And so another chapter must come to another crushing end. Well, that might be a tad overdramatic, but bear with me. I’ve written plenty before about the various things I’ve tried over the years while trying to achieve a certain benchmark of success.

The fine art of working for other people

But I’m an odd lad. I’m a writer, so I don’t really do all that well when I work with other people. Not that I’m not necessarily a team player, but more that I work better alone.

I could make a list as long as my arm about my various failures in corporate/business or office/retail life.

Still, it usually boils down to starting the job well, those above me liking my work ethic, but then after a while, when I make suggestions for changes to make the work faster, better, and more efficient, it’s pretty much always been the case that things weren’t changed, ideas were put on the long finger and I ended up getting disillusioned and bored.

I’d tail off, because, y’know lads, what’s the feckin’ point in working hard if nobody else does, and so you learn just to do what’s asked, keep your head down, your nose and arse clean, and do enough to earn your crust without ruffling any feathers.

This is life for many, but it’s not for me. I mix well with people; I genuinely like people, and meeting new people in the real world…crowds of people are a different beast, but that’s for another day, and the type of job that I have done the best in is where I’d be given a task and a deadline and left to my own devices to finish it.

But those jobs are few and far between when you’re starting off your career in your twenties and thirties, and so, thanks to the various failures I made, or dead ends I found myself at, I made the choice that I wasn’t going to work for anyone anymore and that I’d freelance.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

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The safer option, every bloody time

But I need to go back a little further.

As a young lad, I was a pretty decent singer and songwriter, but I lacked the confidence to go all out for music, aye I was in bands, and a few of them were pretty good, but, looking back now, we probably didn’t try hard enough.

We were more into recording and writing songs than gigging, and that was a mistake, but to get back to the point, instead of going full steam ahead and trying that life, I took the option to do something alongside music writing; I went off to study music production.

The logic was that, well, I could maybe get good enough at recording and producing to work with bands, and take what I learned and apply it to the music I want to make for my band.

Oh, the naivety of youth, eh? Little did I know that apart from doing live sound desk work in venues or being stuck with one band, you’re not likely to get much work in Ireland.

Then there was bar work, which I was really good at. I was running a pub by the time I was 22, so I went off and studied hotel & bar management while working.

It was fine. Fine, and utterly boring, but it was an education with some paperwork, at least. Until one of my good pals and his girlfriend announced she was pregnant and it hit me that working and running pubs, while a well-paying job, wasn’t the life I wanted to have if I too, eventually, wanted to get hitched and raise a family.

Oh well, back to the drawing board, eh?

Bigger than Stephen King by Thursday

Now, apart from writing music, writing fiction was my childhood goal. Dare I do a creative writing course? Of course not; I took the safer option and did a degree in Journalism & Media instead.

Like music production, it was the safer option; I could do freelance journalism and then, in downtime, write my fiction and use all my knowledge taken from daily journalism writing, and the contacts amassed, and with a bit of putting my snout to the grindstone after a few years I’d be bigger than Stephen King, and we’re on easy street.

Silly boy, you’re thinking. Aye, spot-on.

Fast forward then a few years of freelancing as a editor/proofreader and copywriting for all types of publications from proper news to music journalism, to technical writing, to medical research publications to even coal-mining research publications and the most mind-numbingly boring of all, review writing…honestly folks, don’t believe any reviews your read, I was living in a large Polish city writing reviews for hotels and restaurants in Sydney in Austraila, and no, I’ve never been to Australia, in all honesty I’d struggle to find Sydney on an unmarked map of Skippyland.

Another sensible idea goes arseways

After getting into spirituality after some mental health struggles and some personal spiritual events, I reckoned I could help others get out of the hole they were in, and I got some qualifications in humanist counseling. And I’ve been writing about the subject since and put out a book about developing confidence just a few months ago.

But yet again, it’s objectively a complete failure. Now, that’s on me; I’ve point-blank refused to do any promotion for it, other than my articles here on Medium and on Substack. Not that that has stopped the scammers emailing me daily offering all kinds of things for money, of course.

I’d imagined, in my foolishness, that I’d be able to pick up more counseling clients, but little did I know that ChatGPT, etc., would all but replace counseling as we know it.

Why pay a person to help you address your issues when you can use a free internet tool that’ll give you platitudes, and lick your arse and call it Baileys.

The thing beside the thing

I’m sure you’ve seen the pattern, though; I’m always doing the thing beside the thing I want to be doing. Weird, isn’t it?

But while the failures in my younger years took far, far longer to learn from, this most recent one has made it abundantly clear where my path should be going.

Now, I know it’s obviously been a while since I published anything, so I thank you for your patience, and I thank you for being with me here on these platforms. I’m not going away, but I just needed a wee bit of time for some rest and recuperation and refreshment and realignment.

I’ve always known what I’ve wanted; I just haven’t done it enough. I’d even stopped publishing fiction and fiction-adjacent writings on these pages, but look, what’s the point in being a mechanic when you want to drive the Formula 1 car?

And so, for once, I’m going to stop standing around in the garage polishing my tools.

That doesn’t mean I’m scarpering off from here into the distance, or abandoning everything I’ve spent ages doing. Nope, it’s quite the opposite.

I’ve worked out what all those detours were for, and I’d be the first to admit that I enjoy taking the scenic routes to destinations.

The way I have to see it now is that the journalism taught me how to write cleanly. Editing taught me the badly needed discipline. The counseling taught me how people think, what they fear, what they hide from themselves, and the mad wee lies we all tell ourselves just to get to the end of the day. Even chatting with the locals in the Dublin pubs taught me how to listen.

And I’m not annoyed, far from it, too. Y’see, none of the time put in has been wasted. But none of it was the destination either. The destination was always the writing.

Because writing was the bloody thing I wanted to do in the first place. Aye, sure, it only took me about twenty years to notice, but thank the various and many gods I have.

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I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

The dogs guarding Alberta’s waters

Alberta has recruited three conservation dogs, Hilo, Jane and Winnie, to sniff out invasive mussels hiding on boats and shorelines. The specially trained Labradors can detect zebra, quagga and golden mussels in places human inspectors might miss, including damp corners where the little freeloaders lurk like cousins avoiding their round at the bar.

Most of us love a yummy mussel, but invasive ones can overwhelm native species, clog water systems and cost millions to control once established.

Here’s a wee video about the lovely hounds.

A laser with better manners

Researchers at Nagoya University have developed a new treatment for gum disease that targets Porphyromonas gingivalis, one of the chief bacteria behind periodontitis, while leaving beneficial oral microbes alone.

Unlike antibiotics, which can flatten the whole bacterial neighborhood like a drunk reversing a tractor, the therapy aims only at the troublemaker.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

The lucky gene that burns the feast

Scientists studying more than one million people have discovered rare mutations in a gene called FNIP1 that appear to make the body burn energy more efficiently.

The lucky carriers had less liver fat, lower blood sugar, more muscle and roughly 60 percent lower odds of obesity, diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. Only about one person in 7,000 carries the mutation, the lucky feckers.

Silencing the same pathway in mice reduced weight gain and liver damage, raising hopes of a future treatment that could mimic some benefits of Ozempic without the crappy side effects of using crap like Ozempic.

Big Brother gets the chop

Some absolute legend in Winona, Minnesota, cut down all eight of the city’s automated license plate cameras, otherwise known as FLOCK cameras, run by those god-awful ghouls Peter Thiel and Marc Andresson.

Police found the severed poles lying in the weeds, but no cameras, no suspects, and apparently no local shortage of people willing to swear the culprit had been fishing with them at the time.

The cameras, worth about $24,000 altogether, record passing vehicles and feed the information into a police database. But they’ve been making huge mistakes leading to wrongful arrests, and there have been tons of cases of dirty cops using the system to spy on ex-girlfriends, neighbors, and even a synagogue.

If anyone asks, the person who did this was with you all night, working in the soup kitchen for homeless army veterans.

Other articles published this week

Book

Finally, finally, I’ve finished C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, and what a book it was. I think I’ve said enough about how good it is previously. A story centered on a Kentucky ranch and the owner, his upbringing, his own family, and a few characters around him.

A really great book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Music

This Belgian band popped up on my radar this week, and they’ve done something rather interesting.

Post-metal/industrial band Terraformer put out two versions of their new album, La Chute, last month, available here on their Bandcamp & YouTube, and the one I’ve been listening to is the instrumental version, which is loud AF baby. Really great and aggressive metal but without the screaming and vocals, so you can really appreciate the guitar work and the pumping double bass drum.

Loving it.

Here’s one of the stand-out tracks, A II:

Right so folks, that’s it so for another week. Enjoy your weekend. Mind Yourself.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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A while back, I read A Course in Miracles (ACIM), the spiritual text “scribed” between 1965 and 1972 by Helen Schucman, an American clinical psychologist, after an inner voice identified itself as Jesus came to her.

Plenty of readers find it profound. I found Jesus sounded like a bored professor trapped in the same seminar room since his Crucifixion.

Did you ever read John Williams’ Stoner? ACIM’s Jesus sounds like William Stoner at his most worn down and bored with existing, but still professional enough to dole out his best spiritual advice.

My boredom, though, means sweet feck all and proves absolutely nothing, well, other than I’m not always the best judge of interpreting characters. I’ll give you an example.

A few years back, Netflix put out their version of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Oh man, was Sandman boring. What a miserable loser. So I asked a pal who writes comics, and he said, yeah sure that’s the way he is in the comics.

Now, I’d read half of the whole volume, and I’d always seen Sandman as being hilariously sarcastic, but in the TV rendition, he was just walking around like his auld one had slapped his arse after going to town on the biscuit tin.

Anyway, I don’t reckon that God ever signed a contract promising to be entertaining; imagine the big lad in a room with Harvey Weinstein there for a second. But ACIM left me with a troublesome question: why do we call one voice revelation and another channeling? When does a message from beyond become the Word of God, and who’s the lucky/unlucky sod who gets to draw the line?

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Ancient channeling in the Bible

There are parts of the Bible that, we’re told, arrived through methods that would look perfectly at home in the occult section of your favorite back-alley occult bookshop.

Jeremiah, the ancient Israelite prophet, hears the word of God and dictates it to Baruch ben Neriah, who, like the good chap he was, writes it all down on a scroll, and thus we have the Book of Jeremiah.

In Revelation, John of Patmos, Saint John/John the Evangelist, receives visions through a heavenly chain involving God, Jesus, and an angel, followed by instructions to write the whole blazing bloodbath down.

Islamic tradition offers an equally direct example. The Prophet Muhammad received the whole of the Qur’an through the archangel Gabriel, aye the same one who told the Virgin Mary she was up the spout with God’s child, more on that below.

Muhammad’s message comes from God, passed through a shiny intermediary, enters a human consciousness, and eventually becomes text.

Were that process reported by a government accountant from North Dublin next Thursday, half his family would stage an intervention and the other half would try to monetize it and launch a podcast and a half dozen subscription-based courses.

More than a thousand years before Jeremiah’s chat with his pal Baruch, at Mari in Mesopotamia, prophets and ecstatic speakers delivered divine messages to kings, and scribes preserved them on clay tablets.

It’s fair to say, then, that for thousands of years people have faced the same question: did a god speak, or has somebody been at the sacred mushrooms?

The channeled book that nearly became scripture

The Shepherd of Hermas, an early Christian work, contains visions and teachings delivered by supernatural figures, including the shepherd of the title. Early Christians read it widely; some regarded it as scripture, and the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus placed it after the New Testament books.

The early church also had Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla, early Christian prophets who claimed that the Holy Spirit continued speaking through them.

Their New Prophecy movement created a bit of administrative headache for the early Church leaders. Dead prophets can be interpreted, translated, footnoted, believed, and then locked safely in a cabinet. But living prophets could come along and announce during lunch that the bishop is full of shite.

Virgin birth stories before Christianity

Saint Joseph, Mary’s main squeeze, deserves a moment of sympathy.

Mary comes to him, hands clasping nervously and staring at the floor to avoid eye contact, and tells him she’s pregnant. Joseph knows they ain’t been doing the deed, so he naturally wonders what in the name of God has happened. Mary replies, in essence, “Ah here, Joe, catch yourself on, I wouldn’t cheat on you. An angel called Gabriel appeared, and told me that God got me up the duff.”

Perhaps it was the greatest miracle in history. Or perhaps auld Joe was the first person in human history to hear that and think, yeah, that’s possible I suppose, sure Mary’s mad pious and all that.

But, the thing is, Mary wasn’t the first lady in history to tell her partner she’d gotten preggers by a god.

Rhea Silvia, the Roman princess and Vestal Virgin, became pregnant with Romulus and Remus through the God Mars, which sounds mad sexy in fairness to Rhea.

Danaë, the Greek mythological princess, conceived Perseus after Zeus entered her prison as a shower of gold, a move entirely in character with the glam and campness of Zeus.

The stories differ, but the shared pattern remains pretty fascinating: a divinely chosen child, an impossible conception, a heavenly explanation, and a human audience asked to believe it.

Crowley, Seth, Ra, & the Yeats household

Aleister Crowley, the English occultist and writer, claimed that an entity called Aiwass dictated The Book of the Law to him through his wife while on their honeymoon in Cairo during three one-hour sessions in April 1904.

I’ve read it a couple of times, and I call bullshite. It feels like Crowley’s grandiosity wearing an Egyptian headdress, with the cosmos appointing him herald of a new spiritual age, which, yeah, of course it would, wouldn’t it?

Jane Roberts, the American author, presents a more interesting case. Across hundreds of sessions, she spoke for an entity called Seth, and produced a vast body of material about consciousness and reality, called The Seth Material.

I’ve only read one volume of the 30+ thus far, and no, I won’t be reading all, but I’ll avoid mounting the altar and issuing commandments. The material has coherence, psychological texture, and a peculiar intelligence that makes casual dismissal a bit too lazy.

Seth may have been an external being. “He” may also have arisen from Jane Roberts’s unconscious, an autonomous personality, or some depth of mind beyond our vocabulary. The mind contains rooms we’ve never entered, with God knows what’s warming itself by the fire down there.

The Ra Material sounds far more cracked. Between 1981 and 1984, Carla Rueckert, an American channeler, and her collaborators held 106 sessions with a supposed collective intelligence called Ra, discussing densities, spiritual evolution, extraterrestrials, and the Law of One.

I’ve not properly read it, so my verdict remains the honest Irish response reserved for a pub story involving aliens, pyramids, and reincarnation: “That sounds fierce unlikely, now.”

