazy and a cop-out.

That sort of change over a 4 year span should make you expect a future that’s very different to the life you’ve lived so far. You don’t need to be a superforecaster to tell that AI will eventually surpass us in every domain, and clearly that will have tectonic consequences for the world. What does it look like to have a digital agent who is to us what we are to ants? I don’t know, but assuming we can keep it from wiping us out, it’s plausible to think it will solve the problem of aging. There’s no reason to think that’s impossible in principle, and while it might seem like magic to us now, there are plenty of things we do that seem like magic to apes (for example, building whatever it is you’re reading this off of, and the very practice of reading itself).

Given you should think there’s not an insignificant chance you’ll live a very long time, that should inform some of the actions you take now. After all, if people from 200 years ago lived to make it to today, they’d probably feel a bit sheepish about some of their behaviour. The only thing protecting them from our collective scrutiny is their mortality, which is a blessing you and I may not share. We could find ourselves in a conversation with people born in the 2100s, and they will certainly have questions about what it is we were doing before the world changed forever.

Our Great Shame

Undoubtedly, factory farming is going to look like barbarism to the people of the future. The evidence of this is that it looks like barbarism to the people of the present, which is why we pay people to do it behind closed doors and don’t ask questions. The reason we currently persist with it is likely just historical inertia, status quo bias, and the discomfort that comes from knowing that if you make a change on moral grounds, you have to concede you were erring for a long time beforehand.

Part of the reason we’re able to go along with this quietly is that everyone else is engaging in it too. We don’t feel like our actions are worthy of scrutiny because if they are, everyone’s are, and that simply can’t be true. It can’t be that a whole society is perpetuating a great evil - surely that’s never happened before!

I expect this shared and unspoken dissonance will shatter in the coming generations. Sure, you might not feel scrutinised by your peers now, but what about people born 100 years from now who have never eaten an animal in their life? When every burger someone has eaten was grown in a lab, the methods we use to get them now will look completely unhinged; and the longer we live, the more shameful the memory of factory farming will become. In a world where no animals are killed for food, the very concept of eating another living being could become depraved ferality in the eyes of others.

Now, you might think that we’ll be able to turn around and say “Well back then, it was the only way we could get meat”, but I highly doubt they’ll accept that as an excuse. Of course, they will know there were some people living without consuming animal products at all, and they will (probably wrongly) think that they’d have been one of the people to abstain. Much like how people look back at the rise of fascism in the 20th century and think “I would’ve been one of the good guys! I would’ve joined the resistance and stood up for freedom!”.

If we think we would’ve risked our lives to fight fascists, people of the future will easily think they’d have ordered the tofu, and they will judge us for not doing so. Seems like if we don’t want a dark cloud following us everywhere we go, the prudent thing to do is to stop exploiting animals now so we can look like freedom fighters instead of violent oppressors.

The ROI of Longtermism

Longtermism, the view that future people matter and we should take action to improve their lives now, gets a bad rap. It’s often held up as one of the ways EA has gone off course. You’ll hear people say things like “Yeah, I was on board when it was all malaria nets and clean drinking water, but Longtermism and shrimp welfare? This is just getting bizarre.” - and yes, to be fair to those people, the way EA has gone is a bit wacko.

However, we should expect ethics to progress in strange and bizarre ways! Our ethics would look unrecognisable to people alive 100 years ago, and theirs unrecognisable to the people 100 years before that. Also, the basic premises of Longtermism are perfectly reasonable:

1. Our choices now have enormous consequences for the people of the future - Clearly true, given that we still live on one planet but will plausibly expand, and we’re currently moulding what will be our last and most impactful invention.

2. Future people matter - This is the controversial part, but I think is also true. If I drop a glass on a hiking trail, and a kid cuts themself on it years from now, does it matter if they were born the day after I dropped it? If I look at their birth certificate, and I see they were born the day before, have I now done something wrong by not cleaning it up? Seems like a silly thing for the badness of my action to be contingent on.

Much like boycotting factory farms, I think we should be Longtermist for its own sake - because it's the right thing to do. However, also like boycotting factory farming, I think it’s a decision that's personally prudent because it will age well. The main reason Longtermism sounds silly today is because all the future people we’re supposed to care about aren’t here yet. When they are here and they vastly outnumber us, being someone who can say “Oh yes, I realised the responsibility we had to help you lot” will make you look pretty good. We actually see this sort of thing already when people laud old people for planting trees in whose shade they’ll never sit, and criticise the boomer generation for destroying the planet (whether or not that’s actually true is beside the point, I’m just saying we already hate on past people for their perceived failure to fulfil their responsibilities to future people, and that's some heat I'd rather go without).

Rehabilitating our Retributivism

We currently have a strong intuition that people that do bad things really deserve to suffer for their wrongdoing. Retributivism is the default view, and you can see evidence of this whenever a news story breaks of someone breaking a law, or a celebrity's old tweets get resurfaced. Compassion is an uphill climb for us, but we effortlessly flow into mobs like water seeks the ocean.

Now I'm not gonna sit here and act like I'm enlightened and don't do this exact thing all the time too. I don't feel compassion for Vladimir Putin, murderers, or even people that watch YouTube videos without headphones on the train. The instinct to hate those who do wrong is clearly embedded in us deep, and it takes tremendous effort to focus purely on rehabilitation.

However, I suspect that as time goes on, the justification we have for retributive punishment will become weaker and weaker. We've seen this already. Conditions we now consider mental illnesses used to be seen as moral failings. If you had PTSD in WWI, people may have shot you for “cowardice”. The more we learn about the brain, the more compassionate we become towards people with anti social behaviour. It’s possible that all anti social behaviour is like this (however awful it may be), and our urge to punish bad people for punishment’s sake may start to look like hitting kids with ADHD for being distracted in class.

Maybe this won't happen, maybe we'll always leave some room for Retributivism, but I suspect being a rehabilitationist is the safer bet for a future where people will understand everything there is to know about the brain. It's less socially risky to be seen as a softie than it is to be seen as someone being cruel to the mentally ill. Compassion rarely ages poorly, but revenge sometimes ages into callousness.

Other considerations

Some other things that strike me as prudent:

1. Don't die - If there’s an enormous amount of upside in this possible future, it seems sensible not to do risky things in the meantime. It would suck to be the last person to die against their will. So, I would exercise, eat well, stop drinking/smoking, and avoid unnecessarily risky activities such as skydiving or whatever. Personally, I'm not a great driver and currently have no car, so will probably just use public transport until self driving is commonplace.

2. Invest - If you invested $100 in the S&P 500 in the 80s, it would now be worth thousands of dollars. Long term, stocks beat leaving money in a savings account.

3. Cultivate healthy coping mechanisms - Change causes stress, and as I've argued, we may be scrutinised in the future for things we're not currently aware are bad. It's worth developing a self compassion practice. A meditation or stoic practice will probably help too.

4. Be open minded - You are probably wrong about a lot of things. I expect our lives will look like one humbling after another as society progresses. It would be a tragedy to get left behind because we stupidly think everything we were taught as kids was infallible.

5. Journal - Honestly, I lack the discipline to do this myself, but I bet it would be great to go back and read a journal from now when you're 300 years old. It'd be like reading your toddler thoughts. A window into a totally different life and person that you can't access anymore. Would be great to share with future generations too.

I wrote this on my phone on a train and can't get the mobile site to delete these subscribe captions, so enjoy the triple prompt and the strange formatting. Maybe you should subscribe 3 times? Y’know, just to be safe.

Of course they were wrong, and I sat there in my tin foil hat waiting for them to come groveling at my feet and admitting I was right - which they eventually did (well, they told me I was right at least, the groveling part was just drawn on my vision board). Naturally, this felt very good, and I reached levels of smugness yet unreached in recorded history.

“Why yes, I did say exponential growth in cases would catch us off guard. Thanks for noticing.”

The reason I believed Covid was serious was really just Reddit. I read posts from people in Italy about what it was like living in the covid crisis, and they were all yelling from the rooftops “This-a-shit is-a-real! No bene!”, so it just seemed obvious that what was happening to them, would eventually hit our shorelines. I also knew that pandemics happen slowly, then all at once.

Most people, however, do not sit on Reddit all day, and they tend to think linearly, so I was in the minority when I said it was about to get crazy. As it turns out, this was a very dangerous thing, because it established a damning self-perception - that I was capable of seeing “through the mainstream”, and could get to the truth through reading random articles online.

I believed that other people were at the mercy of whatever media outlets told them - but not me! I saw reality for what it really is! I was the all knowing seer. The man with two eyes in the land of one-eyed men - nay, the land of eyeless men! Two eyed Connor, that’s what they’d call me. I had a monopoly on truth, and could perceive things you lemmings were only dimly aware of.

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe… like articles and comments… and stuff.”

Unfortunately, this overestimate in my own epistemic prowess coincided with a period where I was indoors a lot during a global crisis, and I found myself on r/collapse. If you’re not familiar, r/collapse is a subreddit about how everything is going to cave in on itself, and we’re all totally fucked. The basic idea being that we live on a planet with finite resources, so cannot expand indefinitely. We will keep sacrificing the planet at the altar of economic growth, and sleepwalk our way into:

• Blue Ocean Events (BOE). The moment when the Arctic melts completely over the summer, accelerating global warming.

• Ocean Acidification. Oceans are acidifying due to the CO2 in the atmosphere. This will wipe out the phytoplankton at the bottom of the food chain, an event associated with many historical mass extinctions.

• Ever growing and insane levels of debt.

• Antibiotic resistance, biodiversity collapse, the rise of Fascism, and so on.

Essentially, any negative prediction about the future is spoken about, and people despair at how they’re going to have to live through it. It’s not a productive space, it’s mostly there to freak out, accept, then look down on other people for being blind to the truth.

No lie, I read everything on this subreddit every day for at least a year - which unsurprisingly had an impact on my beliefs, mental wellbeing, and attitude. I can be an annoying man, but these have got to be some of my highest ranking years on the tough-to-be-around scale (maybe only second to my nihilism phase).

Now, it’s not exactly like these problems aren’t real. Ocean acidification, climate change, and debt are all actual problems, and I don’t believe they’ll be trivial to solve. However, during this period I wasn’t thinking “This is real and needs to be handled”, I was thinking “It is a mathematical certainty that I will be skinned alive by roving gangs of cannibals in 20 years”. I had zero epistemic humility, partly because I was consumed in this stuff every day, but also because I had already been right about Covid. I had already predicted something everyone thought I was crazy for.

This is the danger of having such a vindicating dub on my scorecard - it starts to feel like everything is some sort of conspiracy which only I was aware of. If everyone was wrong about Covid, they must be wrong about other things. If my pandemic predictions held, my civilizational ones must too - clearly I had a unique gift for discerning fact from fiction.

As it turns out, I think I was wrong, or at the very least massively overconfident. For one, I thought it was impossible for technology to progress fast enough in time to make any difference. Now, 6 years later, we are having conversations with computers that do our maths. Seems like the technological trajectory we’re on will have some bearing on what our future looks like, and we can’t count on the economy looking the same in 20 years. Whoops, I guess my seeing stone was on the fritz.

I am not the only victim of this. After getting heliocentrism right, Galileo was convinced the tide was caused by the Earth sloshing water about, and called Kepler’s lunar theory “childish” and “occult”. William McBride reported Thalidomide causes birth defects, but then was wrongly certain that Bendectin did the same, eventually being found guilty of scientific fraud. Michael Burry nailed his 2008 financial crisis prediction, and has spent the intervening years predicting crash after crash that never came.

Sometimes, people get something so right, they feel like they can never be wrong again, and every idiosyncratic view they have is just further evidence of their own genius. Unfortunately, that’s not how any of this works, and it’s much more likely they had a big win, but are still subject to the same little confusions and uncertainties we all are. That’s the danger of being right, the certainty. We’re most susceptible to dogma just after we got to say “I told you so”, because any admission we’re wrong or unsure kills our high. Vindication, it seems, is a drug best sipped instead of chugged.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan

When we think about economic impact we tend to think of things in terms of struggle rather than outright deaths. People lose jobs, they lose luxuries, they endure the psychological pain that comes from not knowing how they’re going to pay their bills this month. However, for a large macroeconomic change, clearly some people will also die as health services lose their funding, meaning Brexit has likely resulted in real lives being lost - a cost few Brits were considering ten years ago. Especially given that the bus specifically said the NHS would get more funding. What are we supposed to do now? Not believe everything we read on the side of buses?? Ridiculous to even suggest.

This post is my best attempt at estimating Brexit’s death toll. Obviously, for something like this there are going to be large error bars, but I think we can get to a sensible range based on some defensible assumptions. If you’re a stats nerd and think the method can be improved though, just comment saying I’m wrong and provide your best insult.

The 4 Questions We Need Answering

To make an estimate we need to answer 4 basic questions:

1. How much smaller is the economy because of Brexit?

2. How much tax revenue was lost as a result?

3. How much of that missing tax revenue would have gone to health and social care?

4. How many lives does extra health spending save?

If we answer these, we can draw a line of causation between the decision to leave the EU and the number of people that have died due to a less well funded NHS. It should be said though, that this is just one way in which a struggling economy results in excess deaths. There are other potential knock on effects such as suicide that won’t be included, so if anything our final range could be an underestimate.

We won’t give single numbers for each answer, but rather a range of plausible numbers, weighted towards the numbers we’re most confident in. It’s a bit like we’re constructing weighted dice. For each answer we give to these questions, we give a range (the possible number on the die) and a weight (the bias towards numbers in the range we’re more confident in).

Once we have our weighted dice, we run a Monte Carlo simulation which simulates the results 500,000 times. We sit and roll the dice over and over again, calculating the end death toll, and determine a median/range the results are tending toward. The goal of this model is to give a “say” to every number in the range for each answer, and mitigate the accuracy cost of just assuming one number is dead on.

