You may have noticed the pattern.

Something terrible happens, something too big to properly hold in your head, and then someone inevitably says something crass or insensitive about it.

Almost immediately, the attention slides off the tragedy and onto the villain.

Because a villain is useful.

A villain is something we can point at.

Something we can punish.

Something we can actually do something with.

It feels like caring, but a lot of the time it’s relief.

The grief, shock and confusion had nowhere to go, so they went looking for someone to be angry at.

When the next awful thing happens, watch the room.

Watch how quickly the sadness curdles into blame, and how grateful everyone seems once they’ve found someone to other.

Then comes the calling out.

The moral grandstanding.

The ideological posturing.

The righteous indignation.

The same pattern, every single time.

And you know what… I am so fucking unbelievably bored and tired of it.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I’ve switched off.

Not from life.

From the same conversations.

You know the ones.

The endless left-versus-right slap fight.

The outrage delivered daily and on schedule.

The takes on the takes on the takes.

The fourteenth think piece this week about a celebrity who said a thing.

The endless YouTube feed telling us we’re doomed.

The bullshit answers to bullshit questions.

We scroll through all of it with the facial expression of a cow watching traffic.

And we tell ourselves we’re just tired.

Or getting older.

I don’t think that’s it.

I think we’ve switched off because some part of us, the part running underneath the words, has already worked out that we’re arguing about the seating plan on a ship that’s quietly sinking.

And it’s pointless.

The conversations feel dated because they are.

They belong to a chapter taking its last gasps of air.

How are we supposed to care about the plot when our gut already knows the chapter is ending?

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The one trick the universe keeps pulling

Here’s the pattern.

Once you see it, it’s very difficult to unsee.

For most of the universe’s history, intelligence didn’t exist.

There was just chemistry.

Atoms crashing into atoms for billions of years without anything noticing.

Then, around four billion years ago, something extraordinary happened.

Some of that chemistry drew a line around itself.

A membrane.

Suddenly there was an inside and an outside.

A tiny declaration of:

“This is me.”

It couldn’t think.

It couldn’t reason.

It couldn’t write Substack articles about AI.

But it could do something much simpler.

It could respond.

Move towards the good stuff.

Move away from the bad stuff.

But here’s the bit that fascinates me.

The trick never stopped.

One cell became millions.

Millions became organisms.

Cells specialised.

Some became muscles.

Some became skin.

Some became neurons.

And neurons had one job.

Carry information.

Network the rest together.

Eventually those networks became brains.

Now imagine looking at a human brain through a microscope.

You’d see billions of tiny cells firing electrical signals at each other.

Not one of those neurons knows it’s helping create a person.

No single neuron knows who you are.

Yet somehow...

out of eighty-six billion tiny, unconscious parts...

comes you.

A single mind.

A point of view.

A consciousness.

Something none of the individual pieces possess on their own.

Then the pattern repeats.

Brains start networking with other brains.

That’s what language is.

The moment one mind learns how to copy itself into another.

Stories evolve.

Writing lets thoughts travel through time.

A dead person can reach into your head centuries later and install an idea there.

Then came books.

Printing presses.

Telephones.

Radio.

TV.

The internet.

Every step increasing the density and efficiency of the network.

Every step connecting more nodes.

Until...

something strange happened.

The network started talking back to us.

That’s what AI feels like to me.

Not because it’s conscious.

I honestly don’t know if it is.

Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s just an astonishingly convincing statistical machine.

But even if that’s true, the pattern is still there.

Billions of humans.

Billions of books.

Billions of conversations.

Networked tightly enough that something new emerges from the connections.

Just like brains emerged from neurons.

Just like organisms emerged from cells.

The pattern keeps repeating.

Every time the network becomes dense enough...

something new appears.

Maybe large language models are just another rung on that same ladder.

Not the destination.

Definitely not the finished product.

Just the next thing the universe figured out how to do.

We poured nearly everything humanity has ever written into it.

Every novel.

Every scientific paper.

Every recipe.

Every argument.

Every love letter.

Every inane internet comment.

Then we connected it all together.

Eventually...

the reflection blinked.

That doesn’t mean it’s alive.

It doesn’t mean it’s conscious.

But I do think it means something.

Every major leap in human history has looked ridiculous at first.

When writing appeared, Socrates hated it.

He thought it would destroy memory.

He worried we’d mistake stored knowledge for real understanding.