While we’re mentioning Ireland, William Butler Yeats, our greatest poet and a Nobel laureate, and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats, trouble my skepticism more deeply.

Soon after their marriage, George began automatic writing. William asked questions, and her hand produced answers. The system fed into A Vision, his bewildering work of history, symbolism, and spiritual cycles.

Something happened in that room. The source may have been spirits, George’s unconscious, William’s questions, their marriage, or a third creative intelligence formed between two minds. I just don’t know, but it feels genuine, whereas Crowley’s attempts feel totally fake.

Who decides which voice is God?

Credibility rises when a message survives questioning, remains coherent, produces genuine insight, and avoids making the messenger rich enough to own an island.

Suspicion rises when the voice flatters its recipient, predicts events that never arrive — or ones so vague they’re bound to anyway — demands obedience, and explains why the chosen prophet urgently requires everybody’s money and freedom to sniff the underpants of all the womenfolk.

None of the tests mentioned here can prove the existence of Jesus, Seth, Aiwass, Ra, or the Yeats’ instructors. They can only help us recognize an intriguing mystery and a grift with incense.

There’s also the slim chance that maybe channeling appears to be more common in our modern era because human consciousness is evolving and the veil between ourselves and the divine is growing thinner.

Let’s not all go full starseed child on this, but, hand on heart, I’d happily admit that I’d love that to be true. Maybe literacy, recording technology, and cheap publishing can preserve thousands of experiences that once died with the village medium.

It’s not bizarre to think that the mess of modern life encourages spiritual hunger, but it can also encourage enough confidence to turn an inner murmur into Volume One of a twelve-book cosmic saga. So, aye, on the other hand, perhaps there are just simply more bullshitters around, too.

I’d love to finish this article with a clean answer. I can’t though, because certainty remains as unavailable as a taxi on a rainy Saturday night.

Any voice could be God. Perhaps all voices are, I wonder, adjusting my pantheism cap. The voice could equally come up from the unconscious, a dissociated fragment of the personality, a deceased poet, an alien collective, or some lad making the whole thing up because the rent is due.

We rarely ever truly know whether the messenger is lying, mistaken, inspired, unwell, or tuned into some frequency that only our dogs can hear.

It could well be that the most honest thing here is to listen carefully if something makes itself known to you, but, at the same time, question everything, keep whatever deepens life, discard whatever bloats the ego, and never turn a private revelation into somebody else’s commandment.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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Bang? No bang

On December 22, 1849, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky stood, alongside 21 comrades, blindfolded in a freezing Semyonovsky Square in St. Petersburg before a firing squad, fully aware and accepting that he had only a few moments to go before he departed this mortal coil.

Tied to a post, freezing his nuts off, and condemned for his involvement with a political discussion group, he turned to another prisoner and said, “We will be with Christ.”

But before the rifles fired, a messenger arrived carrying a pardon from Tsar Nicholas I. The execution had been staged. His sentence became years of hard labor in Siberia instead.

Sweet suffering Jesus, lads, imagine believing your life has ended, only to be handed it back, although being sent to a hard labor prison in Siberia…ah, okay, yeah, death would be worse than that, well, just about.

That scene of Dostoevsky accepting his fate has followed me around now for years. Perhaps it always will.

I’ve long been fascinated by death, and that sentence sounds darker than it deserves. I don’t mean it in an edgelord Goth occultist way, y’know the type, a fascination with Aleister Crowley — but without the Thelema “spirituality” — all black nail polish and black leather when it’s 30 Celsius outside, listening to crap like Black Veil Brides or the like.

I don’t fear death in the way loads of people do — the way I see it, I’ll be dead, so I won’t even be able to care, and nor do I spend my evenings dressed in lace reciting Edgar Allan Poe by candlelight like some eejit who has mistaken melancholy for personality.

I’ll put it another way: since I can remember, death simply refuses to leave me alone. I’ve said before that my first ever memory is my granny Murphy holding up a dead mouse and excited because she’d ‘finally caught the fecker.’

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Memento Mori can become a trap

Memento mori is the ancient practice of remembering that death is inevitable. The assumption beneath it is fairly straightforward.

If we can all remember that life is finite, then, in theory, at least, we’ll all value each day more deeply.

I grew up in rural County Wexford in Ireland, and death was never hidden behind hospital curtains or sanitized into polite silence. Sure, look, most of the people I grew up with were the sons and daughters of either farmers or builders, and by the time I was even going to school I’d seen countless dead animals.

But for people, sure, look, there were funerals attended multiple times a month. Coffins rested in family homes, or in funeral homes if the family were more well off. Neighbors wandered in carrying apple tarts, sandwiches, gossip, prayers, and sympathy in roughly equal measure.

I served as an altar boy as a young lad in the local Catholic Church, standing a few feet from the coffin while incense drifted toward a crucified Christ in the stained glass above, flanked by the village founder St Fintan and St Bridgit on the other side.

Years later now, and when I meditate now, it pretty much revolves around death. I lie, sit, and imagine everything gone. Absolutely everything. My name. My ambitions. My worries. My endless internal commentary. Everything and everyone I know. I am, in a strange sense, practicing being dead.

And the exercise brings me great peace. The dead obviously have no email inbox. No Slack notifications from your boss who tries just a little too hard to be your pal, no reputation to defend. No ego, no bills, and they sure as bejaysus don’t have to rehearse imaginary arguments while brushing their teeth.

But over time, it was becoming obvious to me that I’d become wonderfully acquainted with death and surprisingly absent from life.

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The danger of living in tomorrow

So, here’s my confession. The internet loves a good confession, doesn’t it?

I think about death far too often. I don’t dread it — I refuse to, to be honest. I simply invite it into a few too many conversations inside my own noggin.

While I’m there contemplating the final page, ordinary life quietly wanders past. A good meal that herself has spent ages making disappears unnoticed. One of the wee Murfs says something from across the room. A walk beside the river becomes another opportunity to think about mortality rather than to admire the river doing what a river does.

The rule I’m applying here is simple: attention determines experience. Wherever attention rests, life follows. And that realization brought me back to Dostoevsky.

Arthur C. Brooks, the American author and social scientist, recently argued that Dostoevsky built his philosophy around meaning rather than comfort. Brooks draws those ideas from novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot.

I suspect there’s another lesson hiding underneath. A man who believed he’d only a few minutes left received decades more life. The question lingering in my mind has little to do with what Dostoevsky learned.

Would I use that second chance any better than he did? I mean, it’s not like Fyodor was the happiest Jack at the party, was he?

Knowing myself, I’d probably swear never again to waste an afternoon, all spunk and bluster, Carpe Diem baby, but then I’d find myself reading a Reddit thread debating whether Napoleon Bonaparte brought steak tartare (the delightful dish of raw minced steak and a raw egg) to Poland or the Polish mountain people, suspiciously called Tatars gave “tatar,” it’s Polish name, to the French — aye, I’m firmly on the side that the French got it from Poland when they were either going to Russia to fight, or hightailing it back after they got their asses handed to them.

Reddit is my Crystal Palace

Instagram bores the life out of me. Photography doesn’t; I’m a big fan of that, but Instagram isn’t photography, and I’ll let you in on a secret: when I post on Instagram, I’m sitting on the toilet; it’s my two fingers up to all the influencers and marketers and clowns who really should know better that they aren’t going to become social media stars.

Reddit is another matter entirely. That place has me by the collar.

I open it between proofreading articles. I scroll while eating lunch. I convince myself I’m learning something useful because every third post contains an interesting historical fact or an obscure philosophy recommendation. Twenty minutes disappear with the elegance of a David Blaine coin trick.

In his 1864 novella, Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky described the temptation of modern society as a “crystal palace,” a glittering vision promising comfort, certainty, and perfect order.

My crystal palace fits comfortably into a pocket, right there, the radiation warming my nuts and what’s left of my formerly eager swimmers in middle age.

Constant distraction weakens attention and weak attention produces shallow living because every meaningful human experience requires sustained attention.

The Grand Inquisitor never needed Wi Fi

One of my favorite passages in The Brothers Karamazov is “The Grand Inquisitor.”

Ivan Karamazov tells his younger brother Alyosha about an old cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, telling a silent Christ during the Spanish Inquisition that humanity doesn’t truly desire freedom because freedom carries responsibility, uncertainty, guilt, and doubt. People, according to him, will happily exchange freedom for certainty, bread, and somebody else making decisions for them.

We’re nearly 150 years later now, and the Grand Inquisitor has become wonderfully efficient, and with added AI to boot.

He recommends the next video before the current one ends. He offers your favorite flavor of fury carefully selected for my tastes. He fills every quiet moment before my own thoughts have the chance to arrive.

And like all moments in life, there’s a great absurdity playing out. I meditate on death, and it offers me freedom from illusion, keeps it in my mind that life is finite; but then, like a right eejit, I surrender massive lumps of that finiteness to strangers arguing about rare, fake Rolex watches, bicycles, and obscure theological disputes on Reddit.

The second chance we ignore

There’s one final confession. I’ve spent years now practicing being dead.

Perhaps the greater spiritual discipline would be practicing being alive.

That means I really should be leaving the brain-killing-dopamine AI-slop machine in another room while eating lunch. It means walking without headphones. It means listening properly when another person speaks instead of preparing a clever remark that scores me points on a scoreboard that doesn’t exist.

None of these acts will appear in history books, and none will earn applause, but each one just declares that this ordinary Tuesday deserves my full attention.

Dostoevsky walked away from a firing squad that cold December morning and received the remainder of his life as an unexpected gift. Most mornings, the same miracle visits the rest of us with considerably less theater. We open our eyes. The sentence has been postponed once again.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now

The Amazon’s hidden past

LiDAR scans have uncovered 432 ancient earthworks beneath the Amazon rainforest, 396 of which have been previously unknown- well, unknown to us. I’d be fairly sure that the people who lived and worked there knew about that. Jaysus, that’d be mad if they didn’t, eh?

Anyway, researchers believe the Aquiry civilization may once have built up to 30,000 such sites and supported as many as three million people.

The discovery overturns the old idea of the Amazon as untouched wilderness. It was once a busy landscape of roads, farms, ceremonies, and settlements. Ancient city planning beneath the trees, while parts of Ireland are still waiting for a bypass.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Fewer empty plates

Global hunger has fallen for a third consecutive year, with 7.8 percent of humanity, about 645 million people, affected in 2025. That is 43 million fewer hungry people than at the recent peak in 2022.

Asia and South America recorded the greatest improvements, although Africa continues to carry a dreadful burden. There is a mountain yet to climb, but humanity has shuffled a few million steps uphill, which is more than can be said for most government committees.

A brighter day in Trinidad

More than 3,000 people in Trinidad and Tobago regained their sight during a free surgical mission at the Community Hospital of Seventh-day Adventists. Volunteer doctors treated cataracts and other eye conditions for patients who had postponed care for years because they could not afford it.

Fair play to the lads and ladies running this. In less than two weeks, they gave thousands of people their world back.

Julie’s long overdue retirement

After 40 years in circuses, Julie, Portugal’s last circus elephant, has arrived at the 1,000-acre Pangea Elephant Sanctuary, where she can roam, bathe, and spend her days as she pleases.

She has already taken enthusiastically to mud baths. Forty years in show business, and her dream retirement turns out to be a field, a pond, and nobody asking her to stand on a stool. Fair play, Julie.

A routine worth keeping

Older adults who woke, ate, socialized, and went to bed at regular times reported less pain and fewer symptoms of depression. Researchers believe a steady routine may help keep the body’s internal clock ticking properly — which means I’m going to have to have a serious chat with meself; I’m an awful lad for not sticking to schedules, which is wild when you consider that my day job is structured on deadlines; maybe that’s the reason why.

Anyway, the study was fairly small and can’t really prove that routine caused the improvements, but the advice is pleasingly simple: eat on time, keep regular hours, and stop turning every weekend into an assault upon the illusions of time, aye, we all know it’s not real, but it’s also really, really real and quite useful.

Previously published articles

Just the one from this week:

And here’s one from the archive:

Reading

Yeah, I’m still on the same book…told you it was a long one, but I’m in the final stretch, pun slightly intended. As previously written C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings is fantastic.

It’s so beautifully written, y’know; it’s one of those books that while you’re reading it you’re thinking this must’ve been written fifty years ago. But no, it’s really recent. Often find myself wondering if it’ll get turned into a film or limited series show; then again, that might ruin it.

But yeah, seriously, this book about a Kentucky ranch and the people involved is a stand-out; Morgan is such a talented and incredible writer. I’m often just gobsmacked by the way she writes…only slightly jealous, ha.

Music

Pretty slim pickings this week; I’ve only the one for you. A band I’ve featured before here, Favesoul hail from the Netherlands and make some incredibly powerful and melt-your-face-and-eardrums post-rock music, and are back with their 11th release, A Ghostly Reflection.

Well, not really a band I suppose, it’s the brainchild of Gio Snouck who does all the instruments and producing and mixing. Yeah, I really dig this, just

Full album is available on Bandcamp here, and on YouTube here.

And here’s one of my favorite tracks from it, the album opener Dreams Where It All Came True:

Rightio folks, that’ll have to do for another week. Have a mighty weekend. Mind Yourself.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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On Sunday, 26th of July, Mayo put to bed 75 years of hurt, misery, and a half dozen near misses when they beat the team with the most titles in the Cathedral of Gaelic Football by 1–20 to 1–17.

Any one of you who follows sport will, likely, have heard of Mayo’s win. Social media posts have been watched by millions across our globalized and interconnected world; news stations across the planet on the following Monday put out pieces in all kinds of languages on their win — Monday is a fairly slow news day in fairness — and thousands upon thousands of pages on the internet and in traditional newspapers have told the story too.

And it took me a while to put my thoughts down, largely because what can you possibly say that hasn’t already been said?

Challenge accepted, you know, dear reader. I like to make things tough on myself; otherwise, how could I ever know that I’m able to do anything, eh?

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Mayo’s 75 years of hurt

At first glance, the 75-year wait seems to be the main story here, doesn’t it? Mayo’s influence across the globe ain’t exactly small either, and it wouldn’t be a bold statement to say that County Mayo, along with a few other Connaught counties, have never really recovered from the darkest days in Irish history that were the Potato Famine of the 1840s.