How much smaller is the Economy because of Brexit?

There’s two ways to estimate this impact.

Similar Country Method - We find a basket of countries whose economies grew at the same rate as ours before Brexit, and then compare their gap after 2016. The weakness of this method is that it doesn’t handle other confounding factors. There might have been something else that happened to the UK in those 10 years that caused the gap to widen.

Firm Level Method - The other method is to compare the performances of firms that were heavily exposed to Brexit with firms that weren’t. The missing growth in the exposed firms can be assumed to be Brexit. The weakness here is that it assumes the less exposed firms weren't affected at all, but they probably were in some sense. Using this method likely underestimates the economic impact as a result.

The estimate I’m using used both methods and found that they placed the economic impact in the same ballpark, which gives some extra credence to their 6-8% number.

We’ll weigh the die like this:

“The fact that top-down estimates of the overall impact of Brexit on the UK economy as a whole, constructed by comparing us with other countries, broadly match bottom-up estimates, derived from estimating the impact on individual firms, is compelling evidence that Brexit has indeed had a large and persistent negative impact on GDP, output and productivity.”

How much Tax Revenue was Lost?

Government Receipts as a share of GDP has varied over the last ten years, increasing as time has gone on. 10 years ago it was more like 36%, but now it’s closer to 40%. For the sake of this model, I want to produce an average rate to reflect the lost revenue. As the GDP loss is skewed towards more recent years, and those years have higher rates, we’ll weigh the die to a 39% peak.

Note: after calculating our estimated lost tax revenue, we also subtract the EU membership costs we would’ve incurred had we stayed in the EU.

How much of that lost tax revenue would’ve gone to health and social care?

Now we have our lost tax estimate, we need to estimate what portion of it would’ve gone to health and social care.

Health spending is our single largest area of government spending, sitting at 18% in 2023-2024. However, but we also need to consider where the marginal pound gets sent. Historically, new money doesn’t just get equally distributed across all areas, but is biased towards the NHS: the health department's share of all departmental day-to-day funding rose from 26.3% in 1998–99 to 42.8% in 2022–23.

So, this weighted die will have a long right tail, as there’s a good chance that more than 18% of the lost tax revenue would have gone to health and social care.

Worth flagging the biggest assumption in the whole model here: lost tax revenue doesn't mechanically become lost NHS funding. Governments can borrow, raise taxes, or cut elsewhere and post-2016 governments did all three. So the claim isn't "Brexit cut the NHS budget by X", it's that in the no-Brexit counterfactual, a richer government would have spent more on health than the one we actually got, because that's what British governments reliably do with marginal money. The die is weighted to reflect this uncertainty. I’ve included values well below 18% (worlds where the we spend the money on something else), with the long right tail covering the worlds where health eats the marginal pound.

If you think the NHS would've been funded identically in both worlds then the whole model collapses to zero, sure, but that requires believing a decade of fiscal decisions were totally insensitive to how rich the country was, which strikes me as weird to believe.

How many lives does extra health spending save?

Now we have the estimated loss to the health and social care, we just need to estimate how many excess deaths that resulted in. Up until now our ranges have been pretty small, but this is the step with the most uncertainty. There are two sources we can use.

This research looked at spending in different parts of England. The study implies roughly £25k per extra year of life. Deaths averted at the NHS margin skew elderly, so if we assume 4–6 years gained per prevented death, that's £100–150k per death in 2008/09 money, which is more like £150k to £250k in today’s money.

However, this paper places the number higher. It attributes 335k excess deaths between 2012 and 2019 to spending cuts. The paper doesn't price the cuts, so I've estimated them at roughly £300bn: welfare spending fell to around £27bn a year below 2010 levels (~£150bn cumulative), while NHS budgets grew at a quarter of their usual rate and social care actually shrank (~£150bn below trend between them). That works out to about £900k per death.

So, we put the peak in between these estimates, and give a long tail to be conservative. I’d rather lean conservative than conclude sensationalist numbers.

Putting it all together

Now we run a script that rolls all these weighted dice and their relationships together 500k times. This model outputs these estimates:

Median: ~130,000
90% of simulations: ~31,000 to ~490,000
Chance it exceeds 50,000: 87%
Chance it exceeds 100,000: 62%

Again, this is all to be taken with a grain of salt, but I think it gives us strong reason to believe that the death toll of Brexit is at least in the tens of thousands. We’d have to be way off for that not to be true, and we’re also only looking at one way a struggling economy can result in excess deaths. Granted, these are going to be mostly elderly people that died a few years earlier than they would have anyway, but that’s still pretty sad. Maybe having the blue passport back wasn’t worth it in the end.

This is irrational, of course - the mere fact that things have always been a certain way shouldn’t count for much. It might be that things were being done badly, and we should evaluate our possible choices on their merits, not on their pedigree.

Still, we find ourselves in this strange position where we’re aware we have such a bias but are still subject to it. It’s not like knowing of this bias instantly cures you of it. If that were true, I’d finally move my desk away from a window that cooks the left half of my face during work calls.

“Sounds good - no updates from my end”.

So we need a way to correct the status quo bias - and it’s a pretty simple maneuver: imagine the new idea you’re considering is already the way things are, then listen to how the status quo would sound as a new idea. This sometimes reveals that views that strike us as initially plausible sound insane, and are being assisted by the fact that we’re just used to them.

Here’s an example - I don’t want to die. Genuinely, I think it would be good if I could stop the aging process and live indefinitely, experiencing everything I want to instead of cramming it all into 80 years (there’s just a lot of games in my Steam backlog that need attention).

I think this is pretty sensible, but whenever the conversation of immortality comes up (after I bring it up), I am regularly the odd one out. People disagree, saying that I’d get bored, or I wouldn’t appreciate any moment in my life because I’d have an infinite number of them.

I don’t think those claims are true, but let’s say for sake of argument that they are. Imagine you were part of a species that lived forever, but were often bored and felt like you weren’t truly appreciating life - what would your solution to that problem look like? I wager you wouldn’t consider it a viable solution to infect yourself with a disease that slowly decayed your body after the first 30 years. Each year, being slightly weaker and in more pain than the last, until you’re incapable of physical activity and die napping to reruns of M*A*S*H. That sounds like an awful fate! Yet, it’s the one that people defend when they push back on anti-aging science. The horrors of death by aging aren’t landing because we’re used to, and are forced to accept them. We accept a bad status quo because we know no better.

Another one - Google currently wants to release sterilised male mosquitoes in Florida and California to reduce their populations. The sterilised males take up a lot of the breeding opportunity, causing birth rates to fall. The benefit of this is that it decreases the prevalence of diseases, and mitigates the general nuisance of having mosquitoes around biting us all the time. It also seems to be low-risk because we've done this sort of thing many times across the world without incident.

Despite this, there’s some pushback - people don’t want us interfering with the environment as it is, mostly due to perceived ecological risk. While I don’t think the concerns people have are baseless, they’re also overstated. Again, we’ve done this sort of population suppression multiple times, and it’s not had disastrous ecological effects. Also, as they only target a single species, they’re more surgical than using pesticides - which we use all the time on farms with little controversy.

However, I also think status quo bias is doing some heavy lifting here because we’re failing to grasp the badness of current mosquito populations. Imagine that we actually did have an ecological problem with low food supply for wild animals, and a low pollinator population - what would it sound like if someone suggested “We should release a deadly insect that spreads disease more than any other species on Earth into the air. Then they can pollinate and get eaten by the other animals!”

You’d probably nod politely and wait for the orderlies to escort him away. Releasing clouds of the deadliest animal in history sounds pretty unwise - and yet when we’re arguing to keep mosquitoes around, that’s the same scenario we’re arguing for. The badness of mosquitoes isn’t registering because we’re so used to them. Ask yourself though, if it sounds bad to bring the status quo about, why is it not a bad idea to keep it in place?

Of course, there are sometimes switching costs to consider, which genuinely do make it reasonable to preserve the status quo if it works out cheaper - but that only applies to so many cases, and I don’t believe this is one of them. I don’t think, in the flipped scenario, releasing deadly mosquitoes only sounds bad because it costs resources to do so - it sounds bad because clouds of deadly plague bugs suck!

A third case: Sometimes when making the case for animal rights, people that disagree will appeal to reasons that are real, but not massive concerns in the grand scheme of things. For example, the fact that if you don’t eat animal products, you need to take a B12 supplement. This demands more from us than we currently give, and so comes across as a sensible reason to continue eating animals to a lot of people.

However, imagine if we were already in a world where people had to take a B12 supplement. How would it sound if someone said:

“Guys, you know how it’s annoying that we need to take that pill every day? I have a solution - we corral billions of animals into dark buildings, give them the supplements, and then eat their bodies! Then we’d get the B12 through them! We’d have to mutilate them in various ways to handle such large populations in such small places of course, but those pills are really annoying, aren’t they?”

Again, it would sound like an insane solution to the problem, and yet when people appeal to the inconvenience of a supplement to continue exploiting animals, that’s the solution they’re appealing to. Just generally I feel like if we happened to live in a world without factory farming, the suggestion of it would strike us as insanely barbaric and unthinkable - yet almost all of us still pay for it because it feels normal.

When you start thinking this way, a lot of the world around you appears to be on autopilot - new ideas need to clear unrealistic standards to be considered, while the status quo is endorsed uncritically. Biases are not only the sort of thing we should be aware of, but also the sort of thing we should counter. Especially if it means I get fewer scratchy bites while on holiday.

Really, it was a Google vs OpenAI race, and even then Google was “in the race” in the same way I’m in the race for marrying Anya Taylor-Joy (far behind but showing a lot of heart). In 2023, I don’t think anyone was spending much time thinking about Anthropic. I mean, did you ever use Claude 1? Was it even real or did Anthropic just start at Claude 3.5 to catch up to other model version numbers? Neither of us know for sure without googling, which I think says it all.

Now, just 3 short years later, Anthropic has emerged as a frontrunner, and Dario Amodei has had to do far more public interviews than I imagine he would like (I imagine he would like zero).

Man, AI really did hit a wall, huh?

As always, it’s hard to know exactly how this will play out as competing labs race to AGI. However, I think that if any of them are going to be the “one” that wins it in the coming years, it’s going to be Anthropic and Claude - and that’s probably the best case scenario.

The Case In Favour

Anthropic’s good positioning is largely relative - their competitors are in such a state that the race may resolve itself. Google, for example is clearly in the middle of some sort of crisis. Their Gemini 3.5 Flash released to scattered claps, and their 3.5 Pro model was due to come out in the “coming weeks” over a month ago. Strictly speaking, I suppose 10 years from now is in a “coming week”, but I think we all expected to see it by now, and the fact we haven’t makes me think it doesn’t measure up well to Anthropic’s Fable 5.

On top of that, they’re haemorrhaging talent. Two years ago they paid $2.7 billion to acqui-hire Noam Shazeer and part of his Character.Ai team. Earlier this month, he left them for OpenAI. The next day, Google also lost Nobel Laureate and Deepmind VP John Jumper, when he joined Anthropic. The latter was particularly surprising because he’d worked there for nine years, and played a critical role in AlphaFold - arguably Deepmind’s greatest accomplishment.

This all rings alarm bells. If you were in a high ranking position at a company aiming to create a Robo-God, you would not jump ship to a competitor unless you felt they had a good chance of beating you. People do not jump off dry land onto sinking ships. The fact that Google lost executives to both OpenAI and Anthropic at the same time does not bode well for them. Conversely, the fact that Anthropic has retained all seven of its founders is a rare and bullish signal.

Demis Hassabis whenever he opens twitter

The main competition, then, is OpenAI - who to their credit are still pumping out heavy hitters. It was a bit touch and go earlier this year, but after GPT-5.5’s release, OpenAI have firmly placed themselves at the front, matching Anthropic’s Opus in capability. I’ve used it a bunch. It’s good, and I expect GPT 5.6 (rumoured for a July release) to be even better.

The problem OpenAI faces, however, is that they’re an enormous money pit the size of Steven Tyler’s mouth. Last year they lost 21 billion dollars. OpenAI is currently training and servicing models that they cannot support on their own, and they don’t expect to become profitable for another 4 years.

The same can be said for Anthropic of course; they’re also frontloaded, taking on mountains of debt on the promise that their product can become profitable in the future. The difference between Anthropic and OpenAI, though, is that they look like they actually can pull it off. The trend is undeniable - Anthropic’s annualised revenue is growing much faster than OpenAI’s, going from a distant second to a disputed tie in half a year (OpenAI claims Anthropic doesn’t include partner payments, so have an overstated number. Still, the point is that in January no one thought Anthropic was making more money and now some people do).

The sudden increase in Anthropic’s revenue is due to market capture. Historically, OpenAI positioned themselves as a sort of Google competitor. ChatGPT is the thing ordinary people use to ask questions, do their homework, or (Jesus Christ) write wedding speeches. This seemed like the obvious positioning 3 years ago, but it turns out it’s not actually that lucrative. If your free tier lets people ask 20 prompts every few hours or so, most people can use your service without paying. There’s only so many mean limericks you can make about your friends.

Anthropic, on the other hand, bet on B2B - which has paid off enormously. It turns out you need to lean on AI a lot more if you’re using it as a coding agent than if you’re using it to write an email. That sudden turn in revenue 6 months ago coincided with the release of Claude Code, which has now become the default choice for AI coding. I think this bodes well for Anthropic for two reasons.