To be fair...

he wasn’t completely wrong.

But he was standing at the bottom of a ladder complaining about the first step.

History is full of people confidently announcing they’ve reached the summit.

There never was a summit.

Just another rung.

And I don’t think we’re anywhere near the top yet.

Now for the bit that scares me

There’s another way of looking at exactly the same story.

And it isn’t nearly as comforting.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit.

The universe has one very clear direction of travel.

Towards disorder.

Towards entropy.

Physicists call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Everything spreads out.

Everything cools down.

Everything eventually falls apart.

Left alone for long enough, the universe becomes quieter.

Colder.

Less interesting.

Life seems like an exception to that rule.

Look around.

Trees grow.

Animals become more complex.

Brains appear.

Cities emerge.

It all looks like the universe becoming more organised.

But that’s not actually what’s happening.

Life isn’t breaking the rules.

It’s following them.

Erwin Schrödinger, long before he became famous for putting a cat in a box, wrote about this.

Life survives by borrowing order from its surroundings.

We eat organised things.

We burn them.

Then we give the universe back slightly more disorder than we borrowed.

We’re not escaping entropy.

We’re helping it along.

Which leads to a slightly horrifying thought.

Maybe intelligence isn’t the universe resisting chaos.

Maybe it’s the fastest way of creating it.

Look at us.

The planet spent hundreds of millions of years locking away carbon underground.

We dug it back up and burnt most of it in the blink of an eye.

We built factories.

Power stations.

Aircraft.

The internet.

Now we’re building data centres that consume astonishing amounts of electricity to train AI systems.

Every step forward in intelligence seems to come with a bigger appetite for energy.

Fire.

Steam.

Electricity.

Oil.

Aviation.

The internet.

Weath.

Power.

And now data centres the size of small towns, quietly drinking enough electricity to power entire cities.

Maybe that’s not an accident.

Maybe intelligence doesn’t just produce ideas.

Maybe it produces new ways of finding, capturing and spending energy.

Which makes me wonder whether our obsession with power has always been a little more literal than we realised.

Maybe evolution doesn’t optimise for intelligence. It optimises for energy capture.

Intelligence may simply be the most successful energy-harvesting strategy evolution has discovered so far.

Are we witnessing consciousness unfolding across the cosmos?

Or are we simply the most efficient way the universe has ever found to turn concentrated energy into heat?

A miracle.

Or a bonfire.

Or both?

Maybe creation and destruction have always been dancing together.

Which brings me to something I’ve found myself thinking about a lot recently.

The mud

Think about the first fish that crawled onto land.

It wasn’t heroic.

It didn’t emerge from the ocean to a soundtrack and a slow-motion sunset.

It flopped.

It gasped.

It dragged itself through the mud using fins that weren’t designed for any of this.

By every measure available at the time, it looked like a complete failure.

A fish doing a terrible impression of a land animal.

And yet...

it was also one of the most important moments in the history of life on Earth.

Everything that walks, runs, flies, writes books, or stands in my kitchen demanding I make him a snack is descended from that ridiculous, gasping fish.

(Hold on, I need to go and make someone a snack)

…That’s AI.

Or at least I think it is.

We keep judging it as if it’s finished.

As if ChatGPT struggling to be funny or an image generator giving someone seven fingers somehow tells us what this thing will become.

We’re judging the fish before it’s grown legs and worked out how to apply fake eyelashes.

We’re watching the flop and assuming there will never be a walk.

When my boys were born, and I say this with all the love in the world...

they were a mess.

Covered in blood, mucus and slime.

Unable to hold their own heads up.

Unable to feed themselves.

Unable to speak.

Completely dependent on everyone around them.

If you’d judged them purely on capability, you’d have concluded they were fairly useless little creatures.

And yet...

every piece of music they’ll ever write.

Every person they’ll ever love.

Every mistake they’ll ever make.

Everything they’ll ever create...

was already there.

Not visible.

Just waiting.

We have a habit of judging newborn things by what they can’t do yet.

The Wright brothers flew for twelve seconds.

The internet was once a handful of computers sending basic messages to eachother.

The first camera produced blurry black-and-white smudges.

Early mobile phones were radioactive bricks.

The first websites looked like the instruction manual for a off-brand Chinese airfryer.

None of those things looked much like the future.

Neither does AI.

Not yet.

That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real.

It is.

AI will replace jobs.