Some of Mayo’s most famous descendants include recent American President Joe Biden, whose wife’s roots are found in my own wee rural Wexford village. Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, was also of Mayo heritage. There’s Admiral William Brown, the so-called father of the Argentine Navy, who, like all strong-hearted and strong-stomached Irishmen, loved a row with the British. Ah, but look, time is shorter, and attention spans are shorter, so let’s not get all listicle here.

As in the title, what’s most interesting about Mayo finally winning the All-Ireland is the supposed curse the team was under.

Gaelic Football, explained for the Americans

Do I need to explain Gaelic Football for you Americans?

It’s a bit like soccer, except you can use your hands. But unlike, say, rugby, and more like basketball, you cannot just carry the ball; you need to do something with the ball every three steps taken, either passing it to another player or doing something like a ‘solo’ or a bounce to yourself.

Also, the tackles are hard, the likes of which you’ll see in your own native Gridiron Football, but the Irish lads and ladies wear no protection other than the occasional gumshield.

So, look, it’s basically soccer with hands and a whole ton of physical violence, really, a ton of violence and that’s one of the reasons we love it, as you can see in this video.

Now, the scoring. Mayo won 1–20 to 1–17. Meaning the scores were 23 points to 20. A goal is worth three points, and you score a goal by putting the ball in the net, like soccer.

You score a point by getting the ball over the goal between the two uprights; it looks like rugby posts, a little like American Football posts. You can, in a new rule I personally don’t like, also score a two-pointer by scoring from further away from the goal, but that’s not important; I’m only adding it for conciseness.

The curse, dammit

The curse, dammit, write about the curse…

The last time Mayo won the All-Ireland football championship was in 1951. What always happens after an All-Ireland win is that a team will travel to their home county by bus and party like bejaysus across the county that night.

The story goes that when passing through the town of Foxford there was a funeral happening, and the boisterous champions weren’t able to keep themselves quiet and it’s said that either the local priest, the bereaved spouse, or a member of the Irish Traveller community put on a curse on them, where it’s said that Mayo would never win another All-Ireland until all members of the 1951 squad were dead as disco, depite disco never existing in 1951.

Dead men, lost finals & one last survivor

Between 1951 and 2026, Mayo played in 12 All-Ireland finals, losing 11, finally winning, as you know, last weekend.

When Mayo got to a final, most of the country would be cheering for them. Football’s a big deal there, and we all love an underdog, but time and time and time again, they blow it and fall at the final hurdle, bottle it as the Brits say, make a hames of it, make an absolute balls of it as my auld fella would say; I believe you Americans call it choking.

Finally though, they won and to see the joy and celebrations has been just wonderful.

So, the curse is real? Well, real or not, it most certainly came to be true. One of Ireland’s largest online media companies put out a poll on Sunday night asking whether people believed it was real. 55% of people, me being one of them, voted yes.

In 2016, an Irish TV channel made a documentary about the supposed curse, and two of the final three surviving members of the 1951 squad said it was nonsense, made up by the media; both men died not long after, in 2019 and 2021.

The last man to die who was in the squad in 1951, Mick Loftus, was an unused substitute on that day, died in 2023, so whether the curse was real or not, the fact of the matter is that, yes, Mayo did not win a championship again until after the last person in the squad died.

To make things a little bit weirder, Mick Loftus’ grandnephew, Conor, played in the game last Sunday, coming off the bench in the closing stages.

Mayo wasn’t the only cursed team

Of course, Mayo’s curse is certainly not the only sporting curse. There’s the case of Béla Guttmann cursing the Portuguese football team Benfica so that they wouldn’t win a European trophy for a hundred years because they wouldn’t give him, their manager, better wages; they have failed to win a European Cup since the one he won with them in 1962.

The Chicago Cubs went 71 years without a World Series because a pub owner’s goat was asked to be removed from Wrigley Field, and the owner, a Mr. Willian Sianis, said they’d never win one again. He was wrong. The goat’s name was Murphy, though.

There’s the story of the Australian soccer team and a witch doctor. When the witch doctor wasn’t paid, the curse the players had wanted placed on their rivals was instead placed on them, and they ended up not qualifying for the World Cup for 30+ years.

There are more sporting curses, plenty more, and lads, I’ve spent far too long over the last few days looking at proper religious curses made by Popes and saints — even St Patrick vs. the Soldiers of Coroticus — and other religious holy men to be convinced that we’re not dealing with real things here.

When a story becomes a curse

But are they ‘just’ stories that become true, or are they something almost metaphysical in that they have the potential to be real, or true, but we get to decide?

And how big is the ‘we’ here? When does the belief of one individual become the belief of another, and then how long does it take to consume a whole team, then a county, and then a whole country?

Look, Ireland would be a poorer place without such stories. And that’s what this is, a wonderful story. Aye, Mayo got over the line after 75 years, aye, the curse held — if it existed at all back then, it certainly came to exist — because the maddest thing, for me anyway, is that every Mayo team from 1951 onwards took to the pitch shouldering it.

They carried the funeral, the priest, the widow, the Traveller, the bus, the noise, the dead men, the lost finals, and the expectation that somehow, at the decisive moment, the old misery would return to collect its due and they would fail again.

It’s tough enough to play sports, but to play with all that baggage weighing you down? Yikes.

But Sunday, the 26th of July came, and we all wondered whether the curse would persist. And how could it, since all the men were gone? So, finally, Mayo stood tall, taller than they had in years, and did what a cursed team isn’t supposed to do.

They stayed calm as iced cucumbers; they held their nerve, their positions, stuck to the game plan that had gotten them that far, and then they took the final step and refused to become the latest names in an old story.

What Mayo’s victory means for the rest of us

And that’s the lesson for the rest of us. Y’know, some of us, many of us even, might well — and justifiably even — feel damned and cursed, but that doesn’t mean giving up.

The teams that got to the finals and lost tried their damnest to win, and even though they didn’t get over the line, their battles, grit, and determination most certainly inspired the team that finally did it last Sunday.

So, aye, bad luck might be following you around now, but you don’t give up, you keep going, and you shoulder the weight, and you dig into the grind because you’re willing to make the effort to make things better for yourself and, more importantly, for those who come after you.

So, well done Mayo, or as we’d say at home, Maigh Eo Abú!

…and for anyone who wants to watch the match highlights, here you go:

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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Digging your way to a longer life

A spot of gardening may do considerably more than provide tomatoes the size of marbles and courgettes large enough to frighten the parish.

University of Edinburgh researchers followed 475 older Scots for up to 25 years and found that frequent gardeners had better wellbeing and physical function, slower declines in walking speed, and slower shortening of the protective telomeres at the ends of their chromosomes.

Those who gardened regularly also had a 22 percent lower risk of death than people who rarely or never did, even after the researchers accounted for general physical activity and various social and lifestyle factors.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

The algae are after your exhaust

American student inventors Rohan Kapoor and Jack Reichert have built the Go Green Filter, a small bioreactor containing microalgae, water, and lights that clamps onto a car’s exhaust.

According to their own sensor testing, its five algae plates reduced carbon dioxide readings by 74.25 percent, which is mighty industrious work from pond scum usually content to lie about making the garden path slippery.

The car filter remains an early prototype without published independent testing, but the underlying science is sound, and there’s something fiercely cheerful about two young lads putting sunlight and green gloop to work where billion-dollar companies have long produced reports, committees, and enough hot air to power Galway for a hundred winters.

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Tooth enamel gets second bite

Researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed a protein-based coating that imitates the biological machinery used to form enamel during childhood.

When applied to damaged extracted human teeth, it acted like a microscopic trellis, guiding minerals from saliva into neat, aligned crystals and growing a new enamel-like layer up to 10 micrometers thick. A fine day’s labor for a material thinner than a priest’s patience at a rowdy wedding.

An old antibiotic sharpens its sword

Researchers at Scripps Research and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have given the antibiotic vancomycin fresh teeth against vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, a hospital superbug that had grown far too pleased with itself.

The small molecule they’ve put together, pghi-4, blocks an enzyme called SagA, disrupting the bacterium’s cell wall repairs and leaving vancomycin able to bind and strike once more.

Fast Fashion Gets a Dressing Down

As of July 19, 2026, large companies across the European Union can no longer routinely burn, shred, or dump unsold clothing, accessories, and footwear.

European authorities estimate that between four and nine percent of textiles placed on the market are destroyed before anyone wears them, a great bonfire of money and material caused because last Tuesday’s trousers have somehow become ancient history.

Brands will now be pushed toward resale, donation, remanufacturing, and reuse.

Other articles published this week

Book

Nothing new to report, folks; still slogging on C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, and sure I’ve already told you how good it is and how well written, so nothing really to add…man, it’s long though.

Music

Tricky returns with his first album in six years. And I won’t have a bad word said about Tricky; I’m a big fan of the menace and the darkness and the murk of what the former Massive Attack man has always done. But he’s never sat still, always trying to do more rather than just becoming karaoke, and happy to tour around putting out stuff that sounds the same.

Bristol alt rocker Mitch Sanders handles most of the singing duties on the album, but Tricky’s always there lurking in the background. Really like it.

You can get the new album, Different When It’s Silent, here on Bandcamp and here on YouTube. Here’s one of my stand-out tracks, So Cold.

The first band I ever interviewed was a Wicklow band called God Is An Astronaut. If you’re into post-rock, you’ll definitely know that name, and if you don’t, well, you should get to know them.

Still knocking around, and ever touring, they’ve put out 12 albums in all. I think when I interviewed Torsten Kinsella, it was around 2005, so they’d had two out at the time.

I love this band; I’ve stopped counting how many times I’ve seen them, cannot say enough good things about them; but to sum up, they’re quintessential post-rock listening. Absolute masters of the art and their instruments and not afraid of pushing themselves both live and in the studio.

But, yeah, live, live they’re immense. And on July 10th, they released a live album from their set at Hellfest, a French heavy metal festival. And you can listen/buy it on Bandcamp here, and it’s also available on YouTube here:

Right, folks, that’s it for another week; have a good one. Mind Yourself.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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Last week, the Internet received some welcome glad tidings from the underworld, well, kinda.

A Roman mystery that had survived seventeen centuries, give or take, and enough pub theories to sink a trireme — that’s the boat said Romans used to sail — had apparently been solved on WitchTok.

The claim came from United States-born occult educator and historian Thorn Blackbird, now based in the Netherlands. A Reddit discussion sharing screenshots and descriptions of Blackbird’s posts says that a cord is wound around the twenty knobs, with the pattern read through the Moirai, the three Greek Fates who govern life’s thread.

Blackbird reportedly offers readings and has kept the complete method private over credit concerns.

The original TikTok material was unavailable to me; I don’t have a TikTok account, so the account deserves the modest label it has earned: an intriguing social media claim, although it’s pretty hilarious that the lady wants to keep this to herself when, if she’s correct, it was fairly common knowledge 1800 years ago.

On the one hand, you’ve got to kind of admire the scale of it all.

Rome wasn’t kind enough to leave an instruction manual, no temple mural, no marginal note from a bored legionary saying, “Used the bronze yoke today, worked grand, predicted I’d get a ride, and I got a ride with a tavern wench that night.” Then the algorithm arrived with a ball of string and announced that history had been doing the whole business arseways.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

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What is a Roman dodecahedron?

The object itself is a wee marvel.

It’s a hollow copper alloy object with twelve pentagonal faces, differently sized circular openings, thirty edges, and twenty wee corner knobs, as you can see in the photos.

Most fit comfortably in the hand. I like to imagine that they resemble a hand grenade designed by ancient Roman Emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius after a long dinner and a dangerous quantity of sacramental wine.

About 134 have been found. They date from around AD 200 to the late fourth century and occur almost entirely in the Empire’s northwestern provinces, as you’ll see below. None has been found in the Roman heartland of Italy, and no surviving Roman description or image explains how or what for they were used.

That absence drives people half demented; the subReddit dedicated to it is great craic, and a rarely wholesome internet rabbithole worth getting lost in for an afternoon while dodging work Zooms.

The dodecahedron plainly involved planning, metal, skill, and expense. Somebody commissioned it, somebody held it, and somebody knew what it all meant with the easy certainty of a person lifting a spoonful of porridge, which you Yanks for some crazy reason call oatmeal.

Why the Roman dodecahedron mystery refuses to die

List time…Proposed uses have included a:

rangefinder
surveying instrument
calendar
candleholder
gaming piece
knitting device
jewelry gauge
military tool
religious object
divination device.

English Heritage notes that the known find spots (the above image) range across military and civilian, domestic and religious settings, which has done sweet feck all to tidy up the matter.

Every theory gets five minutes in the witness box, and each leaves wearing the same suspicious mustache. My biggest headscratcher, though, is how come none have been found in Italy? It’s really all quite bizarre.

Either way, the answers to what it was for tell us plenty about ourselves.

Engineers discover measurement. Soldiers discover military equipment. Knitters discover gloves. Mystics discover prophecy. Social media creators discover a three-part series, and lads with usernames like AncientTruth69 on social media roar, in ALL CAPS, that museums fear this knowledge.

As we’re all more than well aware of, human beings are pattern-making creatures. We connect the stars above us and turn them into hunters, animals, and celestial kitchenware.

We find faces in damp walls and burnt toast and messages in coincidences — yeah, yeah, I know: “There are no coincidences” is something I say tons. That faculty helped our ancestors notice tracks, seasons, danger, and what was for dinner before that made dinner out of them.

The same faculty turns an empty space into an itch beneath the skin.

“We don’t know” feels unfinished. A mystery appears in front of us, and straightaway we assume it contains a hidden answer, like a Christmas cracker made by the fickle gods.

Could the Roman dodecahedron have been used for divination?

The divination idea deserves a fair hearing; I’m not against divination, in all honesty; it has its uses, and Roman life contained plenty of augury, omens, dream interpretation, drawing lots, astrology, and other attempts to read divine intention.

A ritual purpose fits within the religious landscape of the age because it was an age absolutely chock-full of it.

A 2025 study by Austrian researcher Michael Guggenberger and British researcher Stephen Leach places the dodecahedron inside Platonic and Pythagorean thought.

Plato associated the twelve-sided solid with the cosmos. They propose that the objects may have served as divine receptacles in theurgic divination. Their carefully built argument remains unproven.

That scholarship gives ritual theories respectable ground, but it supplies zero evidence for the particular cord system now circulating online. An occult practitioner on TikTok prattling on about the Fates offers an easy target, but as already established, ancient Romans took divination seriously, so we can’t just dismiss the idea completely.