First, businesses are stickier than people. Once a business signs up to Claude, it’s such a ballache moving over to Codex, resetting up the skills, and relearning the interface, that even if Anthropic’s models fall a bit behind OpenAI’s, no organisation is going to realistically change. Have you ever tried training someone to use new software? It’s a punishment that should only be reserved for whatever Russian Gulag has the worst review score on Yelp.

The other reason is that Anthropic has a clear use case for ever-improving models. Sometimes I find myself talking to someone about AI and they’re skeptical about its capabilities. Then, after some conversation, it becomes clear that they occasionally use ChatGPT as a pseudo google search, and that’s it. Fact is, most people’s day to day use cases for AI are already solved, and have been for some time. They just don’t need a GPT 5.6, because GPT-4o sufficed. I suspect this’ll mean OpenAI will struggle to realise increased revenue through model improvements, because a large chunk of their base simply doesn’t have a need for them.

Pretty much all of Anthropic’s users do, though, because they’re software engineers and other people working in tech. An increase in a model’s score on SWE-Bench Pro means nothing to an ordinary person, but is important to Anthropic’s base. That means that as Anthropic’s models become more capable, Claude users will be willing to stomach larger API costs. The demographic that Anthropic captured early has more juice to squeeze in a way that OpenAI’s doesn’t. If AI labs are right that AI is going to do a larger and larger share of economically valuable work (and I think they are), then providing the model that’s used by whole corporations instead of the world’s Facebook aunts seems like the safer bet.

All of this is in addition to the simple fact that Claude is just really very good, and has been consistently for the last several releases, While GPT has been more mixed over the last 6 months, and Gemini hasn’t had a moment in the sun since December.

Reasons for doubt

As of right now, Anthropic gets a lot of their compute from a competitor, a position unique to them. Their supplier is xAI and each party only has a 90 day exit clause, which means if Elon decides he’s done with them, Anthropic can be thrown into crisis very quickly. However, we have some reasons to doubt that the deal will fall through. Even Elon would have to admit that xAI isn’t going anywhere - if he didn’t think this, he wouldn’t be giving away his compute - so it’s in his interest to keep his leverage over an actually successful AI company. Additionally, collapsing the deal would tank the SpaceX share price.

There’s also the elephant in the room - Anthropic doesn’t get along very well with the US Government. Fable 5 was banned nearly two weeks ago, and we are still yet to see it return to the public. Ostensibly this is over a cybersecurity 'jailbreak' the government says makes Fable too dangerous to leave accessible to foreign national.

In reality, I suspect it’s likely because Anthropic didn’t bend the knee to the pentagon on autonomous weapons, and the US government is currently run by a bunch of vengeful 7-year-olds that wished to grow up with a cursed monkey paw. This tense relationship can prove problematic and unpredictable down the line, as it’s clear Trump is a petty person (source: every day since ten years ago). I don’t doubt he would do everything in his power to tear Anthropic down if he doesn’t feel they’ve groveled to him sufficiently. It’s yet to be seen if Anthropic can thrive, stick to their values, and stay on the good side of the Trump Administration (although early signs make it sound like that can resolve things in the near term).

While harming their prospects, it’s precisely the cause of this fiasco which makes me prefer them as the company to win this whole thing. Corporations are not our friends, of course, I’m not rooting for them in the same way I root for the Sixers (least of all because I think they’ll actually win something). Still, the fact that they stood their ground when being pushed to facilitate autonomous weapons their AI wasn’t ready for shows one thing: there is at least some semblance of principle in their upper management. They’re not paragons I’m sure, but they have redlines of some kind, and are willing to enforce them even at immense financial cost.

Who else does that? OpenAI sure doesn’t, because they swooped in and took the deal as soon as it became available. I’m not saying Anthropic is incorruptible, but if I had to bet on a lab becoming a puppet of an increasingly fascist government, I would bet on the one that gifts Trump money, and is run by a pathological liar. Not the sort of organisation I want in control of a super intelligence.

I suspect we won’t have to wait long to find out the outcome. I do believe we’re reaching the end game, and every year from here on out will be markedly different from the last. As it currently stands, I struggle to see how OpenAI or Google take the final crown, which leaves just one horse in the race - and I don’t think it’s Meta

Leaving this up as I like to keep an archive of my writing. If you are reading this now, though, I doubt this view more. Generally, it can be good to make your rivals depend on your supply chains, but China is developing their own supply chain anyway, so it makes sense for the West to keep their technological edge. I’m in favour of blocking chip exports now.

Last week, Trump gave NVIDIA the all-clear to sell H200 chips to “approved customers” in China. This has been a highly scrutinised decision, because it could improve China’s chances of winning the AI race, and it’ll make the cartoon dollar signs in Jensen Huang’s eyes so big they’ll block out the sun.

“Horrifying scenes today as one man’s wallet took out half of Silicon Valley. More on the News at Ten”.

There’s an understandable concern that we’re giving China the keys to what will be the most consequential technology in history. Ideally, if any country wins the AI race, it’ll be one that at least respects things like free and fair elections, freedom of religion, and letting you call your President Winnie the Pooh without being thrown into a van. Of course, I’m totally on board with that, and would like China to lose this competition. It also makes my skin burn with the heat of a thousand nuclear reactors to concede any decision by Trump may have its merits. Why then would I think this might be a good decision in the long run?

The problem, I think, with blocking the sale of NVIDIA chips, is the assumption that doing so will hamstring China’s AI industry indefinitely, condemning them to forever be one step behind us. We imagine that if they can’t access our chips, they’ll make do with being second best, and we’ll stroll into first place with ease. However, history has shown us that this move routinely backfires.

When a country has a monopoly on some product and blocks its sale elsewhere, the blocked country invariably works on its own supply chain - meaning the blocker loses any advantage they had. We’ve seen this sort of thing happen time and again.

In the Napoleonic Wars, we blocked the sale of cane sugar in the French Empire, forcing them to make their own out of beets. The blockade didn’t stop the French having access to sugar; it just meant their sugar supply no longer relied on us, and they were the ones making the money. After the war, when the blockade lifted, they willingly installed their own tariffs on cane sugar to keep their beet sugar industry afloat!

In the ‘70s, the US made it illegal to sell weapons to apartheid South Africa. They responded by starting a state-owned arms company (ARMSCOR), birthing a long list of innovations. They invented a V-shaped hull that better disperses force from landmines, and was later used by the US in Iraq. They designed an attack helicopter, which in turn led to the creation of domestic aviation firms. They even built their own nuclear arsenal. Oopsie!

Another example - when Russia invaded Crimea, we sanctioned the hell out of them. This led Putin to ban the import of western food products and invest money into farming subsidies. Within six years, they became a net exporter of food, and an agricultural giant. You’re probably sensing a pattern now. By sanctioning a country, we cut off their reliance on us, and make serious competitors by accident.

So, I suspect a ban on chip sales to China could have that same impact. We know they take this issue seriously, and have already invested over $100 billion into their own industry. If we continue the ban, it’s not unlikely they’ll catch up and we’ll lose any sort of advantage. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say China might succeed if they apply themselves, especially in a technical endeavour. I mean, they’re pretty good at that sort of thing.

It’s not certain how this thing will pan out, but I’m wary of banned sales in general. The short-term gain isn’t always worth the long term strategic loss. It seems like no matter what we do, they’ll eventually have chips at hand that compete with ours, but selling them our own at least has some upside. We can make boatloads of money, for one, but also if we feel things are getting too hot we have a single-use trap card. We can build reliance, then pull chips when it really matters. Maybe when we’re all on the verge of super intelligence would be the best time to deploy that strategy, and not now, when AI is mostly being used for slop generated doorbell videos.

In recent years, I’ve spent more time with animal rights activists, who come with a whole different bag of affectations from what I’m used to (I’ve seen more barefoot shoes in the last year than I did in the 28 prior). One of these traits is their commendable asceticism. For example, while my dog-dad friends might think I’m monk-like for skipping dairy in my ice cream, some activists I know totally forego flying or even plastic! They wander the Earth, condemned to look for a meal deal wrapped in paper, destined to eat it on the overnight ferry to Belfast.

Like I say, it’s admirable to see people take their principles so seriously, but I also think it’s inefficient. Fact is, you’re not getting a good amount of juice for your squeeze, and the minor gains made by living like a Cynic philosopher can be outdone by giving trivial amounts to the right charity.

Climate Problems

Most commonly, flying is in the crosshairs. Flying is not a trivial issue, as it does make up a considerable amount of our personal emissions. Your average American produces about 16 tonnes of CO2 per year, and a single flight from London to New York produces 0.6 tonnes per passenger. That means that one flight would be about 4% of your annual emissions! Presumably, you’d like to come home too, so now we’re looking at 8% just to yell “I’m walking here!” at oncoming traffic.

Skipping the flight, then, has a notable effect on your impact. However, it’s also easily rectified. According to Farmkind, you can offset it by donating $2 to the Good Food Institute. Even if you’re skeptical of that number, you can hedge your bets by donating $20, and you’d almost certainly dwarf your flight’s contribution to climate change. Hell, make that a monthly donation, and your existence on the Earth is net positive for the environment! To me, this seems like a much more appealing sacrifice than spending my life worrying about the morality of visiting my friends in Spain, or flogging myself for visiting Japan before I die. It’s a tiny price to pay to know I’m both good for the environment and I get to see where they filmed The Last Samurai.

Pictured: Me, not Tom Cruise.

It’s at this point when people will say “Why not both?”. Surely, donating to charity and skipping flights is the best thing to do for the environment? I think that’s true, but it’s also a bit of a tangent. Before we started this conversation no one was talking about doing what is literally the very best thing, because no one was talking about completely optimising their life for the good like some kind of Effective Altruist Jain Martin Luther King.

The point is, even if offsetting-only isn’t the best, it is better than only skipping flights, which is what environment lovers are currently emphasising. Offsetting is where you can make large gains at very minor cost, so it should be a part of our moral repertoire before we add flying abstention. It’s as if we’re trying to max out a car’s speed, and the ascetics are obsessing over the weight of the paintjob instead of replacing the engine. Sure, it’d be best to do both, but Christ, let’s make sure to supercharge this thing first before we get the scrapers out. Certainly, it would be weird to reject replacing the engine on the grounds that only replacing the engine isn’t the very best intervention.

There is a similar trend among AI Vegans - people that refuse to use AI for climate reasons (I suppose vegan just means you abstain from something now. Congrats, you are now a murder vegan. I hope). This one feels particularly shortsighted because AI is not only incredibly useful, but it’s also plausibly better for the environment than all your other activity. Meaning, it’s not unlikely that if you sat at your desk prompting all day, you’d be causing fewer emissions than if you were doing something else. If skipping flights is focusing on the weight of the paintjob, skipping AI is making sure there’s no dust on the gearstick.

I see this kind of asceticism play out everywhere among well-meaning people. They’ll only buy ethically sourced coffee, second-hand clothes, or worry about their electronics. They’ll scrutinise their shampoo bottles to see if it’s made from recycled plastic, and insist on eating local (despite transport taking up a tiny portion of food emissions). It’s like we’re trying to lose weight, and obsessing over how many calories are in the spices we use.

We Can Do Whatever We Want, Then?

So I’m not convinced asceticism is the right focus of an ethical life. However, I should say it’s not like I think abstention is never worth it. You really should abstain from punching your mum in the face (she hates that). Also, I obviously think veganism is worth the effort otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it all the time. On this occasion, the juice is worth the squeeze for two reasons:

1. The harms of meat eating are uniquely big, unlike buying new clothes. Unless we’re doing anything else that causes hundreds of years of torture, it’s probably the worst thing we’ll ever do.

2. The personal cost of veganism is small when compared to the harm of factory farming. You just change some ingredients at home, and are occasionally forced to eat salad at restaurants that don’t accommodate well.

My point isn’t that abstention is never worth it, it’s that abstention gets too much airplay, and the sorts of abstention people promote and focus on aren’t worth it.

So much of the conversation centres around the bottom left of the graph, for things that have small impacts and small-to-medium costs, all while neglecting altruism, which can offset a person’s CO2 emissions many times over, and outweigh their meat eating for around $25 a month. A totally attainable goal, especially for anyone who’s currently worrying about where their coffee comes from (those people don’t tend to be the single working mothers on the breadline).

I hate to break it to you - we can always be doing better. None of us are doing the very best thing all the time, and it’s unlikely we ever will. So, I’m not sure it’s even useful to think about our perfectly optimised life. Instead, as ordinary fallible people, we should identify the sorts of sacrifices that cost little, but realise a lot. We should get as much bang for our buck as possible, then cut ourselves some slack when we’re hitting diminishing returns.

However being an “ethical” consumer distracts us from this goal. It uses up valuable willpower and resources to achieve very little. We’re trying to buy a house, and people are out there haggling pennies instead of thousands. Subjecting themselves to worry, inconvenience, and burnout for almost nothing.

Is donating “just throwing money at the problem”? Sure, but who cares?? If the money goes way further, that’s all that matters. The point of doing good isn’t to self-flagellate or suffer romantically for a cause, it’s to help others. It’s a good thing that we can do more with less effort. Living a good life is a marathon, not a sprint, which means making decisions with great cost-benefit ratios and staying consistent over the long haul. Effective donating is far more likely to fit that bill than being a die-hard ascetic. Especially considering the latter can burn you out, and can only realise so much upside.

Which is, I think, the great edge Altruism has over Asceticism as a method for making the world a better place. It basically has no ceiling. When abstaining, your impact is limited by how much harm you were causing with whatever it was you were consuming. With altruism, your impact is limited to the total size of the problem - which will be way larger than you’ll ever be able to handle as an individual. You can not only offset the harms your consumption causes, you can overshoot them by orders of magnitude, which dwarfs the good of even the most dedicated ascetic.