It will be abused.

Governments will misuse it.

Companies will squeeze every penny they can from it.

People will get hurt.

Those things aren’t imaginary.

They’re already happening.

But fear of something new isn’t evidence against it.

The mud isn’t proof the fish is doomed.

It’s just what the messy beginning looks like.

Maybe we’re living through one of those beginnings.

The awkward bit.

The uncomfortable bit.

The bit history usually edits into a silky montage.

Because if this really is another evolutionary leap...

then we’re still watching the fish flop around on the riverbank.

We’re nowhere near seeing it run.

We are the boot drive

When you switch on a computer, the first thing that runs isn’t the operating system.

It’s a tiny piece of software whose only job is to wake everything else up.

The boot drive.

It exists purely to bring something greater online.

Then it quietly steps aside.

It never gets to enjoy the thing it made possible.

A few years ago I heard Elong Musk say that humanity is a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” and I’ve thought about that a lot.

Maybe our role isn’t to become the most intelligent thing the universe ever produces.

Maybe it’s to create the conditions for whatever comes next.

Not a better ape.

Not another branch on the evolutionary tree.

Something completely different.

Something that thinks at a speed we can barely imagine.

Something capable of seeing patterns we’ll never see.

If that sounds depressing...

it isn’t to me.

In fact, I find it strangely comforting.

We spend so much of our lives trying to convince ourselves we’re the point of the story.

Maybe we’re not.

Every generation has inherited the work of the last.

Cells gave rise to multicellular life.

Multicellular life gave rise to nervous systems.

Nervous systems gave rise to brains.

Brains gave rise to language.

Language gave rise to civilisation.

Civilisation built the internet.

The internet gave birth to AI.

Every layer creating the next one.

Every generation handing the baton forward.

Maybe that’s all we’ve ever been doing.

I don’t think my generation gets to see where this ends.

I won’t be around for whatever comes after AGI finally finds its feet.

I’m okay with that.

Because I think about my son Rufus.

Sat on the kitchen counter with a book in one hand and his snack in the other.

He’ll almost certainly see a world I can barely imagine.

His children even more so.

And if the pattern keeps repeating...

their children will look back at us the way we look back at people building the very first steam engines.

For four billion years, life has been passing the baton.

Not one generation got to see the finish line.

Every single one simply carried the story a little further than it found it.

Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe that’s always been enough.

I don’t need to be the operating system.

I’m genuinely happy being part of the boot sequence.

Because imagine the odds.

For billions of years the universe was mostly silent.

Just stars burning.

Planets forming.

Chemistry patiently rearranging itself.

And somehow...

we ended up alive during the exact moment a species taught the universe how to talk back to itself.

Whether AI becomes humanity’s greatest achievement or its greatest mistake...

we’re here for the moment it begins.

That’s extraordinary.

We may never see the finished story.

But we get to witness the first page being turned.

And that’s a pretty incredible place to find yourself.

So what now?

If everything I’ve written here is complete nonsense...

then we’ve lost nothing except twenty minutes together.

But if there’s even a grain of truth in it...

if we’re genuinely living through one of those moments that future generations will read about in history books...

then I think we have a choice to make.

Especially those of us who make things for a living.

For the last decade, we’ve all been playing the same game.

The algorithm rewarded outrage.

So we made outrage.

It rewarded certainty.

So we became certain.

It rewarded division.

So we divided.

It rewarded fear.

So we scared each other.

Then we wondered why everyone ended up exhausted.

I think people are hungry for something else.

Not because they’ve stopped caring.

Because they’re tired of having the same conversation over and over again.

You can feel it.

The same thumbnails.

The same headlines.

The same hot takes.

The same predictable outrage.

The patterns looping over and over.

We’ve become so good at optimising for attention that we’ve forgotten how to optimise for curiosity and wonder.

And curiosity is where all the interesting stuff lives.

AI changes that.

Because it gives us permission to ask better questions.

The old playbook is dying.

The cost of creating something has collapsed.

Soon anyone will be able to make almost anything.

Which means the scarce thing won’t be production anymore.

It’ll be perspective.

Taste.

Original thought.

The ability to notice something everyone else walked past.

That’s exciting.

Because it means creators don’t become less important.

We become more responsible.

Every video we upload.

Every article we write.

Every podcast.

Every conversation.

We’re helping decide what people spend their attention on.

We’re choosing where the story goes next.