Every age finds itself inside the object

Maybe we should see the dodecahedron as some kind of bronze inkblot Rorschach test.

Industrial minds favor tools. Military minds favor instruments that kill civilians of a different skin color. Craft communities favor domestic uses, while the spiritual marketplace favors personal revelation.

Or maybe there’s a deeper kind of typical human tradegy/comedy afoot too.

We imagine ourselves as heroic archeologists, all whips and a brown fedora, excavating the past, and getting to kiss Marion Ravenwood, but then we mess it up and smuggle our own baggage and wants into the trench beneath our coats.

By the time we’re finished, the Romans are knitting GoKitty gloves, checking artillery distances, predicting the amount of winter grain that’ll have ergot on it for a decent psychedelic trip to meet the gods, and charging fifty quid for bespoke readings over Zoom.

Growing up in 1980s and 90s Catholic Ireland, objects could carry invisible meanings, which would appear to be totally bizarre to anyone not from there.

Rosary beads were used to count prayers, but they could also carry memory. Holy water filled an ordinary bottle in the corner of the bedroom, but was part of a larger sacred story of healing the sick. Holy medals, statues, relics, and pictures all had their place and lived in the thin places between matter and meaning, where you hoped what you’d prayed for would be given a fair hearing by the Big Man above in charge.

Remove the backstory and the object becomes even weirder. Leave a rosary in a field for two thousand years, erase Christianity from the record, and some future professor may announce that the 20th-century Irish used it to calculate correct sausage length for their ritual breakfasts on Sunday mornings.

The internet can’t bear an empty space

It’s fair to say that the internet has put rocket fuel under our hunger for answers and the platforms we use thrive on revelation, too.

Release a video where you say, “Here’s one possibility,” and it limps home with forty-seven views while saying, “I’ve solved the mystery Rome tried to hide,” gallops through the gates dressed as Caesar.

People genuinely feel patterns click into place, which, I suppose, is fair enough when we’re part of a world that seems, to many, to be devoid of meaning. The rush of coherence is powerful, especially when the world seems like a bag of ferrets thrown down a staircase.

Mysteries once grew folklore. Now they grow content ecosystems.

The past doesn’t owe us an answer

Human curiosity has given us archaeology, science, medicine, history, and every decent question ever asked by a child who should’ve been asleep an hour ago.

The dodecahedron’s actual purpose may eventually emerge from a future discovery. Time, as is its wont, has already gobbled up all the decisive evidence, leaving only the bronze thingamabob and our competing stories.

I guess there’s a whole terrible beauty to it all. Whole worlds vanish. Civilizations ebb and flood, and turn into something else. The owners of such things die, their languages change and evolve, their rituals fade, and familiar household certainties become riddles displayed beneath museum lighting.

The Roman dodecahedron holds twelve faces, twenty corners, thirty edges, and a hollow center. Engineers, knitters, soldiers, archaeologists, witches, skeptics, and columnists peer through its openings and tell the room what they see.

The wee bronze yoke keeps its counsel; all I’m sure of is that we reveal ourselves around it.

You can support my Substack Page by becoming a Paid Subscriber here, or check out my book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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The other morning, big-S Science arrived at my breakfast table with a whallop and three instructions for a happier life thanks to some clickbait godawful article I found myself reading over my eggs and yesterday’s reheated whatever we had for dinner.

The instructions were quite simple: Be kind to someone. Move your body. Practice gratitude.

Rightio, Mr. Science, fair enough, like, I thought. Us idiot ape cousins have spent many millennia now worrying about happiness, and here you have the balls to land at my kitchen table — that needs a bit of a wipe — with your answer in a neat little list, and delivered with the confidence of a man who’s never had to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe while two children asked where the snacks were.

The article writer knew what they were at. He cited a handful of studies, another handful of reviews, all of which were centered on thousands of participants, and all the other usual and proper academic furniture.

And, the conclusion sounded like something my Murphy granny would’ve said to me while opening the curtains in the morning on a rare non-raining day in Wexford, and telling me to get outside, quit my moping, and make myself useful.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Can Three Simple Habits Make You Happier?

Right, so I say to myself, let’s engage with the science and go all Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman on it, yeah! Science bitch!

The experiment involved zero meth cooking; however, I wouldn’t be into that craic. Mine involved one middle-aged Irishman living in southern Poland.

Funding amounted to the price of a coffee obtained from my more wealthy and more physically attractive wife. Ethical oversight came from said wife, who glanced at me with the expression of a woman long accustomed to hearing that I’d had yet another good idea.

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Happiness Habit One: Be Kind to Someone

The first instruction was kindness. The research suggested that even small acts could improve well-being, so I sent a message to someone I hadn’t spoken to in a while.

Now, look, nothing heroic occurred. I didn’t donate a kidney, I didn’t rescue any orphan kittens from a burning workhouse that only employs orphan kittens for some reason, nor did I carry a wounded translator the American soldiers had left behind across four mountaintops, back to his village.

I simply told that person that a memory of us getting up to mischief had popped into my head and hoped they were doing well and minding themselves.

A warm reply came back a few hours later, and we exchanged a few lines back and forth, and he reminded me of another episode of Dublin pinting highjinx. The whole thing felt really grand, like we were just carrying on from where we’d left off all those years ago.

Okay so, Mr. Science, you’ve a point on the board. 1–0 to you.

Happiness Habit Two: Move for Ten Minutes

Movement came next. I already walk and run regularly, usually along the Olza River, where Poland and the Czech Republic face one another across the water like neighbors keeping a civil eye on the hedge.

For my experiment, I just head out but with no phone, no podcast in my ears, and no fitness objective. I had nowhere to reach and nothing to measure. The task was simply to move.

The first few minutes contained the usual upstart committee meeting inside my head. Work needed doing. Money needed earning. Messages needed answering. Some foolish thing I’d said in a butcher’s back in 2004 to a pretty lady returned for its annual review, reminding me of the cringe I experienced.

By the seventeenth minute, or thereabouts, the world began making its case to be known.

Oak and beech and willow and birch leaves trembled in the light and cast their shadows once never to be cast again, something called komorebi that I’d first heard about in a Japanese movie called Perfect Days, a fantastic film.

Then I noticed a lad out for a stroll with his border collie, and the dog was there nosing at the root of a lamppost with the dedicated concentration of a devout scholar deciphering an ancient document, and then he took a wizz on it. The ever-gaggling river went about its old business, carrying both mud and memory, and whatever else rivers carry when nobody asks them to become content.

My usual mental problems accompanied me home, of course, but they were now sat a few rows farther back. My shoulders, usually up around my ears, were lower, my breathing slowed, and the day seemed to have more room in it.

Okay, Mr. Science, now you’ve two points. 2–0.

Happiness Habit Three: Practice Gratitude

The final instruction involved writing down three things I felt grateful for. I approached this with great caution because gratitude can become fiercely tiresome when wielded by the wellness industry.

I opened the notebook. My first thoughts were for the joys of beer, and indoor plumbing, and the blessed silence of a phone on airplane mode.

But they, ah well, they didn’t feel like enough, so I held onto my horses and waited for the deeper answers to let themselves be known.

I wrote down the names of my wife and children, with their noise, jokes, tempers, the crumbs they leave everywhere, their seemingly never-ending questions, and their sudden moments of love and joy and tenderness.

I wrote down the health that allows me to run beside the river after years when I carried far more weight and far less faith in myself.

For the third, I wrote down an ordinary evening from earlier that week. We ate supper, talked nonsense, played Uno, watched a World Cup football match, with me explaining why the rules to the kids, and then they were off to bed and meself and herself watched Carmy learn to know himself in The Bear.

The scene above would never appear in an American movie; sure, there’s nothing flashy or razzmatazz about it. All it was was a small kingdom of the everyday, easily missed because the mind keeps a careful ledger of every insult and disappointment while allowing whole years of goodness to pass through customs unrecorded.

Right, Mr. Science, three for three. 3–0, you win.

What I Learned From My One-Day Happiness Experiment

Following an intensive trial involving one man over several hours, I can confirm that kindness, movement, and gratitude didn’t cause me to fall to pieces.

Further research may be required before the findings reach the Nobel committee.

So there you have it. Be decent to somebody. Go outside and move your arse. Remember that life, for all its thunder and trouble, still contains a few bright rooms.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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Missed last week, folks, sorry about that. I was off on a break down the country chasing some bears and bison; alas, none were seen, just their poo and prints.

If you’ve missed my other articles this week, here you go:

Rotten tomatoes ripen into a global triumph

Ugandan agripreneur Shifra Ainomugisha grew up watching almost half her family’s tomato harvest soften, split, and rot before it ever reached the market.

She carried that hardship into Solafam, the company she co-founded to provide small farmers with solar-powered cold storage, irrigation, and artificial-intelligence farming advice.

Since 2022, Solafam has helped more than 1,500 farmers, most of them women, while cutting food losses by 30 percent and raising household incomes by 28 percent. Ainomugisha has now been named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

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Oregon’s bees are buzzing back

After a catastrophic pesticide poisoning in 2013, Oregon brought scientists, farmers, state agencies, and environmental advocates around the same hive.

The Oregon Bee Project has since trained more than 12,000 pesticide applicators, and the state recorded no confirmed acute pesticide-related bee kills from 2021 through 2025. Education works, begob, even when the pupils are humans, and the bees have been explaining the matter for centuries.

HIV vaccine teaches immune cells to spot a master of disguise

Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, Scripps Research, and IAVI have spent 14 years teaching the immune system how to recognize HIV before the slippery divil changes his coat again.

Their vaccine guides B cells through a series of carefully designed “lessons” until they produce broadly neutralizing antibodies, rare defenders capable of blocking many different strains of the virus.

Dementia begins to loosen its grip

Forty years ago, almost three in ten Americans aged 85 to 89 had dementia. By 2024, that figure had fallen to around one in ten, while research across Europe and North America found new cases declining by roughly 13 percent every decade.

Better education, fewer strokes, improved heart health, less smoking, and treatment for hearing loss appear to have helped protect millions of aging brains.

Nearly half of dementia cases may now be preventable or delayed by addressing known risks throughout life.

Five thousand small miracles at Lake Tuz

Around 5,000 flamingo chicks have hatched in two colonies at Lake Tuz, one of Türkiye’s most important wetlands, with more expected from a third.

Five years after drought and shrinking waters left young birds dead upon the salt, the nursery is alive again with gray, gawky chicks following their parents like a school outing organized by lads who forgot the sandwiches.

Book

I’m still well stuck into C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings that I mentioned a fortnight ago, and wow, what a great book. It’s so well written; I cannot express it enough.

So far, the story has focused on Henry and his nasty so-and-so father, his deaf mother, and his daughter, who is the focus of the next section. Henry’s taken the Kentucky farm from corn to a premier horse-breeding ranch.

Then the focus turns to Henry’s daughter Henrietta; she sees her father’s descent into obsession and the deadening of her emotions, as if it’s a family curse. Where I am now, we’ve moved on to the story behind the new hired hand, Allmon Shaughnessy, whom Henrietta has hired and seems to want to bed.

But yeah, it’s a great book. Bloody massive, although I’m reading slowly at the moment thanks to the World Cup, but that’s almost over. Loving it.

Music

Is Jack White too mainstream to plug? Probably, but then again, the way White releases his albums, a ton of people don’t even realize he’s released anything.

Look, you know my love for bands with two members and the racket they can make, and I really like the White Stripes. White’s not the most gifted guitarist; he’s no Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page, but man, is he able to write riffs and grooves.

Anyway, his new album, Frozen Charlotte, is here on Bandcamp and here on YouTube. And here’s one of my favs off the new record; it’s called There’s Nobody There.

Post-rock-wise, If These Trees Could Talk are back with their fourth album, The Hidden Hand. I really dig these Ohio lads. From brooding and patient ethereal guitar-laced textures to absolute face-melting, riotous storms of intensity.

Great band if you’re into post-rock.

You can get the full album here on Bandcamp and here on YouTube. And here’s one of my favorites from the new album, called Sea of Glass.

Right so folks, that’s it for this week. Enjoy the weekend. Mind Yourself.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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“Don’t speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke. Your body doesn’t know the difference.”

The line above is usually attributed to Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong martial artist, actor, and, I guess, philosopher. However, there’s no reliable evidence that he ever said it.

Y’know yourself, the internet has a mighty habit of dressing its own wisdom in the robes of dead famous lads, then sending it wandering about the place like a saint’s relic.

Still, when I first saw the quote while scrolling Instagram, which is a polite way of saying, sitting on the toilet, I felt accused.

Y’see, earlier that day, I’d made a few wee mistakes, the sort of harmless blunder that barely deserves a raised eyebrow. I’d forgotten the name of the person I was talking about, missed a couple of typos in an article about Lionel Messi I was proofreading, and I did my usual morning thing of walking into the kitchen and standing there wondering what in the name of St Ursula I was there for.

My response was automatic. “Christ, I’m an idiot.”

You have to laugh at yourself; no harm done really in the great grand scheme of things. But the problem with calling yourself an idiot is that you start to believe that that’s exactly what you are.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

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The Irish habit of insulting ourselves

Us Irish people are suspicious of anyone who speaks too warmly about themselves. I’m plenty sure that you know about the whole tall-poppy syndrome.

Confidence, among us paddies, is tolerated in small doses, preferably diluted with both measurable doses of Catholic shame and stout. Some lad can win an award, publish a book, or save three children from a burning house, and he’ll still be expected to say he was only passing that way by chance and sure, didn’t he a holy show of himself altogether.

We call ourselves eejits, gobshites, disasters, and hopeless cases, and being, one of my favorite Irishisms, mortified at our behavior. We turn embarrassment into entertainment before anyone else can hold something threatening over our heads.

Self-mockery keeps the room comfortable and saves us from the mortal danger of appearing pleased with ourselves.

And look, aye, I get it, there’s great charm in it, and there’s great craic, and banter, and fun, and laughter in it too. But there’s a question here: who are we entertaining when the audience has long gone home?

When I call myself a stuttering gobdaw while alone in the sitting room, there ain’t no social tension being relieved.

How negative self-talk becomes identity

Two of the smallest words in the language carry a mighty load: I am.

“I made a foolish mistake” describes an event. “I’m foolish” begins writing a character. “I failed” belongs to a moment in time. “I’m a failure” tries to escape time entirely and settle upon the soul like an eviction notice.

We do this the whole time.