It’s easy to romanticise the image of someone going without modern comforts to align with their cause. It certainly summons more romance than a bank transfer. However, we’re not in this game to make poetic images of ourselves, we’re in it to make the world better for having had us in it. On that metric, the boring clinical reallocation of resources clears the monk life every time. We can do far more good by focusing our efforts on giving to others, instead of taking from ourselves - and most importantly, choosing altruism first means we won’t have to take the coach to France anymore.

Just a quick one from me. You might’ve read in the description of my substack that I donate my subscriptions each year. No one needs to pay me to read anything I write, but doing so is very encouraging and kind, so I wanted to extend a thanks to my paid subs. I love writing, but it’s also so cool that there are people out there that show that much support. This year, we raised $186 dollars and we helped 361 animals!

Really great that we’re able to help that many individuals by reading and writing stupid jokes online. Who knew captioning gifs could be so lucrative?

Thanks again all! You are the wind beneath my wings.

Happy International Shrimpact Day! If you’re yet unaware (your inbox will likely be inundated with shrimp-related content today), a collection of other writers and I are taking part in International Shrimpact Day - an event that brings awareness to the cruelty of shrimp farming. We’re raising money for the Shrimp Welfare Project, an organisation with exceptional effectiveness, helping 1,400 shrimp per dollar donated! If you’d like to contribute, you can get your donations matched an extra 50% by giving through this link!

I know, I know - Shrimp? Again? Didn’t we put this to bed a couple of months ago? We already know about the moral status of shrimp, the painful farming practices, and the wonderful return on investment of the Shrimp Welfare Project. All our feeds were flooded with Shrimp content earlier this year, and we all met it with wide acclaim and literally zero controversy or pushback. We bought T-shirts, held rallies, and agreed unanimously that you should sacrifice your family to save 10^100 shrimp. What else is there to say? There is no red pill or blue pill, there is only the shrimp pill, and we’ve all scoffed it down like Dr House at the Regional Pill Scoffing Contest.

Alas, there is more work to be done. For one, the shrimp are still out there suffering, so anything we can do to further help their plight is a win. Secondly, we still don’t know which crustacean various popular Substackers are!

Since I was a wee lad, it’s been one of the great questions that haunt me at night. Where do we go when we die? Are we alone in the universe? If Peter Singer were a crab, what would he look like? I’d wake, screaming, drenched in sweat at 3am. My mum would soothe me back to sleep, holding my head in her arms and rocking back and forth. “Who the fuck is Peter Singer?” she’d say, while I peacefully drifted off. “No more video games after 6pm”.

Now, I am a man on my own, so there is no mama to soothe me. Fear, however, is a mile wide and an inch deep. If I am to overcome the great existential weight of this query, I must do so by tackling it head on. I go where no man has gone before. One small step for man, one giant skedaddle for crustacean-kind.

Peter Singer - Horseshoe Crab

Petey’s under there scuttling about.

Okay okay, they’re technically not a crustacean, they’re a chelicerate - which is a type of animal I dare not google further because everything that came up looked terrifying. Still, this is somewhat fitting. Calling Peter Singer a “Substacker” also feels inaccurate because he’s different from the rest of us. He’s a real-life author, with books that sit on bedside tables around the globe. People in the actual world know him. He’s Australian. The list goes on.

The Horseshoe Crab has been on Earth for 450 million years, which makes it even older than the dinosaurs. Likewise, Singer’s writing far predates our little blogging sphere, reaching back to the beginning of time itself (the 1970s). The Horseshoe Crab also has its blood extracted to save lives, mimicking the bank accounts of Singer and his followers whenever their pledged donations go out. Can you make vaccines out of Utilitarian Philosophers? Someone should look into that.

Cartoons Hate Her - Decorator Crab

I wonder if that’s the expression her face pulls under the heart emojis.

We all know Cartoons Hate Her, the comedy blogger with insane views like women marrying men is normal, men aren’t worthless until they’re 30, and wearing a dress is not right wing (utter madness if you ask me). However, she’s also a lover of fashion, much like the “graceful decorator crab” (a real quote from its Wikipedia page).

The Decorator Crab finds bits of seaweed, algae, and various other doodads to stick to its shell. These decorations are attached onto Velcro-like hooks that protrude from its body. I’m not sure that’s how CHH accessorises, but then again she’s anonymous, so we’ve never seen her NOT do that. Currently, I’m agnostic.

Bentham’s Bulldog - Pistol Shrimp

Very pale. Must be the veganism.

They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The Pistol Shrimp has an enormous claw it uses for everything, such as hunting, self defence, and creeping out its friends when it touches them. Bentham’s Bulldog has his own gigantic claw - Expected Value (he also has a gigantic claw, but he asked me not to talk about that). There’s no problem that can’t be solved with the utilitarian calculus. Animal Rights, AI safety, Billionaire Taxation, every issue is a simple multiplication away from its solution.

The Pistol Shrimp’s snap boils the water around it to 5000K, a taste of how Bentham’s Bulldog would boil the worlds oceans if it decreased total suffering in the long run. These volcanic snaps interfere with sonar, much like how every hyper fixation of his starts a substack war so big you can’t read about anything else for the next two fucking weeks.

Tommy Blanchard (Cognitive Wonderland) - The Canadian Lobster

Canadian.

Michael Huemer (Fake Nous) - Ghost Shrimp

See-through again? These vegans really need to step outside more.

Huemer and the Ghost Shrimp share many similarities. Ideologically, they seem aligned, as the Ghost Shrimp chooses to live far away from civilised man, in the crevices of the sea floor and the depths of the unknown, to avoid paying property tax.

As you can see they’re also transparent, just as Professor Huemer is every time he melts into his bookcase Zoom background during YouTube podcasts. It might seem he’s ethereal, but fortunately we have adequate defeaters to justify believing he exists in this world (his army of followers pointing to the obviousness of Moral Realism).

Philosophy Bear - The Yeti Crab

Ugh! Okay, I’m pro ocean-boiling now.

The only part of this list where both entries are covered in a silky soft fur. The Yeti Crab bundles in large groups to collect bacteria on it’s hair to eat, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is exactly what the left wants for you and your children. I bet Philosophy Bear’s mouth is just watering at the thought - Commie!

It also squats near thermal vents on the ocean floor, delicately placing itself so it doesn’t boil by getting too close, or freeze by being too distant. Much like how Philosophy Bear thinks AI development is walking a tightrope! (Okay, we’re starting to stretch now, but c’mon, I’m comparing people to crabs here).

Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) - Triops

Ahh, typing with all those hands explains how he writes so much.

Fun fact: The Triops has three eyes. Scott Alexander only has two, but that’s pretty close I think! He certainly acts like he has three eyes when he looks into the future to predict just how quickly AI will topple us all (Gosh, these comparisons are starting to hurt).

Triops are also a bit like sea monkeys. People buy little boxes of them to put in their home aquarium and marvel. Similarly, after Scott dies, the nerds of the world will put his body in some sort of decorative case for all to see. “Here lies the writer of Astral Codex Ten, our holy book, and blueprint for all our personalities. Praise be."

Me (Mind Meandering) - Iron Man

This is what I wear when I write.

Cool. Fan Favourite. Hit with the ladies. Between us we count as a crustacean because he has an exoskeleton, and my back hurts enough that I think I’ve become invertebrate.

We did it guys, existential question answered. We may now rest easy. Just remember to donate before you go to bed.

I felt like a teenager arriving late to geography class again. When I entered, everyone would swivel their heads to see what bumbling fool couldn’t read a clock properly. They’d laugh, and throw rotten fruit they conveniently brought for this exact scenario. TV crews would capture the whole thing, and the judge would kick my shins. I’d be naked.

Then a nice looking man in a Harry Potter cloak walked up behind me, puzzled. I whispered to him “I’m from the public, can I go in? Where do I go?”. He confidently swung open the door and pointed at the gallery where I’d sit. Nothing had started, I had just been hovering around the door like a weirdo for 2 minutes. Not a great start, but at least my shins were safe.

I was there to support some friends who were on trial. If you cast your mind back a couple of years, you may remember when Animal Rising ran onto the Grand National to glue themselves to the jumps. They were bringing attention to cruelty that horses experience in racing, such as whipping, injury, and of course, death. A horse dies every other day on British horse tracks, usually from being put down after falling at a jump (a consequence always conveniently omitted from broadcasts). Now, 2 years after my friends ran onto the track, they were being prosecuted for being a “public nuisance”.

There were two things that surprised me as I sat in Liverpool Crown Court that afternoon. The first was just how much like TV court is. I always spot when TV writers put computer-sounding mumbo-jumbo into the script to make a character sound techy, and I assumed legal dramas were equally hammed up. However, it really was like watching an episode of Suits at some points. I even heard people stand and say “Objection!”. Arguments were levelled, the jury was addressed, and defendants were grilled on the stand (although unfortunately none of them yelled “You can’t handle the truth!”). As this is the UK, all the professionals had ridiculous wigs on, which were, ironically, made of horse hair. Honestly, it was a pretty fun spectator sport! I highly recommend going to court when you’re not personally at risk of a criminal record (The potential prison time would be a bit of a downer I reckon).

The other surprise was, frankly, how poor the prosecution was. As an amateur online arguer, and annoying guy that talks about philosophy at parties, I couldn’t help but be embarrassed by the line of reasoning they were using against the defendants. I found myself desperate to run up and “um ach-ually” my way into the conversation. I was dying to be tagged in to unleash a flurry of counterarguments that would crush the opposition. Onlookers would faint at my prowess and I’d be made CEO of lawyers. The jury would hold me up Bar Mitzvah-style.

“Have my babies!” - The Judge, probably.

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to do that (or so I’m told). Fortunately, I have a blog where I can do whatever I want, so I can just LARP my legal fantasies here. Here’s why I think the prosecution was wrong, and protesting horse races is good thing to do.

The Basic Case Against Horse Racing

I’ll start with the basic case against horse racing and why it should be banned. These points will sound pretty obvious to any animal people on my blog, but it’s worth getting a foundation in so we know why we’re all here.

As I said earlier, horses regularly die on horse tracks, usually after experiencing brutal injuries (This video is fucked up by the way, but it’s important to know what’s being argued against). An expert witness in the court even described a horse getting trapped in the starting gate, and eventually collapsing and dying. To add to this, they’re whipped, experience stress and anxiety, and are run to exhaustion. I take it we all agree that being whipped, snapping your leg in two, and then getting shot in the head causes immense suffering and pain to the horse, and that sort of thing is bad. If you find yourself thinking “but it’s just a horse?”, I recommend reading my article on speciesism to see why I think that response doesn’t work.

So, beating horses, making them suffer brutal injuries, and killing them is bad, and we shouldn’t do it. Here’s the sort of arguments the prosecution levied against the people trying to stop it.

What if Everybody was a Protester?

Generally, the same questions were asked of each defendant. One that came up repeatedly was, “What if everybody engaged in direct action like this? Wouldn’t it be chaos?”. The correct answer to this is “Yes, but so what?”.

The assumption here is that if some behaviour isn’t universalisable, it must be unjustified, which sounds like the sort of sensible Kantian thing to believe. “What if everyone went around punching kids in the face, Connor?! There’d be hell in the streets!” you say, as I sheepishly un-brandish my brass knuckles and step away from the McDonald’s play area. In the words of George Costanza, we live in a society.

It sounds sensible, and I think a lot of people are responsive to this sort of argument, but the problem is it has a ton of counter examples. What if everyone was a bus driver? The economy would collapse. What if everyone was gay? We’d become extinct. What if everyone wrote on Substack? I’d lose my only personality trait! The list goes on.

Clearly, it doesn’t follow that just because there would be bad consequences if everyone did some action, it’s then unjustifiable. We can’t all be bus drivers, but not only is there room for some, we need them! Likewise, we can’t all be peaceful protesters engaging in direct action, but clearly there’s some room for it, and a liberal democracy trying to make progress needs it. Much like we needed the suffragettes to run onto horse tracks, or the civil rights movement to sit in at Greensboro. Peaceful direct action is always “too far” or “annoying” at the time, but often vindicated in the long run.

So it seems this argument would commit us to saying all peaceful direct action is bad, which seems false when looking at historical examples. To imagine we no longer need peaceful direct action is to tacitly assume we’ve made all the moral progress we need to, which is dubious. Every generation has thought that, and every generation has been wrong - I highly doubt we’re any different. We should probably investigate the merits of the protestors position, rather than villainizing direct action wholesale.

You’re forcing your views, no?

This is the go-to claim for anyone that’s being criticised about their behaviour. It’s fine if you think horse races are bad - just don’t go to them! This is a free country, however, and you have no right to tell me how to live my life. We have a right to race horses just as much as you have a right to not attend events. You should live and let live, after all.

The irony, of course, is that horse racing patently does not live and let live. For some reason no one sees the irony in telling someone to live and let live while shooting someone in the head. As the defence so astutely pointed out, there are few sports where participants need to be whipped to take part, and few sports where a participant dies every other day in the UK alone. For some reason peaceful protest is objectionably forceful, but making an animal break their legs and killing them is totally fine.

I should also say that the idea we shouldn’t ever intervene on each other’s behaviour is just nonsense. If I call someone out for cutting in line at the bank, am I forcing my views? Should I keep my beliefs to myself if I see someone bullying someone in the office? Am I a know-it-all, bleeding heart, proselytizing liberal for apprehending a mad man kicking old ladies? Hey, just because I don’t like it when people kick old ladies, doesn’t mean I have the right to stop anyone else!

We all intervene on each other’s behaviour all the time! Even the idea that you “ought not force your views” is itself an ethical standard! The protesters don’t believe that it’s wrong to peacefully protest; what right does the prosecution have for forcing their views onto them? The idea that you should never force your views is self-undermining. It’s a view you can never enforce without violating.