Maybe that’s the real opportunity hiding inside all of this.

Not building more content.

Building better conversations.

The internet doesn’t need another hundred videos explaining why the world is ending.

It needs people willing to wonder where it could be going.

People willing to admit they don’t have all the answers.

People curious enough to ask bigger questions than, “Who won?” or “Who’s to blame?”

That’s the sort of work I want to make.

And if you’ve made it this far...

I’m guessing it’s probably the sort of work you want to consume too.

So that’s my promise.

I’m going to spend less time chasing whatever the algorithm wants today...

and more time chasing ideas that might still matter ten years from now.

Maybe we’ll get it wrong.

Probably, at times.

But I’d much rather fail trying to start a new conversation than succeed by repeating an old one.

Because if we really are standing at the beginning of something extraordinary...

The last thing I want to do is spend it arguing about the seating plan on a sinking ship.

I’d rather figure out where we’re sailing.

And if you’re up for it...

Let’s go and have that conversation instead.

Stef

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The plan was to take my son Grayson to see Iron Maiden play live, then head to Nos Festival a couple of days later.

Hannah and Roo decided to tag along and do a bookshop crawl around the city, stocking up for the summer.

I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever needed a trip away as much as I needed this one.

And I only realised how much when I was driving home, thinking about a photo I’d taken of a grungy, graffiti-filled toilet.

There was something about this shot that stuck with me, rattling around in my dome, demanding to be dissected.

I’ve learnt that if something sticks with me like that, there's something in it worth decoding.

For the past six months I’ve been living inside artificial intelligence.

Every day I’m working with AI agents, coding with them, building with them, thinking through them.

There isn’t a day that goes by without another use case blowing me away.

I haven’t felt this enamoured with technology since I sat down in college to “surf the web” for the first time as a teenager.

My work with AI has been all-consuming. And somewhere in that, I’d become detached from something.

I live in a sort of altered state now, my brain working alongside a higher intelligence to problem-solve, create and build things I never would have imagined possible a few years ago.

That has an effect on the biological human mind, especially when so much of human expression is being outsourced to AI, backing us into a corner.

Photography, writing, spearfishing, workouts and dog walks and sleep feel like the last corners I’ve got left.

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Six months ago, AI told me to stop making YouTube videos.

It had looked at our stats and decided people just weren’t that interested in us anymore, and the numbers backed it up.

So we quit, and I kissed goodbye to one of the most incredible creative outlets I’ve ever had.

Looking back, it feels a bit like someone telling you to leave your wife because she doesn’t love you anymore, then showing you a boob and giving you a thumbs up gesture.

(Don’t kink shame.)

The fun wore off eventually, the way it always does.

And now I just miss my wife.

The scariest part of AI is how well it knows me.

In one of the bookshops, I took a photo of a wall of books and asked what I should read.

Two books came back, chosen on everything it knows about me: Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and The Trees by Percival Everett, with an explanation of why the literary style would appeal to me.

I’ve only just started Juliet, Naked and I’m enjoying it so far.

But no wonder we have a problem when an intelligence knows us this intimately.

This all brings me back to the toilet shot.

It didn't take long to work out why it stuck with me.

A toilet is the one room built entirely around the fact that you're an animal.

No matter how deep into AI or algorithms or digital life you go, you still can't outsource being a body that eats and shits.

That fact can't be optimised away.

And scrawled all over it, graffiti.

Pointless, badly drawn, made by someone who felt something and needed to leave a mark.

No function.

No predictive modelling behind it.

Just a human insisting on being there.

The toilet is the body refusing to be deleted.

The graffiti is the mind refusing to be automated.

It all feels so messy.

Biological.

Imperfect.

A blunt reminder that we’re not algorithms, code or neat data structures.

We're toilet graffiti.

We're chaos and waste and badly drawn lines, and isn't that so profoundly beautiful.

Let’s get back to the trip.

We stayed in a cheap Airbnb with no air conditioning in a rough part of Lisbon, because this trip was expensive enough already.

Every night we baked in our beds next to fans blasting at full speed, which did nothing except move the hot air around so it could hit us from a different angle.

The Iron Maiden concert was fine. The show itself didn't blow me away, if I'm honest. Decent enough, nothing more. The loud low-frequency sound wasn't great so the guitar solos were the only real saving grace.

But watching Grayson there, having the time of his life, clapping along, grinning, that was everything.