I’m hopeless with money — I actually am, ask my long-suffering oh-so-gorgeous wife — I’m as awkward as a sow reversing. I’m as lazy as a dog after raiding the bins outside a rotisserie chicken shop. I’m as unlucky as that park ranger who got struck by lightning seven times. I’m too feckin’ old. What kind of idiot would put up with me? I always ruin things…and so on, and so on.

Repetition gives these phrases weight, familiarity gives them authority, and eventually they begin to sound like prophecy.

The sentence I kept repeating

One of my go-tos over the last few years has been, “I’m way behind, way, way, way behind on everything… every-feckin’-thing.”

But come on, behind whom, exactly? It’s not like there’s a line of other Paddy Murphys — although I do share that most Irish of names with 1000s of other lucky sods — doing the same thing I’m doing.

It tends to appear when I see somebody younger succeeding, or when I look at all the unfinished books and novels among my computer folders, the half-built plans, all the abandoned careers I’ve tried my hat at, and all the possible lives that once stood at the crossroads waving their little Panama hats.

And it appears early in the morning too, when the mind holds court without a defense solicitor, and every old fear is called as a witness.

“I’m way behind” sounds factual. In truth, it contains an entire invisible religion. Somewhere, there is a correct timetable. Somewhere, a decent life has already reached the station. Somewhere, everybody else received the schedule, and I was outside having a sneaky smoke.

Eastern spirituality and training the mind

The Dhammapada, one of Buddhism’s central collections of teachings, begins with the claim that mind precedes experience.

Our speech and actions arise from the mental states we actively and even non-actively cultivate. A passing thought might blow through your auld noggin like an Atlantic rain shower, but a thought fed daily grows gnarly teeth.

The Yoga Sutras offer a related practice called pratipaksha bhavana. When a destructive thought appears, the practitioner cultivates an opposing thought.

This requires you to don warrior garb against your own thought, and a fair few people can’t handle that, and you’ve got to be all Zen Samurai about it, and take the fight both honestly and with dogged patience. Grand declarations shouted at a bathroom mirror may leave the deeper belief untouched, because it knows you and is well able to stand there behind the glass, pouting with its arms folded.

“I’m way behind” can become, “I wish I’d started sooner, but feck it, I’ve started now.” “I’m unlovable” can become, “I scared shitless of rejection because rejection has hurt me.” “I’m useless” can become, “I don’t know how to do this, yet, but I’m sure as Jaysus gonna figure it out.”

Western spirituality and the power of words

The Book of Proverbs declares that death and life are in the power of the tongue. The warning reaches the speaker too.

Most of us would recoil from telling a child, “You’re useless. You ruin everything. Nobody will ever love you, you absolute waste of space.” Naw, most of us wouldn’t do that to a kid, but plenty of us deliver the same sermon inwardly each morning, while waiting for the coffee to brew.

Saint Paul the Apostle urged his readers to be transformed through the renewing of the mind. Renewal begins with investigation.

Which thoughts are actually true, you have to ask yourself, and which ones were handed off to you by a parent who didn’t know any better, an overworked and underpaid teacher having a bad day, an ex-lover, a priest, a boss, or a culture obsessed with keeping score?

Words, identity, and the limits of manifestation

Modern spiritual teachers sometimes go further and claim that speech broadcasts a frequency which commands reality. Say “I’m wealthy,” enough times and abundance eventually trots over the hill with a sack of gold. Say “I’m healthy,” and illness receives its marching orders.

Try telling your bank that you’re going to pay the mortgage via daily affirmations and vision boards, and see how far that gets you.

Speak carefully, then.

Because beneath the laughter, beneath the sarcasm, beneath the grand performance of being a hopeless case, you — which includes all your inner selves — are always listening. The voice you hear most often should possess enough mercy to tell you the truth. You, of all people, owe that to yourself.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now

“Time and patience will take a snail to Jerusalem,” so used to say my Murphy grandmother. Although in my part of Ireland we’d never have called her that, we called her nanny, which sounds posh, as if we had a ditzy Jewish New Yorker looking after us, but that wasn’t the case.

The woman behind the saying

Her name was Margaret, but everyone called her Peggy. She was brought up by her aunt and uncle because she was born before her parents were married and, oh, sure, the scandal that would have aroused meant she was shipped off — well, not really shipped off; her aunt and uncle lived at the end of the road.

Still, yeah, the wee babby-child (That’s Wexford talk for baby) was turfed out because her folks weren’t married when she arrived. Oh Catholic Ireland, the shame, the shame.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

But that’s a detour, although I’ll say that I miss her still; she died a good while ago now. Every now and then my auld lad will say something like, “By Jaysus, Peggy Murphy will never be dead while you’re alive.”

I think it’s meant as a compliment, but it’s one of those rural Irish compliments that has a healthy dose of passive aggressiveness to it, but y’know, I’d be awfully like her character-wise and sure she practically raised me when my auld pair were working. My Mam used to say it was a nightmare to get me home for bedtime because I loved being with her so much.

Anyway, I saw someone posting the above saying the other day, and it reminded me of her, and it got me a-thinking.

How long would a snail take to reach Jerusalem?

First up, how long would it take a snail to get to Jerusalem from rural Wexford?

He’d need to get on a boat. Oh sorry, did I just assume the gender of a snail? I didn’t mean to; snails are mostly hermaphrodites, of course, land snails that is, and their mating is weird. Despite being hermaphrodites, they’ll mate with another snail, swap some love juice, and both will lay eggs.

Weird? Yes.
Sexy? Also yes.

Anyway, a snail moves at around 0.05 km/h; for you Yankee Doodles, that’s 0.03 miles per hour. So, there are two possible routes from rural Wexford to Israel for our wee snail mate; let’s call it Sam, since we’ve established Sam is a hermaphrodite. Sam works as short for Samuel and Samantha... Sam, in both cases, crawls for 12 hours and rests for 12 hours.

Sam’s two roads to Jerusalem

Sam gets a boat to France and hauls itself into Belgium, goes south-easterly through Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, into Serbia, then south through Bulgaria, Turkiye, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and then Israel, taking around 25 years.

Or, Sam has a generous benefactor who hires a fancy sailboat, and it goes from Wexford harbor to Ashdod harbor, and it would take 157 days, just over five months, 10 days of which were onboard our fine boat.

The life lived along the way

Imagine both versions of Sam, and the adventures it’s just had on both odysseys. What Sam has seen, what Sam has experienced, the loves, the losses, the lusts, the rages, the wonder, the beauty, the melancholy, the whole feckin’ lot.

And when you’re in the middle of things, you’re experiencing them, but you’re not really appreciating them, are you? Not until later anyway, although maybe just humans are cursed with that; maybe there are no such problems amongst the animals we share the world with.

The long road to here

When I started taking this type of writing seriously, I’d no clue what I was going to do. All I had was the massive ego of someone who’d been through the wringer, had some bizarre spiritual experiences, psychological realizations, and decided he wanted to help others who were stuck and fed up, lost and aimless —  what I had been for so long and for so many years.

Now it’s many years later, and I’ve published a book, had articles read by north of a million people, connected with 1000s upon 1000s of people across the world, made loads of new friends — a few enemies too, I’d have to admit — but I still have loads to do.

Or do I?

The ego trap of doing more

Because there’s kind of an ego trap there, isn’t there?

The need to do more, to show your worth by trying to eke out a place for yourself, have some influence, some — muah, ha-ha-haaaa — power and to see the results in the gratification machine that is the dopamine-doling-out drudgery of social media.

For years I’d felt stuck. I’d done my journalism degree, but couldn’t get a proper job other than freelancing, so I got into editing/proofreading and copywriting. They’re all fine jobs, but there’s no creativity in them.

Even copywriting, you’d think, would have it, but look, one of the worst — not worst, stupidest — copywriting jobs I had was reviewing venues in Australian cities.

There I was writing about the best hotels to have conferences in, the best pubs to have 21st birthday parties in, the best restaurants to have babyshowers in somewhere around Sydney Harbor, or the South Bank in Brisbane, or Perth’s CBD from my apartment in Katowice in southern Poland and, honestly ta Jaysus lads, I’d stuggle to find any of those cities on a blank map of Australia.

Time and patience

But here I am now, and it’s years later, and time and patience will take a snail to Jerusalem.

I studied to be a counselor; I’m writing about the things that make my heart and my head happy: the big bad questions of philosophy, spirituality, and the mad world we find ourselves part of.

Looking back now, I can see how the dots all match up and connect, but when I was living them, I wasn’t sure which way anything would go, despite having a goal.

So, that’s all you can do, isn’t it?

Have your goal, or goals, know where you’re going, but put trust in the wind that it’ll blow and fill your sails. Because you can’t control, well, anything really, other than your reactions, and even then that’s kind of up for debate, but you can’t control outside circumstances for sure; all you can do is pick your goal(s) and head in that direction armed with patience and determination.

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If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now

Other articles published this week

The bison return to the Caucasus

Seven years after twelve European bison raised in zoos first stepped from their wooden crates into Azerbaijan’s Shahdag National Park, the growing herd has reportedly produced twenty-five calves in the wild.

Bison had been absent from the Caucasus since the last wild animal was killed in 1927, but repeated arrivals from European zoos have helped the population rise to around ninety.

A century after gunfire silenced them, the hills are beginning to thunder again. The great hairy gardeners have returned.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Hope holds fast beneath the waves

Scientists have mapped more than 64,000 square miles of coral reef that may remain resilient as oceans warm.

Using observations collected between 1960 and 2025, machine learning models identified potential refuges across 72 countries and 100 territories.

These reefs may avoid the worst heat, endure it more stoutly, or recover faster after bleaching and storms. Only 28 percent currently lie within protected or conserved areas, so the new map gives governments a clearer idea of where money and protection could do the greatest good.

An ancient corner of the brain may hold the key to attention

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a tiny group of inhibitory neurons deep in the mouse brainstem that appears to act as an ancient attention filter.

When the researchers temporarily silenced these cells, known as PLTi neurons, the mice could still see and move normally, but became helplessly distracted by irrelevant sights. One faint flicker at the edge of the screen and away they went, like an Irishman abandoning the washing up because somebody opened a packet of crisps.

Similar brainstem structures exist throughout the vertebrate world, raising the possibility that this venerable little circuit may one day provide new targets for ADHD treatments.

Sunlight could make seawater cheaper to drink

Chinese scientists have built a solar desalination material that drinks deeply of the sun and helps wring freshwater from the briny deep. Its forest of polymer fibers and hollow nanoparticles absorbs 90.2 percent of incoming sunlight while reducing the energy needed for evaporation by 45.7 percent.

A small outdoor system produced 20.16 liters of drinkable water each day and irrigated a plot of spinach, corn, and Chinese cabbage through complete growing cycles.

After a year of stable operation, the researchers calculated that its water could become cheaper than bottled water within two years, with greater savings as the system grows.

Reading

Here are a few articles that caught my eye this week while I probably should’ve been working…

Former NASA investigator Joseph Gutheinz became obsessed with recovering the hundreds of moon rocks gifted by the United States after the Apollo missions.

https://magazine.atavist.com/2012/the-case-of-the-missing-moon-rocks?src=longreads

Noah Strycker turned birding into an extreme endurance sport, traveling through 41 countries in a single year and identifying 6,042 species.

https://longreads.com/2017/02/28/bird-man/?src=longreads

Irish immigrants, driven abroad by British oppression, and their descendants played an outsized role in the American Revolution, serving as soldiers, naval commanders, spies, printers, politicians, and signers of the Declaration of Independence.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-tens-of-thousands-of-irish-immigrants-led-the-patriots-to-victory-during-the-american-revolution-180989052/

Book

I demolished John Williams’ Stoner after I wrote a wee bit about it last week. Whoa, what a book; cannot recommend it highly enough.

What hits you first is the trauma and damage that everyone in it is weighed down by, but there’s also the element that once you know your role in society, family, work, you have to accept it.

You feel sorry for William Stoner, hard not to, for the other characters too, but there’s a thing in the book that all, well, most of, the characters seem to be able to, not quite make peace with their traumas but to keep soldiering on anyway.

This week, I’ve tried three different books. First was You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique. This came to be highly recommended, but I threw in the towel. It’s, how to explain it…the story isn’t moved by what the characters say and do; it’s the author just constantly going, and then this happened, and then that happened, and it’s, well, boring. Which is a pity because I was eager to read about what went down in Mexico City when the Spanish showed up. Maybe I’ll return to it; loads of people really rave about this book.

Then I tried The Republic of Memory, a new sci-fi book about a spaceship traveling across the cosmos to take 1000s of humans to their new home. It’s about the different nationalities on the ship, how language and communication and the people have all evolved aboard the ship that’s been flying for generations.

Great idea, in fairness, but it just didn’t sit right with me. Y’know that feeling when you’re reading, and you’re being talked at rather than talking with? Getting great reviews, but it didn’t gel with me.

One that had been long on my list was C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, a book about a Kentucky horse breeding family. I believe it won the Pulitzer years ago. I’ve just begun it, one chapter in, but loving it so far. Wonderful language, really, really beautifully written.

Music

Parisian post-rockers Lost In Kyiv return with their fifth album, I believe. I’m a big fan of these lads, slow builds and a somewhat melancholy vibe, but then it erupts in your face, and it gets loud. Right up my street.

Their new album, We’re All Going To Be Fine, is available here on Bandcamp, and here on YouTube. Here’s one of the stand-out tracks, the album closer, Liminality.

Galway band Shark Song have just released their debut album, Selachimorpha. They’ve been quite the hit on the live scene in Ireland, from what I’ve heard anyway, as I don’t live there anymore, but they say about themselves, “a sonic assault with more bite than a Great White’s dentures, if Wet Leg and Nirvana had a child and raised it with Catholic guilt that would be these girls.”

And, eh, yeah, that’s what you’re getting here. It’s loud and in-your-face, full of punk attitude, great fun. You can get the full album on YouTube here. I really liked this one, a real stoner metal feel off of it; this one’s called 5AM.

That’s it for another week, folks. Enjoy your weekend, and Mind Yourself.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now

The alarm goes off, the mits reach for the idiot screen, and the soul has barely pulled on its boxers before the whole mad carnival begins again.

War, scandal, wellness, outrage, catastrophe, miracle-mushroom powders, celebrity affairs, political fury, and some bronzed lunatic announcing that he wakes at 4:30 every morning to bathe in ice, sun his perineum, apply a goat-jizz face mask and then conquer his destiny while the rest of us are still cradled in the arms of the ever-loving Morpheus.