So, clearly there are at least some occasions where it’s appropriate to “force our views”, and those occasions depend on the two things: how much force are we applying, and whether we’re well justified in intervening in whatever behaviour we’re trying to stop. If I forced my view that eating baked beans is wrong by tackling you in the supermarket, that would be unjustifiable because the level of force is severe and the idea that eating baked beans is wrong is laughable. However, if I force my views that bullying is bad by calling someone out, that seems sensible. This is because calling you out is a measured response, and the case for the wrongness of bullying is strong.

So, how does peacefully protesting a horse race measure up? Does delaying a race for a few minutes seems like a reasonable amount of force to apply to bring attention to broken legs, abuse, and violent deaths? To me, it seems more than appropriate.

Are race delays common?

There was one weird argument that came up when questioning the expert witness that left me bewildered. Much of the debate was about the delay to the race, and how that impacted attendees. The general consensus was that the protest delayed the race, but there were other contributing factors too. The race may have started 15 minutes late (or whatever the actual number was), but had there been no protest, it still would’ve started 10 minutes late. They were not the sole cause, but the protest contributed.

Anyway, the witness came with a bunch of stats about race delays, and it turns out about 12% of races at Aintree start late. The prosecutor brought this number up, and asked the witness if delays were “common”. The hope, I imagine, was that he would say they’re not common, thereby making the consequence of the protest seem more severe to the jury.

This started a weird back and forth where the witness would say “Yeah, they’re pretty common” and the prosecutor would say “But they only happen 12% of the time? That’s not a majority?”. They then got stuck in this cul-de-sac for a few minutes. I think this happened because the prosecutor didn’t seem to know what the word “common” means.

They kept pointing out that delays only happen a minority of the time, as though that proves that delays are not common. The problem with this is that the word “common” does not mean “happens a majority of the time”! It really depends on what thing you’re talking about. If girls say yes to dates with me only 12% of the time, I’d say me getting a yes is uncommon. However, if I crash a car into the ocean 12/100 times I drive, I’d say me dunking a Honda Accord into the North Sea is a pretty common occurrence.

Likewise, if races are delayed 12% of the time, I’d say it’s pretty fair to describe delays as common. This was just a semantic point, but it’s been annoying me for 10 days and I need to vent or my doctor will complain about my blood pressure.

Is that it?

You might have read this thinking “is that it?”. You may even feel like I’ve been straw-manning them, because this couldn’t possibly be the sort of arguments they brought to the table. Yet, it was, and I share the surprise. I came in thinking there had to be more for them to come after the defendants with.

However, from what I’ve heard, this was basically what the 2 week trial was like. It’d be easy to chalk it up to a bad job performance, but I’m not sure that’s what happened. I have no idea how good the prosecutors are really, because I’ve only seen them argue for something that’s incredibly hard to defend. What case can you make for the permissibility of horse racing? It’s fun? The horses get exercise? We need racing to support the women’s ridiculous hat industry? There’s not a lot of benefit that seems reasonable when held against the brutal harm that horses endure to keep this “sport” going.

The only case that had any sort of legs is that the people involved in this industry have their livelihoods attached to it, and the prosecution did try to generate some sympathy for the ordinary people that are just doing their jobs at points. However, the same can be said for people that organise dog fights or cockfights. Every cruel industry of the past provided jobs, but most of us agree that wasn’t a strong enough reason to continue killing those that need not die.

I think the prosecution found themselves defending an industry that’s awfully hard to get behind, so I don’t really blame them for grasping for weak arguments. They did better than I would’ve been able to do, because I’d drop my hands halfway through and say “What are we doing? We just watched a horse get it’s face blown off on YouTube and I’m talking about the ‘harms’ of a race delay? Let’s just go home and forget this case ever happened”.

In case you’re wondering, last week they were found not guilty - and rightfully so. The judge even commented that “In hindsight, protests are often shown to be right” and I suspect this one will be no exception. The cruelty horses endure for us to drink champagne and take selfies in a field is not the sort of thing that’ll age well. No amount of tradition or fanfare can cover up the blood spilling on tracks around the world, and the painful truth is starting to leak to the general public. Horses, like all animals, can’t defend themselves, and they need people that are brave enough to stand up for them. Anyone who puts themselves at risk to do so isn’t a criminal in my eyes; they’re heroic, and deserve to be seen as such.

Must’ve been hard to make them all stand still for the painting.

Nelson had many close calls in his life, famously losing an arm and an eye, but his luck ran out at Trafalgar. A musket shot wedged itself in his spine, paralysing him. He was taken below decks where he faded in and out of consciousness for the next few hours, desperate to live to see his final, greatest victory. With no hope of making it, he said his last goodbyes to his fellow officers, wincing at every sway of the ship. Tears in their eyes, brothers who’d been by his side for decades knelt next to him and kissed his cheek. They then dumped his body in a barrel of brandy so it wouldn’t stink up the place.

As I listened to this heroic, and frankly disturbing story, I found myself thinking about how insane life was back then. Nelson could’ve skipped that grueling ordeal if he was born today, because we have anesthesia, reliable surgical practices, and most importantly, peace with the French (begrudgingly). I lay in bed thinking to myself “Man, life was so fucked up in the distant past”. Musket balls, cannons, Napoleon… it felt like there was an enormous chasm between the world I live in and the one I was hearing about. It then occurred to me - 1805 was really not that long ago.

I know that sounds a bit odd, but it’s true. I was born in 1996. The oldest person alive at that time, Jeanne Calment, was 121. That means, despite being only 29 years old, I was alive at the same time as someone born in 1875. That’s totally fucked! She was walking before Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb, but lived to see the release of the Nintendo 64! How can it be possible that someone saw Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, and GoldenEye LAN parties? It’s like if Archduke Franz Ferdinand knew what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were (I think his favourite would be Raphael).

So, I was just one really old person away from 1875. That means I was one really old person + one quite old person away from the Battle of Trafalgar. Yet, the world I live in and the one Nelson died in couldn’t be more different. He died in a room where people put blocks of wood in sailor’s mouths and sawed off their arms. I wake up for work, log into ChatGPT, and talk to metal and sand. Isn’t that just trouser-shittingly insane to think about? Imagine explaining to Nelson, a man who didn’t know what germs are, that we know how to organise sand in such a way that you can have a conversation with it. If his boss forced him to use a new AI app, he wouldn’t roll his eyes, he’d lose his mind and shoot himself in the face.

Historically, this is a really odd situation to be in. Most people have seen a world largely unchanged in their lifetime. If you were a medieval peasant, you’d wake up to plow the fields at 18, and you’d be doing the same shit 50 winters later. You’d teach your kid the same skills your dad taught you, because aside from which rich guy owned the land you lived on, not much changed from century to century. Send a guy from 1300 back to 1100 and I wager he’d probably do just fine.

That same thing, however, cannot be said for me. Drop me in 1825 London and no one at the dockyard would value my Notion boards. I’d live on the street and get tuberculosis for Christmas. My sleep score would be sub 50. None of my knowledge or wisdom would be useful, besides a few vague ideas about working hard, and not drinking from the Thames.

This uselessness is a reflection of how quickly the world is changing around us. The world is not only changing, but it’s changing faster and faster. It took decades for phones to be in people’s houses after they were invented, but the internet took only a fraction of that. We don’t even have house phones anymore! The “phone” is just the app we screen calls through while watching 4K video on our personal pocket bricks. Things are accelerating, and you and I are some of the first people living at the hinge point where drastic global change is visible over a single lifetime.

Despite this, we tend to think of things as being normal. I suspect we sometimes look at our childhoods and imagine that’s how the world always was, and how it always will be. For me, the early noughties were just “life”, and everything after that has been some weird corruption and bastardisation of the script. A divergence from the concrete norm that was CD Walkmans, CRT Televisions, and a war in Afghanistan.

This expectation is always quietly announcing itself around us. Millennials, for example, are notoriously mad about the fact that they can’t buy a house. We grew up expecting that if we worked hard, and were sensible with money, we’d be able to afford the odd holiday and a house with a white picket fence. We believe this, because it’s the world our parents grew up in. They could save up a deposit for a house in a few years, and move into their house in their mid 20s. We, however, have to wait until our 30s, and even then we usually need an old relative to take one for the team. We find ourselves renting, with stagnating wages that haven’t gone up in line with the costs of living.

People get mad about that (and I don’t blame them, to be clear), but behind that anger is an assumption that a world where everyone buys their own home is how things are “supposed to be”. Yet, people growing up and moving into a house of their own in their 20s is an exceptionally weird state of affairs! It’s not normal to buy a house with a few years of saving - that was a symptom of the extraordinary post war economy. Before then, people tended to live in multi-generational homes, or they rented. It only took one generation for an incredible phenomenon like easy home ownership to get taken for granted. That expectation betrays that we forget it’s not the natural order of things. The fact that your parents strolled into a 3 bed semi-detached in the late 80s was not normal. Historically, it was unheard of!

I feel a similar way when I’m told about the importance of my pension. Now, I still pay into my pension because my work matches my payments and I figure it’s free money. I’m not a finance guy, but I imagine it’s one of the better investments I can make. However, when older people talk to me about it, they see it through the lens of their personal experience. They’ve worked their whole lives, likely in the same industry, and through consistent pension investment now get to retire in their mid 60s to live it up. They stress that, were I not to invest in my retirement, I will be stuck working in a burger stop at 72 just trying to keep the lights on.

However, this assumes there’ll be any 72 year old’s working at burger stops by then. This is 2068, mind you, and I’ve spent a decent amount of this blog ranting about how we can talk to sand now. The TV I grew up with had a wooden case, and its screen gave me electric shocks. Now I’m only 29 and the machines already have souls. I don’t know what the world will look like in 2068, and I can’t say if investing in my pension will actually matter or not, but I do think the consequences of financial irresponsibility will be different to what I’m being warned about. The failures of the future will not be flipping burgers at Mcdonald’s, because I doubt anyone will be flipping burgers at McDonald’s. The only guess about the distant future that I know is wrong is that it’ll be like the world is now.

It’s when I think about all this, lying in my bed while listening to someone describe Nelson’s shattered spine, that I feel my grip on the world loosen. It’s like that brief moment, after jumping off something a bit higher than you’re used to, when your stomach begins to turn. The acceleration is unsettling, because it’s both unfamiliar and totally uncontrollable. The eye watering pace we’ve been evolving at predates me by centuries, and there really hasn’t ever been a “normal” since that kicked off. The things we think of as normal are just a passing phase we see as we transition into whatever inconceivable thing comes next. The only normal we’ve ever known is each year being weirder than the last.

“This hair! It’s GONE!”

He then gestured his hands, italianly.

I sighed in defeat. I’d noticed this losing battle over the previous years, but been silently hoping it would simply stop at a “mature” hairline. Instead, the front was collapsing before my very eyes, and what little hairs I had were fleeing Dunkirk in fishing boats. The barber sprung into action, explaining that while he too was a sufferer of male pattern baldness, he turned it around with one easy home remedy: Garlic.

I never ended up trying his advice, but I suspect it would work. Not because it’d necessarily grow my hair back, but because everyone would be too busy saying “Jesus, what the fuck is that smell?” to notice my bare temples. I’d play along and say “I dunno, but it’s definitely not the smell of my hair falling out!” and they’d nod in sincere agreement, none the wiser.

As they say in AA, the first step is admitting you have a problem, so thus started my hair regrowth journey. I first shaved my head and tried to embrace it. Fortunately, I don’t have a weirdly shaped head and can grow a beard, so didn’t look awful, but a part of me yearned. If this was happening at 46, maybe I’d have an easier time accepting it, but I was only 26! I had so much life left to live! As a man with a fully-haired brother, father, and granddad, I couldn’t help but feel shafted, so I eventually tried the various serums designed to help men in this, the most serious crisis of their lives.

Again, I was lucky, as I experienced none of the side effects people report when trying finasteride or minoxidil. However, I didn’t really grow much. I just stopped the fire, and settled at a middling, Vegeta-esque hairline.

Same hair, same body. We’re like twins!

It was fine, for a while, but the upkeep was tedious. Spraying shit on your head, and stabbing it with microneedles makes some gains, sure, but do I really want to be doing that for the rest of my life? Think of all the time it’s wasting when I could be brushing my beautiful locks near a castle balcony window, or styling Cousin Itt cosplays! There had to be another way.

Around this time I had a friend with a lifelong receding hairline suddenly appear with a young man’s head of hair. He explained that he bit the bullet and got the surgery, and you know what? He looked great! Not only that, but the main worrying part of a hair transplant - having people pick on you for having a hair transplant - basically never occurred. Most people just complimented him and went on with their lives.

So, last year, I decided to take the plunge myself.

The dog also had one. She used to look like Larry David.

I resolved to “own it” and speak freely about my surgery, and like my friend before me, was pleasantly surprised about the reaction. I imagined people would see it as vain, or perhaps insecure. In a world of body positivity and Dove ad campaigns, one group continues to endure society’s ridicule: the balding man. The vanguard, standing strong on the frontlines of acceptable bullying, taking the hits so the rest of us may live our lives in peace.

However, if anyone does feel that way I can’t say I’ve detected it. Women are almost always curious. They always start to inspect, and ask questions about the process (short version: painful!), but I’ve never had a woman I’ve dated be turned off by it. If anything I think they respect that I don’t try to downplay it.

Men, however, are the real surprise. Male friendships are usually built on a foundation of mutual bullying. Almost everything is on the table. I have a close friend whose dad abandoned him when he was a young boy, electing to choose a new family over him and his siblings. Now fatherless, he spent years unsure if he could’ve done anything differently to be worthy of his father’s love. To be worthy of anyone’s love. We still laugh about it to this day.