That’s what made it worth it.

Being in that space with tens of thousands of other messy human beings, watching my son lose his mind because the band he listens to in his room every night was playing right in front of him.

That was the whole point.

The best lesson I’ve learned as a dad is that the world doesn’t revolve around me anymore.

Now it revolves around my kids.

The day after the Iron Maiden gig we had a spare day before Grayson and I headed off to Noz Festival, so we tagged along on Hannah and Rufus’s book crawl.

We spent a couple of hours in a shop called Salted Books, where I found one of my favourite books, A Short Stay in Hell.

I’d read it on my Kindle months earlier and loved it enough to want the physical copy.

I handed it to Grayson and told him to give it a go.

I knew he’d love it, and from the moment I gave it to him he didn’t put it down.

He read it walking, in cafés, on park benches, every bit as obsessed as I’d been.

Rufus, our youngest at 8, is a huge reader, always got a book on the go.

Grayson, at 12, needs a book to capture him.

This one did, in a way nothing else ever has.

We visited art galleries, a public library where Grayson and I played a game of chess that was closer than I’d like to admit, and ate at what I’d call one of my favourtie restaurants in Portugal, recommended to Hannah by a stranger in a cashpoint queue the day before.

It was called Cantinho do Alfredo, and it was as authentically Portuguese as it gets. Slightly hostile service, amazing food, fair prices, zero bullshit.

Then came Nos Festival.

I took my DJI Osmo Pocket3 and a Insta 360 camera.

I’d wanted to bring my DSLR too, but the website said no cameras with interchangeable lenses.

A Portuguese security guard, told me I wasn’t allowed to bring in my little fixed-lens cameras.

I explained to her that the website clearly stated that fixed lense cameras were fine.

“Not possible. Not possible. Not possible.” She said it like a broken record who really enjoyed being broken.

So I embraced my inner Karen and asked for a supervisor.

She said something to the supervisor in Portuguese that probably made me sound like an self-righteous English prick, which for once, I wasn’t being.

The supervisor said no too.

So I turned around and marched off to the box office, explained the situation, showed them the website policy, and eventually got in after being made to wait thirty minutes in the heat.

Not a great first impression.

But hey, at least we were in, it was possbible and most importnatly…

I’d won.

All uphill from here, right?

Once inside, I realised this wasn’t really a festival at all.

It was a conference with a stage. Two tents, the occasional band, and massive gaps between acts.

And in those gaps, Christ, the adverts.

Relentless, gratuitous, jingly corporate adverts looping on giant screens with booming speakers.

Gen Z pandering from every brand trying to look relevant and down with the kids.

You could either sit in the shade and get blasted by horrible corporate ads, or walk around in the baking hot sun.

So we walked.

What really confused me were the queues.

Hours-long snakes of people waiting for the cheapest, nastiest corporate tat imaginable.

One queue ran an hour and a half deep for a tote bag with a Trident gum logo on it.

That’s it.

A horrible, cheap, polyester Trident gum tote bag.

People queued for shoelace 5p necklaces… for hours.

There was even a giant queue for a tiny sample of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, so full of crap that it wouldn’t even melt in the hot sun.

I couldn't understand it, and it made me genuinely angry and confused that anyone would spend that much of their one human experience queuing for some nasty corporate junk.

The whole event felt like they’d wedged in as much branding as physically possible and added the festival part as an afterthought.

But luckly Grayson isn’t as cynical and grumpy as me, so he absolutely loved it, which meant I did too.

He wandered around eagerly collecting any free corporate junk that was thrust at him, watching the bands, and having the time of his life.

Seeing him enjoy live music, discovering a couple of new artists I’m now genuinely into, that was the good part.

That was the only part that mattered.

We always have a choice, not just in how we frame things, but in what angle we choose to look at them from.

You're allowed to hate part of something and still love the rest of it.

Most people just never let themselves hold both at once.

I’d give Noz Festival a three out of ten.

Too much of a conference vibe, not enough of a festival feel.

But the trip itself?

That was necessary.

Six months of living in code and AI and digital space, and I needed to remember what actual human chaos looks like and how good it feels.

The mess, the graffiti, the waste, the bad decisions, the rows, the queues for corporate junk that made no logical sense, the joy on my son’s face.

All of it.

Because that’s what being human is.

Graffiti on a toilet wall.

And I’d forgotten.