Then the phone winks, asks how you are feeling, asks you what you’re wearing, and do you feel like a quick tug?

Wait, what? Did that just happen? Did my phone ask me for phonesex?

One minute, civilization appears to be collapsing; the next, a woman in flowing beige linen — there’s a fan strategically placed off-camera — is explaining how to manifest abundance through her morning kombucha.

Somewhere between the apocalypse and the affiliate link, the modern world issues its favorite command: find yourself.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

The missing person report

“Find yourself” sounds as though the self were a leather wallet left behind in a taxi after a few too many porters.

The phrase carries a kind of comforting assumption. Right down there, beneath the noise of yourself and the world both around you and within you, there dwells a pure, finished version of you, all polished up like Santa’s boots and looking like a lad in a Victoria’s Secret catalog — do lads feature in Victoria’s Secret’s catalogs?

No idea. They should, shouldn’t they? Equal opportunities and all that, eh? Men can be sexy too, well, sometimes anyway. But does that mean they’ll be in it wearing ladies’ knickers? I wouldn’t be into that now meself, but sure, each to their own, I guess…anyway, returning to our regular programming….

Have a dig through the fear, the ambition, the roles, the compromises we albatross ourselves with, and behold, there you are, now, all radiant, and authentic, smelling of your auld lad’s Old Spice.

But we all know, and we’re all long enough in the gnashers to know that life rarely, if ever, actually behaves so neatly.

We all contain the frightened rugrat, the vain peacock, the dutiful parent, the lonely fool, the generous friend, the resentful worker, the writer, the performer, and the gobshite who checks whether anyone liked the article about escaping the need for approval.

Really though, the self resembles a village committee meeting where nobody remembers who booked the room; it was you, Eric, and yeah man, this could’ve just been an email…

How modern life shapes identity

I can’t be the only person to notice that the world around us looks stark-raving, cuckoo-bananas bonkers because it speaks in contradictory commandments.

Be authentic. Be employable.
Stand out. Follow the trend.
Love yourself. Purchase improvements.
Protect your peace. Be permanently reachable.
Build a personal brand. Wonder why you feel like merchandise.

This chaos has some structure to it, as you’re very aware of, I’m sure. Anyone who feels incomplete can be sold completion. Anyone who feels behind can be sold speed. And anyone who fears exclusion can be sold a sense of belonging, usually with free delivery and 12 interest-free, easy payments.

The machine hums and ticks along nicely when we feel slightly defective. So we have the endless and unrelenting commerce parade of fixes, upgrades, diets, habits, identities, ideologies, retreats, newsletters, supplements, and spiritual programs promising to return us to ourselves by Tuesday.

I’d love to stand outside all this and wag my noble finger. But let’s be honest, there’s definitely some hypocrisy here. I write online; I want readers; I check reactions; and, to my shame, I feel a wee spark of joy when strangers approve of me. Easy to blame the circus before you remember you’ve bought 10 boxes of popcorn, and the kids are wired to the moon on candyfloss.

Buy the ticket, take the ride

The American journalist and gonzo writer, Hunter S. Thompson, gave us the immortal command: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Life doesn’t really offer a clean viewing platform. We’re already aboard. We work, marry, raise children, fail, desire, consume, compromise, love, grieve, lose our tempers, make promises, break a few, and occasionally behave like eejits of international standing.

The ride reveals us through motion. Nobody can learn anything about courage while sitting safely in a room discussing it; that’s no better than us all watching the World Cup now and tutting as a striker makes a complete balls of a move, skies the ball to row Z, and we’re thinking we could’ve buried it, but really, what do any of us know of playing soccer to an elite level?

Taking the ride means entering experience with our peepers open. It means accepting that choices lead to consequences, habits become character, and every road ventured means veering off the one we’ve been on.

Who’s driving?

George Gurdjieff, the Armenian philosopher and mystic, argued that humans are made up of many competing “I”s. One part wants discipline, another wants a donut, well, a hundred donuts, with ice cream.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, approached the same confusion through the persona and the shadow. The persona helps us function in society. We become the reliable worker, the kind parent, the strong friend, the spiritual seeker, the witty chap at supper who’s definitely doing grand and has no weirdness moving through his skull when he’s alone at all, at all.

Our personality masks usually begin as a form of protection in childhood. The obedient kid needed safety. The comedian needed affection. The overachiever was fighting for attention. A survival strategy can carry us for years, long after the danger that created it has gone out to pasture.

Then comes the shadow. Our envy, resentment, vanity, cowardice, hunger, rage, and all the other stuff we prefer to detect in our in-laws. Self-knowledge is about as comfortable here as finding your cousin on PornHub.

Is there a true self?

Buddhist philosophy introduces a grand difficulty. The permanent, independent self we seek may never have existed in the form imagined.

What we call “me” is more like a sloshing river of memory, sensation, habit, fear, desire, relationship, and attention.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous summons to “become who you are” places responsibility at the center. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about bad faith, the habit of hiding inside roles and excuses to escape the burden of choice.

Ask yourself, didn’t we inherit much of ourselves without ever asking for it?

Family doles out beliefs, and school hands us measurements. Our strata in society impose expectations on us, and advertising loads us up to the gills with desires.

The work begins when we examine the whole shebang and ask which parts deserve to travel onward.

The danger of finding yourself

Finding yourself sounds fairly pleasant enough until the person you uncover wants to rearrange, even demolish, the life you’ve built.

You may discover that a long-held ambition belonged to your Dad, a definition of success came from people you only respected because you’d no choice, or, even worse, that a whole personality was assembled to keep rejection on the other side of the door.

Any one of us can become highly skilled at living a life chosen by fear, duty, imitation, and the longing to be loved. Years pass, applause arrives, the bills get paid, but the small voice keeps muttering from the cellar that all’s not well.

And you need to be careful when that voice finally gets noticed. The selves we outgrow deserve understanding. They were needed when they were needed. We can thank them and still refuse them full access to the steering wheel.

The luxury of self-discovery also deserves some of the limelight. It’s easy to preach “follow your bliss” when your parents’ trust fund is footing the bill, and nobody’s depending on you. A parent working two jobs might find their identity through endurance, care, loyalty, and keeping a promise when every nerve cries for escape.

We become ourselves through relationships as well. The father materializes because there’s a child to be cared for. The friend appears because someone trusts us. Freedom reveals one face, responsibility reveals another.

Becoming someone worth being

Authenticity offers a pretty crappy moral compass.

A selfish person may feel sincere. A cruel person may speak honestly. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, understood character as something formed through repeated action.

The real question is simple: what am I becoming through the things I repeatedly do?

The world will be more than happy to answer that for us. I’m behind. I must impress. I can’t disappoint anyone anymore. Repeat those voices long enough, and they begin to sound like your own.

Buy the ticket. Take the ride. You will stumble the odd time and lose yourself in old masks, borrowed ambitions, and frightened habits. Finding yourself begins when you notice you’re wearing them and learn they don’t have to be worn.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now

Open Instagram or TikTok for a harmless look at what the world is doing, and within minutes you may meet a skincare prophet, a millionaire morning-routine evangelist, a furious political oracle, and a woman weeping sincerely beside an affiliate link.

Somewhere between the family photographs and the dog videos, we’ve allowed the internet to become a shopping center with delusions of intimacy.

Back in the day, we went online to find people with similar interests, or at least interesting people, but they all seem to have been replaced by salespeople performing personhood, and selling sweatshop-sourced tat for corporations they don’t even work for.

I can’t be the only dope who thinks that every avocado toast breakfast, every Greek holiday, heartbreak, marriage, illness, child’s birthday, outfit, opinion, and moment of apparent vulnerability can now be measured, packaged, and presented to the market.

Roll up, roll up and behold the modern miracle, folks: the human soul, available with free delivery when you use code BLESSED20.

Paradoxically viral

Back in January I wrote what I’d considered a pretty throwaway article about people who don’t post on social media.

Last week it went mega viral, 1000s and 1000s of views, out of nowhere. I’ve no idea who shared it, because I didn’t even publish it in a “proper” Medium Publication; I published it on my own, which I usually only use for my Good News Friday newsletter — which you should most certainly subscribe to here.

Obviously, it struck a happy G chord, or maybe a more melancholic Gm chord; anyway, it was looking at people who don’t post often on social media, and the main takeaway is that the people who don’t post often just don’t see any reason to compare themselves with others.

The psychology behind influencer culture

Ever traipse into a local village pharmacy at sixteen to buy condoms?

Whoa, that’s just pure awkward for everyone involved: me, the pharmacist, the auld Biddy waiting behind me pretending she’s not going to tell my Ma I’m riding, and even for the poor ever-suffering, ever-judgemental Sacred Heart of Jesus statue staring down from the wall.

There are other awkward questions we avoid because the answers might reveal more than we would like. Influencer culture raises one of them: why might somebody need to be watched every day?

A meta-analysis of narcissism and social networking behavior found a small but reliable association between narcissistic traits and social media activity.

A separate large Norwegian study of more than 23,000 people linked problematic social media use with narcissistic traits and lower self-esteem.

The polished swagger may therefore rest upon something surprisingly fragile: a self that requires regular confirmation from the crowd. That’s the root of narcissism: most of us get it wrong about narcissists because we think they’re pretty much uncaring psychos, but really, their behaviors display their desperate need for approval.

Every shared photograph, confession, outfit, and opinion becomes another visit to the public weighing scales, with likes and views deciding whether the soul has gained or lost a star overnight.

And look, here’s me diagnosing strangers with ring lights and branded, oversized coffee cups, and I know it’s pretty much pub psychology, but things like ambition, loneliness, insecurity, creativity, extroversion, economic fear, and the ordinary human wish to be seen can all lead someone toward the same glowing screen.

And now a break for some anti-marketing punkrock…

In the above article, I did my best to scribe about the distance between attention and connection. Attention — and sure, don’t we all love a bit of it, really? — provides the exhilarating sensation of being witnessed, while genuine connection grows through privacy, trust, time, and being known beyond the performance.

Influencing, I’d be happy to wager, can leave a person permanently exposed to the first experience and starving for the second. Likes, comments, follower counts, and sponsorships become external evidence that the self matters. But external evidence is nowhere near as valuable as what’s internal.

Identity hardens into branding, life becomes that dreaded word “content,” and privacy can begin to feel like professional negligence. Approval from the masses has to be renewed every single empty day, because the great, huge, all-seeing, all-judgmental algorithm has the memory of a brain-damaged goldfish and the mercy of a Dublin 4 landlord.

A “creator” can have a million sets of eyes watching their “content” and still feel profoundly unseen, because visibility offers a thin, Auschwitz-like gruel of nourishment.

How influencer culture changed social media, the science & research bit

Influencing ain’t nothing new, sorry, a double negative there, but let’s go with poetic license; it’s as ancient as gossiping.

Priests, poets, politicians, village whores, and the lad in the pub who swears his cousin knows a man who can sort out the embarrassing itch in your crotch have always shaped what people believe. Social media industrialized the process and attached live statistics to it.

A meta-analysis of influencer marketing from 2025 found that credibility, attractiveness, self-disclosure, and the fit between creator and brand help drive engagement and purchasing behavior.

Unfortunately for us normies, influencer marketing/advertising works because it arrives wearing the clothes of ordinary recommendation. The viewer feels that a familiar person has offered advice. Behind the curtain, a company quietly counts the clicks.

A 2024 review of 51 studies on influencers and adolescent health found recurring concerns around unrealistic appearance ideals, unhealthy diets, substance use, inappropriate advertising, and inaccurate health advice.

And, previously, a 2019 randomized experiment found that children exposed to influencers promoting unhealthy snacks consumed significantly more food afterward.

How social media algorithms keep users hooked

It’s worth repeating what I presume you already know here.

Platforms rank posts using predictions in things like watch time, clicks, comments, shares, and the likelihood that users will remain seated and staring at an idiot screen as daylight enters Hades around them.

The systems underpinning social media algorithms serve as editors of reality.

They decide, so long as you hit certain factors, which face becomes famous, which argument feels universal, which product becomes essential, and which political fury follows us into bed.

A writer can pen an essay that might alter somebody’s thinking for years, but it’ll generate feck all measurable signals for the IT and marketing nerds. But a baying fool shouting about replacement theories and vaccine psy-ops can provoke eight hundred comments before lunch, half of them calling him a clown, the other half arming themselves with St. George flags, and the machine records a triumph.

A 2025 algorithmic audit published in PNAS Nexus found that Twitter’s engagement-based ranking amplified more divisive, angry, and hostile political content.

In February 2026, the European Commission found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act, citing addictive design features including infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and highly personalized recommendations.

Influencers provide a steady stream of bait for the designed architecture. The platform supplies the trap, observes how long we remain inside it, and sells access to our attention.

Another delightful, anti-consumerism punk break courtesy of the ever-mighty Fugazi…

Billionaire owners and populist politics

Here we arrive at the grand gobshites who own the digital square.

Their companies influence what billions of people see, discuss, purchase, fear, and believe, and their recommendation systems remain largely hidden from public inspection.

God-awful ghoul and general sap, Elon Musk spent roughly $259 million supporting American President Donald Trump and allied groups during the 2024 election. Musk owns his own platform on which he promotes political candidates, movements, and opinions, many of which are racist dogwhistles, to an enormous audience.

The forever alone, Mark Zuckerberg ended Meta’s United States third-party fact-checking program in January 2025. Meta described the change as a response to censorship concerns and excessive mistakes. The timing, shortly before Donald Trump returned to office, was, of course, just a coincidence.

It’s fairly obvious to anyone paying even just a minutiae of attention that populist politics prospers in this putrid soil. Charismatic personalities, simple enemies, permanent crisis, grievance, certainty, tribal loyalty, and contempt for expertise travel quickly through systems that reward emotional reaction.

The influencers are being eaten too

There’s, of course, the main creature trapped in the mechanism: the influencer. We can’t really just bash them; aye, they’re part of the problem, a huge part, but call a shovel a shovel; they’re the symptom, not the cause.

For most of us, their work looks like free holidays, free merch, and taking snaps before their gold-encrusted steak dinner goes Baltic. But the life behind it can involve unstable income, algorithmic uncertainty, harassment, even stalking, relentless ‘content’ production, and the merging of personal identity with commercial performance.

A 2025 Swedish study documented just these things, as well as other factors, including audience demands, constant visibility, work-life imbalance, self-esteem, and burnout.