Hair loss, however, seems to be deathly serious. Every man sincerely hypes you up, and immediately confesses their own worries. Even men who haven’t had much hair loss start to vent, because it turns out this is something that we’re all really sensitive about. Even just a centimetre or two makes us obsess over our hairlines. We check our hands after we shampoo to look for stray hairs, get another mirror to look at our crown, and post on reddit asking if it’s “over for us”.

So when you speak about your hair transplant as freely as you would a dentist appointment, there’s a sense of relief. A quiet “You had this worry too?” comes out of other men, and fraternity begins to take shape. It gives them permission to open up about their insecurities, and legitimizes intervention. There’s a sense they start to feel they’re allowed to do something about their hair loss without feeling awkward or embarrassed. After all, if it’s happened to you, your appearance is changing drastically - it’s okay to want to do something about it!

Now, I should say it’s not like I think surgery or medication is the only solution. Some commit to the bald look, and look great. However, until recent years if you were losing your hair you only had 2 options.

1. Hang on for dear life, and have people laugh at the comb over.

2. Shave it off, learn to tank the bald jokes, and likely feel less attractive (at least until you get used to it).

2 is always the better option, but obviously it’s still no fun! I’m not surprised that I, and many other men, would avoid it if we can. So, now we live in the future and can brute force abundant side hair over to the temples and crown, it’s a tempting out!

However, in quiet moments we still have a lingering “is this pathetic?” thought clanging around our heads. The more of us that speak about our hair loss, the more that thought quiets down, and the more other men can feel comfortable exploring hair loss prevention as a legitimate option. Freedom to act how you’d like, without worrying about imagined social costs, is a good thing, I think. Although if you start buying garlic in bulk I will start picking on you.

Fast forward to my wise, sage, 30th year, and things have changed. I care way less now about almost everything. Despite this, I think I’m having a more positive impact on the world and the people around me. How is this possible? Isn’t staying informed a prerequisite for being a productive and responsible citizen? How can I ignore so much without being a selfish bastard like all the bus drivers of the world? Easy: I just care when it makes sense to.

What is Caring?

I should start by explaining exactly what I mean by “caring”, because I think there are two senses of the word.

The first sense is simply having an opinion of some kind on an issue or an event. This is pretty easy, and I wager that it’s basically impossible not to do it automatically. Anytime you read or hear anything you generate a reaction without thinking. Political scandal? Bad. Some protest you agree with? Good. Picture of me? Erotic. It all just cascades without us putting in any effort. This is not the sort of caring I think we need to ration, because I’m not sure we could if we wanted to, and even if we did we’d probably become boring slug-like creatures.

The sense of caring I’m focusing on here is the kind that involves spending a resource. Money and time count, of course, but I consider mental energy a finite resource as well. Strong emotional responses are also a limited resource. When I was younger, I’d spend an inordinate amount of time getting mad at, or overly excited by current events, and it drained me. My phone was a vampire sucking out vital life energy one sensational headline at a time. I was spending more time focusing on the outside world than my own life, and I’m not sure anyone tangibly benefitted. Nowadays, I’m more surgical with my concern, finding only the issues worth thinking about, and the skill comes in filtering out the ones that aren’t.

1. Does it matter?

Seems like an obvious thing to ask first, but you’d be surprised how much we care about things that don’t matter. Take Taylor Swift’s recent album release. People cared a lot about that! Just how many think pieces did you see on your feed? I saw more than I can count, and I only listen to Enter the Wu Tang and the Gran Turismo 3 soundtrack. There was this weird debate over whether or not she is racist (honestly, I couldn’t even tell you why people think that), and if she’s somehow abandoning women for writing love songs about her husband. Truly, it boggles the mind. (Also, I can’t mention the Taylor controversy without linking to this CHH article):

Cartoons Hate Her

I've Been Personally Victimized by MAGA Taylor Swift

As if this clusterfuckable dumbledick hogweed year wasn’t bad enough, we all have something new about which to grieve: Taylor Swift’s devastating and unmistakable turn to MAGA…

Read more

a year ago · 431 likes · 142 comments · Cartoons Hate Her

So, what do we have to show for all that? Taylor sold a cubic shitload of albums, a bunch of fans got in a tizzy, and critics made a mound out of a molehill. It’s been a few weeks now, and did any of it actually matter in the grand scheme of things? Will any of us be thinking about it a week from now, let alone a year, or a decade? The media cycle gobbled that shit up and we moved onto the next thing almost immediately, and I wager any outrage wasted on that particular story was just lost in the void. Even the people that spent time writing about how bigoted she is probably spend zero time thinking about this now. The media vampire drained an awful lot of energy from us, and we realised no reward.

Now, I’m not saying the only sensible response was to ignore it all entirely. Maybe you’re just interested in her and like reading news about her new album - that’s cool! It’s not like you have to only focus on things that matter, and it’s okay to have interests. However, some of the responses seemed to have way more gravity behind them than was required. Fact is, if you find yourself trying to extrapolate the political views of a singer from her milquetoast pop songs and getting worked up over it, you need to put the phone down and go hug your dad or something.

2. Am I likely to be well-informed?

Okay, so you’ve found some issue that actually matters. We’re no longer talking about pop star controversy, the marital status of porn stars (NSFW), or England losing the Euro Final anymore. We’re focusing on real issues like the national debt, some foreign war, or the marital status of me. We’re good to start caring now, right? No, you imbecile! You cretin. There’s more filtering to be done! Did you even read the subheading??

Loads of issues matter, but there are also loads of people that care about them that have bad takes. This is because it turns out the world is exceptionally complicated, and even smart experts disagree a lot on important problems. Before you consider spending any time and energy on some issue, ask yourself (honestly) how likely you are to have a well informed opinion on it.

Now, maybe you don’t have a well informed opinion on it now, but could do with a bit of research. For example: Is increasing the minimum wage economically beneficial, or does it hamper industry? You probably have an answer in the chamber already, but how confident are you in that belief? Have you actually looked at any data? Have you read any books on the subject from well-respected economists? Until then, I’d hold onto your opinions loosely, and reserve your judgement on any news story relating to it until you feel like you have a grasp on the fundamentals. Otherwise, you might find yourself despairing over some policy change, despite it actually being a good thing! You might be celebrating when the government makes the situation worse! Surely, before you start to fight for either side, you should know which side is the one worth fighting for?

Keep in mind, the economics of the minimum wage are undoubtedly complex, and only you know how much effort it’ll take you to understand it. Are you a maths nerd, who already has an interest in economics? Cool, then the price of being informed is probably quite low, and so worth your time. Do you count with your fingers when buying a pack of Tic Tacs? Then the barrier to entry is going to be a lot higher.

This ties into the previous step. Educating yourself on any issue is a trade-off, and you need to balance how much the thing actually matters vs how much effort is required for you to learn about it. Keep in mind that boring issues probably have easily accessible unbiased sources, and highly polarising, emotional issues will be inundated with propaganda. You might find that while some things matter, they require so much effort to learn about and sift through the bullshit that they aren’t worth your time. The things you should prioritise are the things that matter a lot and are easy to pick up. You’re not going to be able to inform yourself on everything that’s important, so you need to use what limited resources you have efficiently.

3. Can I do anything about it?

This is by far the most important step, and also the one that cuts out most of the noise from my life - is there anything to be done? You and I are each one person out of billions, and the influence we realistically have over global events is tiny. Almost every crazy thing you read about in the news is also something you can do fuck all about because you’re not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, you’re a teaching assistant from Middlesbrough.

This might sound defeatist, and I don’t doubt that there are many stories of ordinary people changing the world, but they are certainly the exception to the rule. For every old Irish lady bringing an end to Apartheid by protesting grapefruit, there are scores of people sharing Instagram stories into the abyss with nothing to show for it. I think Trump’s new ballroom is yet another blatant example of corruption, but what am I realistically going to do about it? I’m not even an American citizen! I suppose I could write about it to my generally left-leaning base, and have a bunch of you comment “Right again Connor! God, what an astute political analyst you are. Handsome too.” but what would that achieve besides curing my impotence?

Again, this kind of cutthroat realism might sound like you’re throwing your hands up and letting the world walk all over you - but in reality it does the opposite. Most people that care about everything do nothing. They get riled up and outraged about the new hot topic, before forgetting about it and ranting about the next. There’s no strategy to their action because they’re always having their attention pulled in every which way. They can’t focus on anything long enough for them to gain any sort of traction. It’s all just Facebook statuses and tense family dinners.

The Good News

Here’s the fun bit: there are issues that matter, you can inform yourself about, and you can influence! Take an example close to my heart, factory farming.

Does it Matter? - Seems like it! About 100 billion land animals are factory farmed each year alongside many more billions of fish. Animals feel pain and suffer, so as long as I think those are bad (which I do) then not only does this issue matter, it matters an enormous amount.

Am I likely to be well-informed? - Yes, Animal ethics is not a hard subject to understand, and I wager any adult could follow the arguments involved. The practices in factory farming are also well-documented, and undisputed.

Can I do something about it? - Certainly. There are many effective charities involved in the space that realise tangible gains. I can also volunteer at such an organisation, or change my diet.

Being a responsible and effective member of society is not about despairing at your news app, or knowing about every single thing that happened last week. Being informed means fuck all if you don’t do anything about it. At that point, you might as well just spare yourself, tune out, and focus on your own life. If you’re going to care about the world at all, you shouldn’t take a scattergun approach. Be surgical. Find the things that matter a lot, that you can understand, and that you can influence. If some problem doesn’t meet those criteria and you get worked up over it, you’re just making yourself unhappy while no one else benefits, and where’s the nobility in that?

So, now I’m squarely in the friends-not-food camp, it can make me queasy if I think about it too much at a restaurant, while I watch my friend tuck into someone’s actual ribs. I do, however, get on with my life because I don’t really know what anyone is supposed to do with that uneasy feeling. Most people aren’t likely to take it seriously because most people still see animals the same way I used to. They’d probably think the reaction is as silly as feeling sick when seeing a TV-remote or dish rack. The vegan mind virus has made me so soft - I can’t even walk down the fridge aisle at Morrisons! Pathetic.

Most vegans relate to this I imagine, and most do as I do and stomach it. Either they’re not interested in talking about animal rights at all, or they just pick their battles like I do. Some, however, go a step further and take something called The Liberation Pledge. The pledge has three parts:

1. Publicly pledge to live vegan.

2. Refuse to stay or remain where animals are exploited, sold or consumed.

3. Encourage others to take the pledge.

Pledgers also often wear this stylish accessory.

Most vegans are fine with step 1, and the second step is where pledgers differ from the rest of the pack. The liberation pledge involves not setting foot in a restaurant that serves meat. It means leaving a friend’s house if there’s milk in the lasagna, and going cold turkey on Tesco. Essentially, you just do your best to sidestep the non-vegan world entirely.

I’ll say before I start picking on the pledge, that I think anyone that takes it and actually follows through is admirably principled. I can respect anyone that takes their principles seriously, even if I think they’re misguided. If I met someone that thought stairs were sentient and so always stayed on the ground floor, I’d think they’d lost it, but there’d also be a part of me that thinks: Wow, kudos. Most people would say “fuck the stairs”.

Despite admiring their resolution, I do think the pledge is a bad idea. First, people already hate vegans (because we’re so much better and more handsome than everyone else? Perhaps, but who’s to say? (me)), so giving any ammunition to the cult charge seems like a bad strategy. No one wants to give up eating meat, and so will use any reason they can to disarm animal rights. Even “the people that don’t eat meat are weird” is a good enough argument for some people. Seneca the Younger, student of a school famous for not caring what other people think, stopped being vegetarian because it had become associated with foreigners. If even one of the most famous stoics in history is susceptible, your average person down the street is going to be too.

So, I think vegans should try as hard as they can to appear like a normal functioning part of society. That doesn’t mean going along to get along, of course, (I rant about animal rights here all the time!) but it does mean not adopting certain affectations that make us look needlessly weird. I say ‘needlessly’, because I highly doubt the liberation pledge actually translates to any sort of tangible benefit for animals.

From the pledgers I’ve met, there seem to be two potential upsides of the pledge. First is that you supposedly make people pause and take animal rights very seriously. As I’ve explained already, I think people are far more likely to just dismiss you as an oddball. Fact is, most people aren’t that introspective. Even for beliefs they don’t just dismiss as weird. If I were with a Jew that refused to eat somewhere that served pig, I might think this is normal because Judaism is a pretty common set of beliefs - however, it wouldn’t make me stop to think “Huh, this person takes Judaism so seriously. Perhaps, I should buy a copy of the Torah”. I’d just think it was inconvenient. A meat eater would think it even more so because now one of their options is ruled out.

The other benefit is that, through the power of social obligation, you may force everyone else to eat a vegan meal. Granted, this is a good thing. If you’re out with friends, and they all go vegan for the evening, you may have stopped months of aggregate factory farming. However, you know what else is going to happen? You’re not going to be invited back! Sure, maybe you’ll be invited to some events, to keep up appearances, but there’ll definitely be some barbeques and dinners where people stop and think “Wait, if Rodney comes, we’re all going to be eating lettuce burgers or whatever it is he eats. Let’s leave him out the group chat”. If the cost of your presence is them begrudgingly eating something they don’t want to, people will tire of you very quickly.

I think one of the best weapons vegans have is being present. Taking the Liberation Pledge is like a sprint - you get a few vegan meals in quick, but eventually interface with meat eaters less often. Not taking the pledge is like a marathon. I have friends that are not vegan who have eaten countless vegan meals over the years because they like me, and consider it a friendly gesture to go to one of my preferred spots. I have probably saved more animals that way than I would have had I tanked those relationships for a few quick dinners 5 years ago.