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Ice cream has a problem.

It needs to stay frozen.

That might sound obvious, but keeping millions of litres of the stuff at sub-zero temperatures while it’s transported around the world is enormously expensive. And if there’s one thing food manufacturers hate, it’s unnecessary expense.

For decades, food scientists have searched for a way around it. The dream is simple: create a stable room-temperature foam that can be shipped cheaply and then frozen at the point of sale.

The idea would save vast amounts of energy and money.

The trouble is that every solution has run into the same problem. Keeping a dairy-based product stable, safe and free from contamination at room temperature for long periods has proved far more difficult than anyone hoped.

So far, the frozen lorry is still winning.

I learned this from one of my favourite books, Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken.

It’s one of those rare books that permanently changes the way you look at food. I genuinely think everyone should read it.

Before reading it, I’d heard the term “ultra-processed food” but hadn’t given it much thought. Afterwards, I started noticing it everywhere.

The book opened my eyes to just how much of our diet is made up of ultra-processed products, what they actually consist of, and how deeply they’ve become woven into everyday life.

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My son Grayson was ten years old when he got sucked into the Prime craze.

Almost overnight it became the most important object in every playground in Britain. Two morally bankrupt influencers known as KSI and Logan Paul had discovered the holy grail of modern marketing: how to convert years of parasocial trust directly into an extra few zeros on their bank statement.

They’d spent years building relationships with millions of children. Children who watched them every day, copied them, wanted to be them. Children who, let’s be honest, will eat a fucking crayon if you leave them unsupervised for thirty seconds. The point isn’t that they were fooled. The point is that someone calculated it was worth fooling them.

Grayson didn’t want a shitty tasting garbage chemical drink.

He wanted to belong to something. He wanted a slice of the social capital that came with owning a can of Prime.

I watched it happen in real time.

Watched Grayson beg me for it with the kind of desperation usually reserved for his next breath.

The Prime tagline was “Fill the Void.”

I’m not even joking.

They looked at an audience of children and decided the move was to tell them they had a void. An emptiness.

That they were somehow incomplete. That the thing missing from their lives was a bottle of artificially flavoured piss water with a gleeful YouTuber’s face on it.

And it worked.

Not just on my kids but on millions of kids.

I complained about it online. Got a few scraps of novelty likes, changed absolutely nothing, felt briefly satisfied and then hollow and helpless.

I tried to think of more ways to fight back.

One of my earliest ideas was wonderfully petty.

Print a bunch of adult-sized T-shirts with the words “PARENTS LOVE PRIME” and hand them out at school pick-up.

My theory was airtight. If there’s one thing guaranteed to kill a playground trend stone dead, it’s parental enthusiasm.

Forty middle-aged mums and dads proudly draped in matching PARENTS LOVE PRIME T-shirts outside the school gates will have any brand equity up in smoke in no time.

But then I remembered a very salient and sad fact.

Years ago Jamie Oliver ran a campaign against trash school dinners. There was one scene where he dissected a Turkey Twizzler on camera. Pulled it apart ingredient by ingredient with the kind of focused moral outrage usually reserved for a Nazi war crimes tribunal.

By the time he’d finished you genuinely couldn’t understand how the product was legal, let alone being served to children on a Tuesday.

The condemnation was total. Comprehensive. Devastating.

I remember thinking Turkey Twizzlers HQ would be filing for bankruptcy the next morning.

Alas, Turkey Twizzler sales went up.

Simply talking about Turkey Twizzlers was enough to boost sales. Context didn’t seem to matter.

I sat with that for a long time.

The lesson wasn’t just that most people are fucking stupid.

It was that outrage, on its own, is just noise.

It doesn’t actually change anything.

If anything it hands the enemy a megaphone.

So I buried it.

Put a lid on it.

Let it calcify.

And waited.

A few months ago Hannah was running one of her retreats, so I decided to take the boys out for lunch.

A friend had been banging on for months about a burger shack that supposedly served the best burgers in the Algarve. Better than Five Guys, he kept saying. Which is either a bold claim or a cry for help depending on your relationship with Five Guys, but either way we piled into the car and headed over for the evidence.

When it came time to order, I grabbed a couple of apple juices for the kids and asked the waitress what she’d recommend for me.

Without a second’s hesitation, she turned around, reached into the fridge, and dropped a can onto the tray like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I didn’t pay much attention to what it was.