Those surveyed described the health-related costs of maintaining traction in a system where disappearing for a week may threaten both relevance and the ability to pay the rent.

How ordinary users can fix social media

Moving to newer platforms can restore some of the old internet magic.

Small communities encourage conversation, eccentricity, and genuine discovery because the brands, growth hackers, and professional attention miners remain elsewhere with their clipboards.

However, it’s temporary, because the capitalists will follow where they can smell out an opportunity to take a dime.

There’s the obvious question to be asked too: is social media for you? If you’re not enjoying it, if it’s not enriching your life, then what’s the point in using it?

I really only use Instagram now; link below, of course, if you want to see photos of Polish nature and graffiti. I share images there, and it posts them to FB too, so I don’t have to log in there, but I love Instagram because I follow tons of bands, tons of landscape/nature photographers, and pals local and foreign, who, like me, flew the coop and we’re scattered around the world.

The moment I see a friend/acquentence selling something, they’re muted. I personally know a few influencers in real life, all of them muted or unfollowed because, to me, they’ve sold out, and this old punk cannot abide that.

If you do want connection on the internet though, we’ve got to seek out spaces with chronological or user-controlled feeds, portable identities, community moderation, open protocols, smaller groups, and business models funded through subscriptions, cooperatives, or other sources beyond harvested attention.

Ordinary users like the rest of us have power, too.

Like all prisoners, we outnumber those holding us hostage. We can stop hate-following, stop rage-sharing, mute sales content, wait several days before buying promoted products, report hidden advertising, support independent creators directly, and follow people who make, repair, teach, investigate, and help.

The EU gets a lot of stick, but thanks to them, European users can choose non-personalized feeds on very large platforms under the Digital Services Act.

TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram currently offer options to disable personalized feeds. Finding and keeping those settings can feel like searching for an enchanted fairy key in a Kildare bog, but they’re there if you look for them.

Can influencers see the light?

Probably not, not the successful ones anyway, and the ones who aren’t successful usually just throw in the towel after a few months of trying.

And we can’t exactly force them to see the light, y’know, horses to water and all that. But we can ignore them, we can unfollow them, we can mute them, we can report them. How do you fight fire? With fire? Nope, you starve it of oxygen.

The internet began as a place where people reached toward one another across distance. It’s become a marketplace because loneliness, envy, outrage, beauty, belonging, and hope could all be monetized.

We can, though, fix the wider culture by reclaiming our attention, supporting better spaces, demanding stricter rules, and remembering that a human life possesses value even when nobody has liked, shared, sponsored, ranked, or purchased it.

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Here’s a link to that other article if you haven’t checked it out yet:

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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Published this week

From the archive

This one’s gone a bit viral this week, so if you’ve missed it, here you go:

This week’s good news…

Scientists begin cracking the birdie dictionary

American neuroethologist Dr. Julie Elie has won a $100,000 prize after decoding 11 core calls used by zebra finches.

The garrulous wee birds use them to announce who they are, what they are doing, and whether hunger, danger, affection, or avian disagreement is afoot.

Experiments showed the finches sometimes confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds, suggesting they understand the messages behind them. Thus draws nearer the venerable dream of speaking with animals, although God only knows what they have been saying about us all this time.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Mosquitoes find honest work at last

Scientists have turned the proboscis — which is the long tube-like yoke in a mosquito’s gob — of dead female mosquitoes into ultrafine 3D printing nozzles. Weird, eh?

The process, called “3D necroprinting,” can produce lines just 20 microns wide, finer than many commercial nozzles. At last, the airborne blood thief has secured respectable employment.

The boffins at McGill’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and at Drexel University used it to print tiny, wee honeycombs, maple leaves, and cell-supporting scaffolds. It’s going to be cheap, biodegradable, and reusable, and the mosquito nozzles could eventually aid tissue engineering and microscopic manufacturing.

Not bad, eh, finally, something good about the irritating little feckers.

Great green vault

The Royal Botanic Gardens in southwest London has digitized 7.4 million preserved plant and fungal specimens, making centuries of botanical knowledge available online for all of us.

The butterfly that grows old disgracefully slowly

Some tropical Heliconius butterflies live three times longer than their closest relatives, with one surviving for a whopping 348 days.

Even in their dotage, certain butterflies retained their weight and grip strength, fluttering onward like tiny winged Methuselahs with zero intention of retiring.

Their unusual habit of eating pollen may help, though diet alone can’t really explain their longevity. Scientists are hoping that studying these little lads will reveal how they’ve evolved to slow physical decline, and see if any of what they’re doing can be applied to us lot.

A mighty wind awakens in the West

America’s largest renewable energy project is now fully operational. SunZia combines a 3,650 megawatt wind farm in New Mexico with a 550-mile transmission line, producing more power than the Hoover Dam and enough electricity for about one million homes.

Reading

Last week I mentioned I was reading Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep. It was really good. Now, look, you’re going to have to be a fan of The Screaming Trees and Seattle music, well then again, maybe not.

It’s about Langan’s tough upbringing, his struggles with identity, the band, and his crippling heroin addiction. I read the follow-up, too, Devil in a Coma, which is about his time in Ireland, in a Co. Kerry hospital, when he was suffering from Covid. And it really hit the poor guy hard; he was in a coma for months, and in-and-out of the hospital, but it ends on an upbeat…which is unfortunate, because he died around 70 days after the book was released, although his official cause of death has never been released.

Yeah, I really liked both. Very funny at times, really heartbreaking at others.

I’ve just begun reading Stoner by John Williams. It’s one of those books you always see listed as a classic. By the name, I thought it was going to be a Beat-type book about drugs. It’s most certainly not. So far, really enjoying it. Willians has a delicate touch; he can describe so brilliantly people who are so bloody repressed and out of touch with their emotions. I know I’m going to love the rest of it.

Music

“Grunge-fuelled indie based in Dublin,” so says the Bandcamp page for HAVVK. So, yeah, all in on that.

This is their fourth album, titled Time Will Kill. Actually, the whole album isn’t out yet, but it’s available to pre-order, and four tracks are on their Bandcamp page. The opening track, Happening Again, is a banger, though.

Yeah, these lads have only just popped up on my radar, so I’m going to be all over their discography over the next few days. Really like the grunge/punk energy of them, y’know, one of those rare bands that have something to say and it’s worth paying attention to what it is.

We’ll stay in Ireland with a Limerick band, Theatre, who’ve just put out their debut EP, Incarnate. This one is very much of a shoegaze/alt-rock vibe. Very stoner-y music and yeah, hard not to love.

Really, really impressive for a debut EP. Here’s the opening track, Gaudete, and you can listen to the full release here on YouTube.

Right folks, that’ll do for another week. Have a mighty weekend. Mind Yourself!

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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The wise man who saw something

Donkey’s years ago, when Methuselah was just a wee gossun, and I was doing a prefects course before going back into my final year in high school, I met a fierce, wise man. He looked like ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons but was a man of immense spiritual knowledge.

He taught me many things, predicted long ago that I’d end up guiding people on spiritual matters, and was an ear when, as a 16-year-old with seemingly world-ending problems chewing his mind to bits, I needed it.

One of the things I’ll never forget him saying to me was that whether you’re stuck in depressive thoughts or in anxious thoughts, you’re denying the reality of the present moment because you’re somewhere else.

We’ll come back to this, so let’s take a wee detour…

The peculiar comfort of pessimism

Like most decent marriages, there’s a fair bit of wee rivalry between meself and the bosswoman, and one of the things we slag each other about is me being of a mostly pessimistic mindset while she’d be far more of an optimistic mindset.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

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Now, for long-term readers of my weird ramblings, you’ll know I’m not a diehard pessimist, I know there’s always hope, indeed, it’s even a wee catchphrase of mine when texting my pals during football matches — it’s the hope that kills ya, is often a signoff from me after Ireland, or any underdog has lost, been wrongs, see for example the recent England v Ghana match where the Ghanese were denied a stonewall pentalty.

So cards on the green canvas, when it comes to individuals and what they, or we, are all capable of, I’d be optimistic. Once people can learn to deal with what ails them, they can mostly come to be able to handle even the worst of what the universe can fling their way.

When the wheels refuse to turn

But when it comes to societal issues, naw, them, I reckon we’re boned. The system we find ourselves forced to toil in is crooked, and the odds are stacked against us from the start. This can be taken as being geo-political, economic, even spiritual; it’s what the Buddhists call Dukkha.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it basically refers to a wheel axle being slightly crooked, so the wheels don’t turn properly. You can live with it, but it’s unsatisfactory. Dukkha just means the unsatisfactoriness of life.

And the great thing — I say for the millionth time to my wonderful wife —  about being a pessimist is that you’re always prepared for the worst and when you’re let down by friends, family, lovers, pets, colleagues, peers, parents, the world itself, you knew it was bound to happen and, well, there’s no need for it to completely ruin your day — unless it’s particularly bad, then of course, it can — but, at the same time, you’ve got to rememeber that Cormac McCarthy quote:

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

That’s the kind of pessimist I am. Aye, things will go wooden-clogs up, and you’ll be annoyed and upset, but it could always, always, always be worse. Much worse.

The mind’s miserable time machine

Living with depression is god-awful, and living with constant anxiety is also a bucket of steaming dogshite. But what are they really?

Any dictionary will tell you that depression is a mood disorder marked by varying degrees of sadness, despair, and loneliness. Anxiety is Apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated misfortune.

Depression is then a form of rumination on the past, while anxiety is doing the same, but for potential future events. Many years ago, I saw a famous Irish singer on a late-night TV show define depression as knowing you need to change but not being able to.

Sounds simple enough when you see them defined like that. Horrid to have to deal with, both a festering, bloated albatross yoked to your neck, dragging you to your knees, until the world turns cold and grey and everything feels like it’s against you.

The past behind us, the future before us

But my auld tutor John above was correct, and it’s an absolute pain in the hoop to learn. It seems so simple, but damn near impossible to put into action. Be here, be present.

Yeah, sure man, that’s all well and good, but how can I wrestle myself away from misery when I think about the past and what I’ve done and/or had done to me, and how in the sweet name of holy Jaysus can I not be anxious for the future when I’ve all this bollology weighing me down?

That right there, however, is the exact problem.

The danger of spiritual bypassing

Overidentifying with the struggles already undergone. It’s not to deny they happened.

Most definitely not, and by God, a hill I’ll die on is that far too many mindfulness teachers, spiritualists, philosophers, and occultists teach a form of spiritual bypassing, but it’s that yes, they did happen. You were wronged, or even you did the wronging — is that a word? It is now, but stewing on past events and making your future tar-pit black because of it…well, how’s that working out?

It’s not, is it?

The Father’s Day I nearly missed

Yesterday was Father’s Day here in Poland. My mighty wee family made a great effort. There were cards, chocolates, even a trip to town for a magic carrot cake and an iced coffee, and loads of hugs and cuddles and kisses.

But I was getting needle-y as the day progressed. Aye, I was engaging and joking around and messing as I do on my best days, being a good Dad, or at least, imitating what I think is what a good auld lad is supposed to be, but underneath it, I knew I wasn’t enjoying it.

As the day faded towards late evening, my answers got shorter, and I needed to be a Dad and dole out some discipline and correct some behaviors, something I really, bloody detest doing, but you have to, it’s called being a parent.

The answer in the cupcake journal

So, I sneaked away before the Portugal v Uzbekistan kickoff, one wee Murph was very happy to see her hero Cristiano Ronaldo bag a brace, got out my fine pink journal adorned with cupcakes, and wrote until the answer presented itself.

I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote some more until this came out: “Annoyed at what? Not writing for the subscribers? Not being productive? FFS, it’s Father’s Day, and you’re off work. Maybe it’s one of them, or maybe, probably, it’s unnamed, and it’s an annoyance of not being properly present.”

There it was, simple as that really. To get out of your way, get out of your own head and be. Just feckin’ be.

Reality had been there all along

And, no, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. As above, this is Dukkha, this is the way of the world. It’s just unsatisfactory by its nature, but I can, as I wrote to finish my journal ramblings, “See mistakes, take the lesson on the chin, make improvements. So, do it.”

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

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I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Previously published articles

And from the archive

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The Pacific gets room to breathe

French Polynesia has announced full protection for another 515,000 square kilometers of ocean around the Austral and Marquesas Islands.

Rare marine species, including giving sharks, whales, seabirds, and so on, now have a sanctuary roughly twice the size of Arizona, and industrial fishing, mining, and trawling have all been banned. Which is great.

Traditional fishing will still be allowed in designated coastal zones, so that locals can still have a fish supper. Once completed, the wider network will protect 30 percent of French Polynesia’s waters from extraction, a mighty blue inheritance for generations to come.

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

The brain ain’t done yet

Nearly 4,000 adults aged 19 to 94 took part in a three-year online brain-health program, and over time their collective scores improved across reasoning, emotional balance, social connection, and sense of purpose.

Even people in their eighties and nineties showed gains, which is a fierce rebuttal to the notion that the brain clocks off early and spends retirement looking for its false teeth and Viagra.

The people who put the study together haven’t, unfortunately, released the actual training, but it focused on attention, big-picture thinking, and mental flexibility, in short daily sessions. Age may slow the machinery, but the auld engine can still sing.

Putting the spring back in old knees

Stanford scientists restored worn knee cartilage in elderly mice by blocking an age-related protein called 15-PGDH. The treatment also reduced pain and helped prevent arthritis after serious knee injuries, giving the mice a better chance of scampering about without sounding like a cupboard full of loose saucers.

Trying it on human cartilage removed during knee replacement surgery, they were also able to produce healthier tissue in the lab. Early days, of course, and it’s not like the therapy has regenerated the stringy stuff inside living people, but worth keeping an eye on.

A helping hand at bedtime

Scientists have discovered that one of humanity’s oldest private pastimes may also be a handy sleep aid. In a survey of 301 adults, those who engaged in self-pleasure before bed reported better sleep, slightly longer rest, and falling asleep an average of 9.1 minutes sooner.

They also felt more positive before drifting off and after waking, which is a fair improvement on lying there counting sheep while mentally replaying an argument with your aunt Biddy from 2007.

Those who regularly enjoyed a little private communion before sleep were also slightly more likely to recall erotic dreams, suggesting the mind carries the evening’s business into its midnight theatre. Sexy!