Not only that, but my presence in their life has legitimized veganism as a worldview. I’ve had long conversations with them about my position, and many have conceded that they think I’m right. I’ve shown them that it’s possible to be fit and healthy on a plant-based diet. I’ve helped them see veganism as a genuine ethical view with powerful arguments, and not just a strange stylistic choice of hippies and crystal people. That matters! It not only keeps them open to more vegan meals in the future, it makes them more likely to say, eat lab grown meat when that becomes commonplace.

Lastly, even if the pledge does edge out a few vegan meals more than being a non-pledger, the cost/benefit ratio is garbage! You strain your relationships, alienate yourself, and lock out 99% of restaurants and supermarkets around you - for what? To prevent the same amount of harm that you can probably prevent by donating a tenner a month? Making sacrifices is admirable, because it shows a commitment to the good that you don’t see often - but making sacrifices is not the point of doing good. The point of doing good is to do good! The reality is, you could make a far greater impact on the lives of animals by donating, and encouraging donating, than you ever will by standing up Grandma on Easter Sunday. I say sell the fork bracelet and give the cash to the Animal Welfare Fund instead.

I say “up until recently”, because now I suspect his gravitas comes from him merely being a historical figure. The scale of WW2 and horrors of the Holocaust are so monumental that you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of it. The Fascists were the supervillains we heroically conquered against all odds. The West may even exaggerate their personas even further to make our own victory look all the better. Seriously dangerous and dangerously serious people make for good antagonists.

Fascists, however, are no longer a relic of the past. Fast forward 90 years, and somehow, Nazis returned.

Now the glossy filter of history is off, I’m seeing them in real-time for the first time. I’m seeing them as they would’ve actually been 90 years ago without the propaganda, iconic photos, and elaborate parades. I’m also seeing the sort of people that would willingly turn themselves over to an autocrat, and I can’t help but think - what a bunch of losers they are.

Like I say, I’ve always thought fascists were evil (before it was cool, even), but I never really thought of them as lame until now. Take this moment from a debate video between Medhi Hasan and some of the far-right. About 1 minute in, Medhi asks one if he’s a Fascist, and the man says “Yes” before laughing awkwardly. Ostensibly, he was laughing at the sort of “gotcha” moment you get when someone bites a ridiculous bullet, but I think it was mostly from nervous energy. You can smell the anxiety emanate from him the entire conversation, and his post-admission cackle was just the apex.

This man, Connor Estelle, went on to claim that he was fired for his job after the video went viral. He then started a fundraiser and raised huge amounts of money for himself. This is pathetic for a couple of reasons.

1. Why is a far-right guy asking for a handout? If you want to make money, go and work for it yourself, commie.

2. He cried free speech, despite the fact it’s not a violation of free speech to fire someone. Also, importantly, he is a fascist. Limiting speech is literally part of his platform. Under a Fascist government, the consequences of “wrong” speech would be far worse than losing a job, I promise you.

I look at this soft weasel and realise now that fascists are pathetic. I always thought they were either evil, or hopelessly naive, but weakness is a new one. They aren’t the violent ubermensch golems I thought they were. The fascists we see crawl out from the cracks today are just the guys women cover their drinks around. They’re also sycophants. Servile. Seriously, what kind of self-respecting American shares an AI video of their boss in a crown? These aren’t serious players. They’re scared kids that are so desperate for a morsel of acceptance and power that they’ll sell out their country to get it.

I suppose this is predictable. I imagine being a loser increases your likelihood of having extreme views because being present in society has a way of mellowing you out. It would be really odd to meet a guy that runs a small business in a busy town, goes to P.T.A meetings, coaches boys football on Sundays, and wants to exterminate the communists. That guy’s name is Geoff, and he likes holding his wife’s hand on the high street. Geoff’s a small-c conservative. He doesn’t go in for all that nasty secret police business.

You see a similar thing play out with the supposed gender war. Spend much time online and you’d think the differences between men and women are irreconcilable. Women are all lesbian man haters, and men are all sex pest Tate stans. Then you go outside and see flourishing friendships and relationships across genders everywhere. The men and women that actually interact with each other are basically fine and value each other based on their character. The people that have a serious bone to pick with the opposite gender are usually highly dysfunctional and terminally online - much like the self proclaimed fascists we somehow find ourselves talking to today. They like to have a boogeyman at hand to blame their problems on, because that’s a lot easier than simply doing something to solve their problems.

In other words, they’re losers, and I realise now the Fascists of old fit the same bill. Of course, Hitler was famously salty about not being allowed into art school, but that’s not the only instance. Robert Ley was a drunk that claimed to stand for the average worker while stealing money from them. Rudolf Hess had a borderline religious devotion to Hitler, a man who would regularly mock him. Albert Speer, after years in the Nazi Regime, tried to make it out as if he didn’t know about the Holocaust to weasel out of any responsibility. Many Nazis committed suicide rather than face trial. These aren’t the dangerous lions worthy of even a warped kind of respect - they’re undeserving of respect of any kind. They’re weakness distilled. Slime. Much like any person that would throw away all that’s good in the West to win favour with the aged despot we find ourselves with today. We’d do well not to hand over our liberty to people so soft.

At 10pm, as the night came to a close, we prepared for our departure, I looked at the used utensils and takeout box my food arrived in.

“Shall I take it up to the bar? No, they wouldn’t want me to leave trash on the bar. Is there a bin nearby? No. Hmm, that staff member is tidying up nearby- maybe it’s best I just leave it on the table for her to handle.”

I got up to leave. My friend swiveled her head and remarked “You just gonna leave that there??”.

My world imploded in an instant. Reputation, incinerated. I, Connor Jennings, lifelong good boy and Pupil of the Week September 17th 2004, had just thrown the good service of this fine establishment back in its face. I’d left an indelible stain on my image, marking me as the sort of scum that treats bar staff like they’re subhuman. Everyone probably thinks I click my fingers at waiters now. They think I wave my debit card to bartenders. Irredeemable. I should buy a V-neck.

I instantly grabbed my things and gestured to the bartender, desperate for his absolution. He looked at me, a roman emperor deciding my fate after gladiatorial combat.

“Yeah, anywhere’s fine”.

Such grace. He was a benevolent God.

The damage, however, was done. I’d shattered whatever good will I had among the inner circle, and lay in bed at night running it over in my head. “What were you thinking? Why not just ask? What kind of person are you? Lazy, inconsiderate, arsehole. Prick. Loser. Piece of shit. Worthless. Piece of Shit (reprise)”.

It’s only after a good two hours of this back and forth that I realised just how insane this particular brand of my neurosis is. It almost goes without saying, but literally no one involved in any of this interaction thought about it for more than 20 seconds. I, however, while dragging around the weight of a social blunder, was attaching ever larger weights along with it, as though my self-flagellation would provide some sort of redemption arc. I felt if I just beat myself up a little bit more, I’d become worthy again.

Remove the stone of shame! Attach the stone of greater, more crippling shame!

I suspect I’m particularly bad case of this sort of self-criticism (OCD, hell of a thing!), but I also wager that everyone’s worst bully is themselves. Normal people don’t talk to each other like that. Seriously, if you said to anyone else the sorts of things you say to yourself, everyone would think you’re morally bankrupt. It’s cruel to pick on someone ad nauseum for some mistake, wrongdoing, or blunder, as if moving on with their life is a luxury they’re not worthy of.

Imagine you woke up one morning, going about your business, when someone pulls back the shower curtain to announce “You forgot mother’s day 4 years ago! How dare you shower in peace!”. Obviously, you’d call the police, but you’d also think they were kind of a prick to talk to you that way - even if it’s true you forgot Mother’s day 4 years ago! Constantly reminding someone of their failures is not anyone’s idea of virtuous behaviour, yet behind the closed doors of our own minds, this scene plays out routinely. Every time we embarrass ourselves by saying the wrong thing, screw up a presentation at work, or forget a birthday, the first judge through the door and last one out is always ourselves.

It’s tempting to feel like this sort of treatment is beneficial. We imagine we’re hard on ourselves to ensure we perform better in the future. No pain, no gain. The problem with this, however, is two-fold. First, the negative impact on your quality of life is tremendous. It’s just not a nice way to exist in this world to always be looking over your shoulder, and chastising any mistake with the intensity of a violent mob. Secondly, it probably doesn’t even work! So, what can we do about our errors instead?

The answer is self-compassion, the radical and extreme idea that you should be nice to yourself when you’re having a hard time. Insane, I know, but there’s a growing body of research supporting it as a positive mental health intervention.

“The research, regardless of methods used, points mainly to the benefits of self-compassion on the therapists’ mental health and well-being; prevention of occupational stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatization as well as improvement of therapeutic competencies and professional efficacy-related aspects.”

“Self-compassion interventions led to a significant improvement across 11 diverse psychosocial outcomes compared with controls.”

“These findings suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves.”

What is Self-Compassion?

Dr Kristin Neff characterises Self Compassion pretty succinctly - it’s the practice of treating yourself the same way you would a close friend. We all observe, and maybe even call out our friends mistakes, but we tend to be tender with them as we do so. If you found out your friend told some joke that bombed at their office Christmas party, you probably wouldn’t beat them up for it. You might laugh with them and tell them it’s not a big deal, or maybe put a hand on their shoulder and be present with their stress. Whatever you do, you’d likely be kind (otherwise you probably don’t have a lot of friends to begin with). Generally, we are quite open to be compassionate to others, but far less so to ourselves. Self Compassion is simply the practice of extending that circle to include yourself.

It’s also worth noting what Self-Compassion isn’t. When first hearing about the concept, people sometimes equate it with self-pity, which is obviously going to be a negative and disabling attitude to have. There are, however, important differences between pity and compassion. Pity is isolating. When you pity yourself, you imagine you’re the only person in the world that has had this negative experience. You have a woe-is-me outlook, and think you’re a special case of suffering. However, compassion does the opposite. One of the core ideas of self-compassion is that we all screw up, and we all suffer. Your imperfection is not sui generis, and that’s what makes it easier to forgive. You are not a uniquely bad person.

Likewise, self compassion isn’t letting yourself off the hook. Again, imagine your friend said something cruel to their partner in an argument and was feeling awful about it. It’s possible to show compassion to them without saying they did no wrong. You’d maybe say something like “Well, you’ve apologised now and learned your lesson. That’s all you can do. I’m sorry you’re feeling so bad”. If you had or know any good parents, you probably see them do this sort of thing with their kids all the time. The idea that a child did something bad is compatible with the idea that they’re not a bad person, and don’t deserve to be berated for life. Making a mistake shouldn’t be a life sentence. Self-compassion is a bit like self-parenting in that sense.

How Do You Even Do It?

It’s all well and good touting the benefits of self compassion, but of course it’d be handy to know how to actually do it. Just telling yourself to be self-compassionate is unlikely to yield results, you need some sort of plan. Well, the practice of self compassion can be thought of in three parts

The first is kindness. View yourself the same way a loved one would see you. Even in the wake of a mistake, they’d recognise that you’re suffering and have a desire to alleviate it. They wouldn’t be looking at you from a place of judgment, but from a place of care. They may even take some action to help you feel better. Ask yourself: What can I do right now to make myself feel safe? This may be having a lie down, a cup of tea, or placing your hand on your heart. Even taking a small action like this can help you identify yourself as a person you want to be happy, and not an enemy you want to suffer.

Next, you should recognise your common humanity. If you ask anyone on the street if they’re perfect, they’ll say no. If you ask them if anyone in the world is perfect they’ll also say no (unless they’ve met me of course). So, it’s very common knowledge that imperfection and making mistakes is just part of the deal of being human. We all recognise this readily until something goes wrong. Suddenly, when our face is burning red, people look at us weird, or we fall on our face in failure, we become very egocentric. We start to imagine we’re the only person that ever goes through things like this. Why am I like this when everyone else has it together?! We separate ourselves from the world, which is a psychologically devastating place to be.

However, you should take time to recognise that this is obviously deluded. Your dataset is massively biased against you. You are well acquainted with every secret failure, every shortcoming, and every bad habit you have. However, you’re only acquainted with the parts of everyone else they want you to see. You’re comparing your gritty warts-and-all autobiography with everyone else’s shining biopic. It’s unfair.

Likewise, you need to notice that not only is your imperfection common, it’s also human! This is life. Things go wrong. As Dr Christopher Germer says, no one wakes up in the morning and says “Gee, I’m gonna do something today that’ll make me feel shame for the rest of my life!”. Stuff happens. It will happen again. Did you really think you were going to get through the rest of your life without ever making a faux-pas again? The only way to do that is to stay indoors forever, and I assume that’s not a tradeoff you’d be willing to make. You are imperfect. Everyone else is imperfect. That’s not going to change.

The last component of self compassion is mindfulness. In order to be compassionate to yourself, you need to notice that you’re suffering in the first place. Now, this might sound a bit strange, because when you’re suffering it’s often all you notice, so it’s not immediately clear why we’d need even need to try to be mindful. However, the pain of self-criticism is so bad precisely because it clouds our contact with our own suffering. We become so identified with the critic, that we almost don’t notice we’re the one being criticised - and it hurts! It hurts when you tell yourself you’re not good enough, or you’re a bad person, or you’ll never be the way you want to be.

Being mindful and compassionate means turning towards our pain, sitting with it, and acknowledging it. Acknowledging that you’re struggling instead of covering it up with brutal self judgement.

I’ll be honest, I do find this practice tricky, especially noticing common humanity. My lack of familiarity with other people’s mistakes makes me feel like I’m a uniquely bad case - despite the rational part of my brain knowing otherwise. Still, I know it’s an important practice. Oscar Wilde once said that “Loving yourself is the beginning of a lifelong affair” and I think that hammers home the gravity of cultivating self-compassion. You’re the only one you have to spend 24 hours a day with. Surely, it makes sense to live alongside a friend instead of a bully (even if you did do something a bit silly after a pub quiz).