Long Reads

Italian football ultras

‘He liked that people were scared of him’: my year unpicking fantasy and reality with a veteran of…
I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro…www.theguardian.com

Michelangelo’s Hidden Drawings

Michelangelo’s Hidden Drawings
The doodles of a genius line the walls of a secret room under the Medici Chapel, where they were hidden for nearly 500…www.atlasobscura.com

The Father and Son who ate everything. Yeah, people are weird. Weird and, it seems, hungry:

The Father and Son Who Ate Every Animal Possible
The year is 1813. You’re an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, enrolled in a course on the science of geology…www.atlasobscura.com

Ireland’s ghost roads

The Ghost Roads of Ireland’s Great Famine - JSTOR Daily
Starving families were forced to earn aid by carving roads through rock, fields, and mountainsides.daily.jstor.org

Reading

I was recommended Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep a while back.

My pal’s words were something like, man, you’d love him, a bit grumpy, a bit contrarian, funny AF though, a bit like yourself really.

Really enjoying it, and I’m really not one for biographies at all. And y’know, I kinda slept on the Screaming Trees, they weren’t nearly as big a thing compared to the other grunge bands of the time.

Then again, you wouldn’t really call them grunge. But yeah, reading it and demolishing their discography and Lanegan’s solo stuff too.

Personally, yeah, a lot to identify with the first half of the book so far. The utter, and aching and lonely frustration of growing up somewhere you’ve neither accepted nor wanted, and where that leads to.

The seething anger he felt growing up, Jaysus, been there, still have the t-shirts, and it’s hard to be of a sunny disposition when you’ve been through that ringer. But there’s plenty of humor in there too, and he was a fairly handy writer, could really express himself, and often uses some beautiful turns of phrase.

Anyway, here’s a belter from their Sweet Oblivion album

Once I finish this, I’ll get straight onto the follow-up, Devil in a Coma.

Ohhh, I’m excited….Japan’s best post-rockers Mono have released their new album, I believe their 13th — lucky for some, eh? — Ah, I won’t tolerate a bad word said about Mono. They’re one of the best in the business at what they do. Just an incredibly great band of wonderfully talented musicians.

Was lucky enough to see them once and woah, it was loud. Bone-shaking stuff.

You can listen to the whole album, Snowdrop, on Bandcamp here. And since they have a song called Bells of Ireland on the new release, I obviously had to share that one.

Everyone loves a bit of Canadian indie — well, everyone that’s cool anyway — and Montreal trio Bye Parula have just released their second record, Something Out Of Nothing.

Really digging this, there’s a really cool funk and groove and indie pop-ish feel coming off of them, and you can’t help but bop along to the songs.

You can listen to the whole album on YouTube here. And here’s the title track, I challenge you not to bop along to this:

Have a mighty weekend folks, I hope you’re enjoying the WC. Come on Scotland and Mind Yourself.

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

Or consider becoming a Paid Subscriber here.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

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The word and the water

Last week I wrote about words (I’ll link it at the bottom of the article).

I wrote about wedding vows, courtroom oaths, Peter Kingsley, the British philosopher, powerful men lying through their polished teeth, and the odd human business — isn’t all business human? — of saying sacred things with a half-empty soul and a full audience.

My argument was fairly simple — like meself, eh? Words matter when truth stands behind them. A vow made needs presence, and an oath needs honesty, and a prayer needs attention.

Since writing it, the piece has followed me around like a ghostly, hungry hound with theological concerns.

It’s returned to me on my walks beside the Olza river that divides my town between two countries. It’s come with me on runs, too, while my watch starts bellowing at me, seemingly concerned about my heart rate, like a tiny medical priest trying to exorcise me from inside my wrist.

I’d written about why words matter. But I couldn’t shake another question under it: if words matter deeply, why do they still fall short of reality?

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

The river before the name

There’s a weird thing that happens when you walk beside a river after the rain. You can call it “river,” and the word does its job well enough. Nobody thinks you mean a toaster, a goat, or a county council meeting, though the latter, arguably, does have similar levels of brown turbulence and despair.

Yet the word “river” carries sweet feck all of the actual thing.

It misses the tinge of the rotting flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and derelict carried along by the water, and it omits the sound of the water moving over rocks that have been sitting there in silent judgment since the Ice Age.

There’s a lack of the cold morning air coming off it, there’s no color of the muck, no bike tire tracks through it, and there’s none of the inner mood of this here Irish immigrant bearing witness to it all, and there’s no mention of the wee ducks having the absolute craic while the rest of us pretend to be spiritually advanced.

Word points. Word helps. Word lets me tell you where I was and what I saw.

But I can’t shake the knowledge that the Olza herself keeps exceeding the label, as it just continues to flow beyond the word we use for her, ignoring it even, and just doing the ancient water-work of being itself.

And once you see that, it’s quite maddening because you start seeing it everywhere.

The word “grief” does very little with the thing itself. There’s no way it can carry the heaviness felt in the body, the trivial arguments you keep replaying in your head, the lingering smell of a dead parent’s coat, the first birthday after the funeral, the cup they always used when they called, left unused in the cupboard.

“Love” is even worse, a metaphorical minefield of massive magnitudes.

Those four letters are being asked to carry romance, duty, lust, tenderness, annoyance, forgiveness, shared bills, old jokes, hospital chairs, tender sex, make-up sex, filthy sex, and the heroic act of listening to someone describing last night’s dream for twelve minutes straight when you would rather be devoured by half-starved Bieszczady wolves.

And should we even get started on the edge of madness, you can find yourself precipiced upon when you delve into the meaning of another four-letter word, “self?”

Buddhism and the danger of labels

Buddhist philosophy gives us a helpful way into this without making us wear linen trousers and talk about cacao ceremonies. It speaks of conventional truth and ultimate truth.

At the conventional level, words work. “I’m Paddy Murphy” helps with bank accounts, invoices, dentist appointments, passports, and apologizing to my wife when I have behaved like a complete gobshite for the seventh time today.

Language keeps the world moving. Try raising young lads, paying taxes, or ordering a coffee through pure enlightened silence and see how far you get.

At the ultimate level, things become stranger. The self, in Buddhist thought, has no fixed, permanent essence. What we call “me” is a moving bundle of sensations, memories, impulses, fears, habits, and stories. Useful, yes. Solid, no. Permanent, no. As stable as a lad who’s 12 pints deep carrying soup through a trampoline park.

I’d be of the mind that suffering often begins when we worship the label we’ve stuck on ourselves, allow ourselves to become stuck with, and those we’ve put on others.

The body knows before the mouth speaks

The ideas of the French philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty can give us a dig out here because he reminds us that we meet the world through the body before we turn it into concepts.

We are breathing, sensing, moving eejits long before we become little eejits of vocabulary.

This is obvious when running. The body knows before the mind begins its commentary. Breath shortens. Legs complain like auld Biddys after mass. Sweat falls from everywhere. The chest tightens. Some old animal alarm rises from the ribs and says, Ah, here, lad, are we being chased by a bear, or do you actually enjoy this lunacy?

Then language comes along afterward, wearing a cheap lanyard, and calls it “exercise.” The cheek of it. The lived thing has already happened. The word arrives late, writes a report, and pretends that it chaired the meeting.

The body is often the first philosopher. The mouth arrives later with notes.

Cormac McCarthy and the older mind

Cormac McCarthy, the American novelist, went even deeper into this in his essay “The Kekulé Problem.” He was fascinated by the idea that the unconscious mind may be older than language and may speak in images rather than sentences.

The famous example is Friedrich August Kekulé, the German chemist, who reportedly dreamed of a snake biting its own tail and then understood the ring structure of benzene.

The image came first. The explanation followed. The snake knew before the sentence did.

McCarthy’s fiction often feels like it comes from that older region of the mind. A road. A judge. A child carrying fire. A dead world. A horse. A desert. A boy crossing a border.

His symbols do things that ordinary explanation can’t really manage without sounding like a child trying to describe a Salvador Dali painting.

Wittgenstein and the edge of speech

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-British philosopher, seemed to live on the edge of language.

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he tried to map what language could say clearly. Then he ended with that famous line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

That line can sound severe, like a cross librarian with a fierce migraine. But, at the same time, there’s some fierce mysticism to it. Some things can be shown, or experienced, more truthfully than they can be stated.

Ask anyone who’s had a mystical experience to describe it, and they’ll struggle to put it into words.

And that brings me back to last week’s article. Words need life behind them. Without life behind them, they become performative.

Tolkien and the mercy of story

J. R. R. Tolkien, the British philologist and fantasy writer, gives us another angle.

He understood language as a living force. Middle-earth grew from names, songs, invented tongues, histories, and myths.

Tolkien also understood that language can fail in the face of reality and still help us approach truth through story.

A myth most certainly didn’t happen in the BBC documentary sense. But myths hold psychic truth, moral truth, spiritual truth, the kind of truth that sneaks past the bouncer of rational argument and sits down beside the soul.

Great stories give shape to things we already know but cannot easily say. See also the great Joseph Campbell and his whole monomyth idea on the same subject, and please do spend hours watching YouTube videos on it.

But to put it into a sentence: story is language dreaming with its boots on.

Borges and the danger of false worlds

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, offers a warning for us.

In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” an invented world begins to invade the real one. Ideas become so elaborate and so seductive that ordinary reality starts to bend around them.

In our algorithm-powered world, that feels uncomfortably familiar now.

We find ourselves living our lives among slogans, brands, profiles, categories, bios, and public performances. People say “healing” when they mean image management. They say “truth” when they mean team loyalty. They say “community” when they mean an audience that has signed up to pay a subscription fee each month.

The modern world often feels like Borges, with soft LED backlighting. Words no longer point toward reality. They build a replacement and charge admission.

This happens inside us, too. We inherit words about ourselves and start living inside them. Lazy. Broken. Difficult. Sensitive. Failure. Strong one. Black sheep. Good girl. Bad son. The labels become fixtures in the mind, and for various reasons, we often fall into believing them.

Healing begins when we notice the label and look again at the living thing beneath it.

Returning to the word and the water

So aye, words matter. Of course they do.

The task, I reckon, for what it’s worth, is to use words with both reverence and suspicion. Reverence, because they have power. Suspicion, because they’re simply smaller than what they mean.

On my walks beside the Olza, I keep thinking about this. The river doesn’t give a flying fiddler’s what I call it. It moves, swells, darkens, brightens, takes the rain, carries the leaves, ignores my wee metaphysical crises, and goes on being water.

And maybe that’s the lesson. Use the word. Mean the word. Honor the word. Then look past it, toward the thing itself, doing what it’s always done since before it had a name.

The aforementioned article is available here:

If you enjoyed this and would like to explore these ideas more, I’ve written a book, The 5 Keys Of Confidence. Available here as an eBook or a paperback.

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I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

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Other articles published this week

Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.

Donkeys bring calm to the ward

At Ville-Evrard psychiatric hospital near Paris, five therapy donkeys named Nono, Pitou, Oscar, Manolo, and Malraux are helping patients with anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, loneliness, and other difficulties step outside the hard machinery of hospital life.

The patients walk them, groom them, clean their hooves, sit with them, and sometimes simply receive the ancient sacrament of a good nuzzle, which is not a phrase you will find in many medical textbooks, though perhaps you should.

Staff say patients often return calmer, more open, and more connected, which is no small thing in psychiatric care.

The ancient switches behind speech

Scientists at the University of Iowa have found that a tiny sliver of ancient DNA may have helped make human language possible. These regions, known as HAQERs, act like wee, little volume knobs for genes involved in brain development. Less than 0.1% of the genome, and yet there they are, bossing the whole linguistic parish around like a tiny auntie at a wake.

A wee machine that bottles sunlight

Scientists at Osaka Metropolitan University have built an artificial photosynthesis system that can turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into formic acid, a liquid fuel, without leaning on the usual battery setup.

Instead of having a gang of electronics standing around like cider-up auld lads supervising one young fella digging a hole, the electrolyzer regulates itself, changing its electrical behavior as sunlight rises and falls.

The clever bit is almost poetic: as the sun strengthens, the device warms, its resistance drops, and the current flows more freely.

A cancer vaccine keeps working

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, given with pembrolizumab, helped reduce the risk of melanoma returning or causing death by 49% five years after surgery. In the trial, 68.8% of patients on the combination stayed cancer free, compared with 49.1% on pembrolizumab alone.

The vaccine is made from each patient’s own tumor, then trains the immune system to recognize cancer’s fingerprints if it tries to sneak back in.

Reading

Right, I’m finally on the final stretch of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

The final chapter is all about the writer who, if you remember, the literary critics and boffins were searching for at the beginning of the book. He was a German soldier during WWII and woof, did he see bad stuff…my Kindle says I’ve still got a few hours to go. Man, this book is long. Very good though, except that second chapter, that’d could’ve totally been cut, and it would’ve made zero difference to the book.

Other articles

A nice, and sweary, diagnosis of modern culture’s constipation of mass media.

Gen X Suffers Mainstream Culture Constipation “ PopMatters
In today’s overstuffed, mainstream culture of recycled “art”, nothing old moves and nothing new gets through. It’s…www.popmatters.com

Grief is turned into an archaeological dig into the life of the writer’s father.

Excavating My Dad’s Life
An archaeologist navigates her dad’s passing by using archaeological methods to preserve his office and gain insight…www.sapiens.org

And conservation efforts in Ukraine for the European bison.

Saving Bison as Bombs Fall - bioGraphic
Amid the destruction of war, Ukrainian conservationists remain determined to help a European bison herd persevere.www.biographic.com

Music

ZASKA is the brainchild of Max Zaska, an Irish multi-instrumentalist and producer, where the collective has a rotating cast. That’s pretty much as much as I know about Mr. Zaska, other than he’s from Co. Wicklow, which is only up the road from my home place, but this album made itself known to me, and it’s great.

Proper sunny soul music for the summer, very chill, and some really great grooves and melodies here. Great stuff. Here’s one of my favorites from the album, Nectar, it’s called Play The Game:

The full album Nectar is here on Bandcamp.

I’ve always got to have some post-rock. And Swedish post-rockers Oh Hiroshima are back with their sixth studio album, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter, and I’m a big fan of these lads.

Soaring, introspective, aggressive and in-your-face stuff. Yeah, play this loud, lads, it’s mighty.

Here’s my favourite song from it, Exit Cloud:

And the full album is on Bandcamp here.

That’s it so folks for another week. Enjoy your weekend, Mind Yourself.

I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.

Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski

Subscribe now