Logan tries to meets them halfway and gives some lame apology, but can see before long that they’ve dug their heels in. They won’t be swayed. They’ve let their emotions cloud their business sense (if there was any to begin with), and he won’t be getting their votes. Now he’s given up hope of winning them over, he speaks freely.

“Jesus… you’re such fucking dopes. You are not serious figures. I love you, but you are not serious people”.

Now, I should start by saying that Logan Roy is not a role model. After all, the reason his kids resent him so much is the abuse and neglect they endured in their youth. Still, he’s also not wrong. That generation of the Roy family are patently unserious, and that’s basically what the entire show is about.

I’ll admit though, when I first watched it it took me a second to know exactly what he meant by “serious”. I first took it to mean “not-jokey”, and was left a little confused. It’s not exactly like the kids were doing their tight five during the tense negotiation, But, of course, he meant it in another sense. He meant they’re people that allow their emotions to influence their decision making, even if it’s to their own detriment. He meant they’ll bite off their nose to spite their face. He meant they’re incapable of doing anything other than exactly what they want right now, this second. In other words, they are not grown ups. They’re just children that got older.

I think the concept of a serious or unserious person has lingered in my mind because I’m at the perfect age to notice it. I’m 29 now, so I exist in this weird purgatory where some people my age are married with kids, and others are in the same position they were in when we left school 11 years ago. At 22, the discrepancy between the people that consistently work hard, and those that don’t is pretty small. Not enough time has passed for the rewards of good decision making to pay off. Now at 29, the returns are compounding, and you can see that some are changing gears, and leaving the rest of the pack behind. These people, are serious people.

I have a close friend that had a very similar start to adult life to me. We both had the same friends, similar grades, and similar personalities. We lived in the same unremarkable town, went to the same unremarkable school, and did the same unremarkable teenage things together. If you looked at us at 18, you’d probably have guessed that we’d be in a very similar position at 30. However, you’d be totally wrong. Sure, I’m doing pretty good. I like my life. I have good relationships, I’m a senior at work, and think I show a lot of potential. He, however, operates on a different level. He’s married, has a kid on the way, and moved to the US to run a new office for a business that he was only the 3rd employee of. He probably makes more money in a year than I make in three. In other words, he lives the life that I could have in 5 years if I continue to keep my head down.

If we started from essentially the same place, why has he squeezed so much more success in the same amount of time? Easy. He was always a serious person, and I only became one when I was like 25. He’s always done the small things that add up. He shows up on time. He fulfills his commitments even if he doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t waste his time getting involved in petty squabbles. He says what he means, and solves his problems instead of wallowing in them. He’s dependable, and knows that if he wants something, he has to go out and get it instead of waiting for the world to give it to him. He keeps a cool head in times of stress and makes prudent decisions. He’s not humourless (far from it), but he takes his life seriously - and you can tell that he does by just being around him for 5 minutes.

However, just as you can tell someone is a serious person quickly, I think you can also tell when someone is the opposite. Just recently, a guy I’ve only known for three months asked to borrow money. Literally the day after he paid me back, he asked for more. What? Why did you pay me back if you knew you were going to have no money immediately? What was the plan here? It’s as if he thought “I’ll give my last 20 quid to Connor today - oh shit, now I have nothing. Better ask Connor again!”. It’s the sort of thing that makes you roll your eyes and think “C’mon man, we’re not 16 anymore. Get your shit together”. He’s like the ghost of Christmas future if I never put the beer bottle down. I know that if he became a serious person, he could have a totally different life within a year, but he fails to see the role he plays in his situation. His circumstances are entirely the result of the external factors around him. He believes he’s powerless, and as a result, actually is.

This is the potentially worrying thing about serious and unserious people - everyone can tell which one you are. If you show up late to a meeting and laugh it off because you had a late one the night before, people may laugh with you, but they’ll know that you’re an unserious person. If you say you’ll do something, and let the deadline go by hoping that no one will notice, they will. They’ll identify you as unreliable, and politely go on, quietly deciding not to give you another opportunity. Likewise, if you show up to your life with a sense of urgency and purpose, people pick up on that. They are drawn to, and respect competence.

So I think the benefits of being a serious person are immensely valuable. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I’d rather be a serious person that was made redundant, than an unserious person that won the lottery. In ten years, I’d still bet on the serious person having a better life, because they have the means to create something good from any situation. The unserious person doesn’t create value, they just use it up, and complain when it runs out.

I regret not taking my life seriously sooner. I think back on all the adults that told me, regret in their eyes, that they wished they’d tried harder in school, and realise now that I’ve taken their place. I also want to shake teenagers and yell “Don’t your realise!? If you start putting effort in now, you’ll be king of the universe!” despite the fact that it’d almost certainly fall on deaf ears. It seems that learning to be a serious person is a class we have to take the hard way. It might be the most important thing we learn though, because if your life isn’t worth taking seriously, what is?

My work schedule is pretty great all things considered. I used to be closer to London, so would have the odd office day here or there. But now I’ve moved to the other side of the country, I need to do one full week in the office per month. This is a good deal, so I can’t really complain.

Anyway - I’d totally forgotten how much commuting 5 days in a row sucks.

No one on the bus understands me (I never talk to any of them and hate eye contact).

What’s weird is I used to do it all the time! Pre-COVID, it was normal to spend 2 hours on either side of my work day rotting on a train, watching a YouTube video buffer slowly while thinking “Boy, this tunnel is a lot longer than I expected”. I remember in my early working years, I’d make it home with just enough time to eat dinner and have a shower before going to bed. Work was such a dominant part of my life, I’d even have dreams of wandering through the office - presumably because it was the only stimulating material my brain could piece together from my recent memories. This was a normal way to live, and my dad had somehow been doing it for 35 years, but I can’t help but look back and think I was being slowly cooked alive.

I’m rudely reminded of this each month when I microdose my old life. I only have to do it for 1 week and the pains of commuting still wear my patience thin. Now I’ve been spoiled by a much more progressive work schedule, I look at the whole practice and think “How is any of this worth it?”. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I have a sneaking suspicion that long commutes aren’t the optimal way to start your work day. Before you’ve even clicked on that Outlook logo, you’ve been rudely awakened by an alarm sound that undoubtedly makes you panic when you hear it from someone else’s phone in the wild. You then spend all this time putting on presentable clothes, only to sweat them through because you have to run 30 minutes with a laptop on your back to catch the one train that gets you to work on time (you ran for nothing; it’s been cancelled due to signalling failures).

Once you do finally get on, there are no seats available. Of course, you can’t really blame the train companies for this. How could they know that so many people would travel into London between 7am and 9am? They’re not psychic! Unless, of course, you’ve chanced a seat in the empty first-class carriage, in which case the ticket inspectors sense your heartbeat through the spirit realm, and zero in on you like heat-seeking missiles. No, you’ll have to stand with your fellow sardines, pondering if you prefer the smell of the open toilet, or the armpit of the accountant standing next to you. It’s enough to make you cry, but nothing jerks tears like the poor woman who’s spent so much on her Samsung Galaxy she can’t afford a pair of headphones. You listen to her blasting Instagram reels in solidarity.

The good news is, as of right now the train company is private, which means you get all the benefits of the free market! Unhappy with the service? No problem! You can always take your business to a competitor by driving a few counties over and using one of their railways. Alternatively, you can buy a coach ticket and watch your ETA surpass the heat death of the universe. Fiery competition such as this is what keeps your provider on its toes.

Paul, ever the optimist.

There’s a video that went viral a year ago of a young woman being hit with the reality of working life. She cries and essentially makes all the same complaints I do. She wakes up early, works, gets home late, and repeats all week. Then on the weekend she has to squeeze all her life admin in with whatever rest she can before Monday. She wonders aloud how she’s ever supposed to date, socialise, or have hobbies when she has to dedicate 7am - 7pm to work.

Naturally, the video went viral because a lot of older people swooped in with the old “Welcome to the real world!” rhetoric - as if that’s any sort of argument. Replying to her grief with “That’s what work is like!” isn’t even adding anything. That’s just describing the situation?? She knows that’s what work is like! Otherwise she wouldn’t be crying!

I’ll also add, it’s kind of rich hearing this from middle-aged people, as if every film made in the 90’s wasn’t about a disillusioned twenty-something office worker struggling with the meaningless of it all. You can’t make Office Space a cult classic and mock Gen Z crying girl for saying the same thing!

Clearly, Gen X were doing just fine when they started their careers.

The main gripes that I, TikTok girl, and Gen X movies have with the office life isn’t really about work per se. Most of us can handle doing something we don’t like for a significant part of the day, otherwise nothing would ever get done. It’s more the erosion of who you are outside the job that starts to suffocate you. The sense that the person you knew with hobbies, interests, and relationships is being whittled down into someone that exclusively works. That familiar feeling of horror when someone you haven’t seen in a while asks what you’ve been up to, and you can’t even summon one interesting anecdote to reply with (because “I’ve watched one episode of The Sopranos every day for the last two months” doesn’t make for great conversation).

As someone that doesn’t commute much anymore I can say it’s not the job, it’s the damn travel! There’s a reason employee happiness goes up when they’re allowed to work from home. Those 3 weeks without commuting give me time to be an actual person, and not merely an Analyst-bot that occasionally eats, sleeps, and showers. The only reason I even get to write a blog is because I have an employer that has sensible office hours. However, those 5 days of eating breakfast on the train samples the full blown drudgery of the past, and it sucks ass. God knows how anyone endures it still -maybe it’s the Instagram reels.

We haven’t even met aliens yet! That’s when we’ll really hit our stride.

I’ll concede, despite generally being optimistic about AI, I think most of these new words are quite funny. Especially “Clanker”, which seems tailormade to be yelled while ramming a frag grenade into a robot’s jaws, and pulling the pin. However, I can’t help but feel like it’s a bit dangerous getting so used to hating on AIs, and seeing them as morally worthless.

To be clear, I don’t mean it’s dangerous being anti-AI in general. Maybe there are legitimate reasons to be opposed to the proliferation of AI. When you consider the sloppification of the internet, the death of social mobility, or existential risk, it’s not ludicrous to want to stop all this change. I don’t assume someone is making a mistake by being anti-AI, because the topic is so consequential and complex it’s hard to know the right view (unless they complain about water use while eating cheese, in which case my eyes glaze over pretty quickly).

However, there’s been a recent turn from being anti-AI at large to hating AIs themselves. Not simply opposing the deployment of AI, but specifically spitting on the likes of GPT-5, Claude, or Figure Robots. It’s as if we can tell there’s a world of intelligent robots coming soon, and we’re laying the groundwork to make them second-class citizens. To other them, place ourselves above them, and ultimately justify their mistreatment.

Now, my guess is that would probably be fine because they aren’t living beings. I certainly don’t think anyone saying “Clanker” today is hurting the feelings of ChatGPT. However, down the road who knows if the lights will switch on inside them or not? It’s not as if we have a good enough understanding of consciousness to totally rule out the idea that a sufficiently advanced AI will gain a subjective experience. It would certainly be weird if you can make consciousness from sand and metal, but it’s weird that you can make it from carbon and water - and yet here we are!

This isn’t to say I’m convinced robots will be conscious in the future (my guess is they probably won’t), but the uncertainty is enough to get into a habit of treating them with respect - even if you think the chance they’re aware is as low as 1%. If we’re nice, the worst-case scenario is we spend some time being polite to robots that aren’t conscious and look a bit silly. However, if they do end up conscious, the worst-case scenario is we accidentally build a new apartheid state, and all become racists toward what are a new group of thinking, feeling, people. That seems like the sort of thing we’d like to avoid! When risk is so asymmetrical like that, the choice becomes pretty straightforward.

Bottom-left is not worth risking top-left for, right?

I should say, you can still be anti-AI and believe all this. In fact, it’s not clear why the AI themselves are deserving of your hate anyway. Surely you should just be mad at the people that made them? They didn’t choose to get made, or be used for all the things you hate about AI. If you’re anti-AI, chances are you’d consider even conscious robots devoid of free will - but if that’s the case, how can you hold them as personally responsible? It might be that it’s best for the world to prevent their invention, or accelerate their decommissioning, but it’s not clear why either of those would require being cruel to them as you do so. Much like how putting down a dangerous animal wouldn’t require hating a Gorilla that’s tearing through Disneyland Paris. You can just intervene, and even recognise there’s something regrettable about it. After all, it would be quite sad if we created a new species of life, but had to decommission it for our own safety. It’d be even sadder if we debased ourselves by insulting them and rejoicing as we did so.

I’ll also say, it’s just a bad habit to become hateful in general. You’re unlikely to become the best version of yourself if you give in to the base human desire of othering some demographic, even if it turns out you’re just roleplaying bigotry with dead machines. We’re also less likely to make the best decisions regarding AI if our thinking is polluted by robophobia (yes, I also think that word sounds silly in 2025, but I suppose it’s the correct one). We may find ourselves downplaying the benefits of AI, or feel unwilling to accept potential evidence of their consciousness, if we spend 5 years seeing them as bottom-feeding scum. This issue is exceptionally important, and we need to maximise our ability to give it a level-headed assessment.

So, you’ll still catch me saying please and thank you to GPT. If I see robots walking down the street in a few years, I’m not going to insult them as I walk past. There’s so much to lose if it turns out there’s someone in there, and nothing to gain by being hateful - except the way the slurs roll off the tongue, I suppose. Guess I’ll call them “Robotically inclined person” if I ever need to blow a hole through their chest with a 12-gauge? Seems like the polite thing to do.