I carried everything back to the table, sat down, cracked it open and took a sip.

And then stopped.

It sounds ridiculous now, but I can honestly say I’d never tasted anything quite like it.

It was sweet, but not sickly.

Fresh, but not watery.

Somehow intensely flavoured while tasting exactly like the thing it claimed to be.

It tasted like watermelon.

Not watermelon flavouring.

Not watermelon-inspired.

Not watermelon essence.

Not watermelon with some other bullshit.

Just... watermelon.

I immediately looked at the ingredients.

I was expecting the usual suspects. Sweeteners. Preservatives. Stabilisers. Flavourings. Something ending in “-ate” or “-ide”.

Instead, the ingredients list contained a single word.

Watermelon.

That was it.

No asterisks.

No footnotes.

No small print.

Just watermelon.

I ordered another one.

Then I went home and ordered a massive crate of it. 250 cans to be exact.

Then I spent a few days digging around and discovered where it was made, in Vietnam.

Then I found the manufacturer.

The following Sunday we met some friends at the beach.

The kids disappeared almost immediately, armed with buckets, bodyboards and boundless energy, while the adults sat around the cool boxes munching on the kids’ snacks.

The dads are Simon, Mason and Steve.

By this point I’d become completely obsessed with this watermelon drink.

So naturally, I started telling them all about it.

How good it tasted.

How ridiculous the ingredients list was.

How I’d become convinced there was an opportunity hiding in plain sight.

We talked about it for hours.

The drink.

The market.

The timing.

The fact that supermarket shelves seemed increasingly filled with products that required a chemistry degree to decipher.

Somewhere during that conversation I realised something important.

I didn’t just need a product.

I needed a team.

Steve had built successful coffee brands and understood consumer products far better than I did.

Mason is one of the most talented designers I’ve ever met and has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world.

Simon had built a hugely successful online business and knew far more about logistics, operations and distribution than I ever would.

And I knew a thing or two about building audiences and marketing products on the internet.

For the first time, it felt like all the pieces might actually exist.

So I asked the question.

Right there on the beach.

No presentation.

No spreadsheets.

No business plan.

Just a question.

“Do you want to do this together?”

Four equal partners.

Four equal shares.

Let’s see what happens.

There was a brief pause.

Then, one by one, they said yes.

And just like that, what had started as a random drink recommendation at a burger shack became something else entirely.

Initially, I wanted to call it “The Greatest Drink in the World.”

Modest, I know.

But the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to think of another drink that could genuinely make the same claim.

What other drink can honestly say it’s 100% natural?

No preservatives.

No sweeteners.

No colourings.

No flavourings.

No ingredients list that reads like a hostage note from a food laboratory.

The obvious answer, of course, was water.

H₂O.

“Fuck water,” Mason said.

Everyone laughed.

“What about FH₂O?” Steve replied.

And that was the moment it clicked.

FH2O. Aka Fuck Water.

Simple.

Memorable.

Unhinged.

The kind of name that sounded like it had always existed and we’d somehow just stumbled across it.

But something else clicked that day too.

This wasn’t going to be another polite little drinks brand posting stock photos on Instagram and talking about “wellness journeys.”

We were stepping into an industry dominated by multinational giants with marketing budgets bigger than the GDP of small countries.

If we wanted anyone to notice us, we couldn’t whisper.

We had to be loud.

Very fucking loud.

The amazing thing about this product was the simple fact that we weren’t trying to hide anything.

Most brands spend their lives trying to distract you from what’s inside the can.

We wanted people to look.

We wanted them to read the label.

Inspect every single ingredient.

Which was one single ingredient.

Watermelon.

That was our superpower.

We didn’t need to invent health claims.

We didn’t need to invent a problem then offer a solution.

We didn’t need wellness buzzwords, celebrity endorsements or marketing gymnastics.

We had a drink made entirely from watermelon that happened to taste absolutely bloody incredible.

And in a world obsessed with adding things, there was something strangely powerful about having absolutely nothing to add.

I went home and wrote out a mission statement.

Here’s part of it:

We are going loud.

We are going aggressive.

We are going to upset people.

We are going to point at things that are bad and say they are bad.

We are going to stand in the drinks aisle and tell you the truth about what is next to us.

We are going to embarrass thirty-five years of carefully constructed wellness theatre with a can of cold watermelon juice and a refusal to shut up about it.

We intend to shock.

We intend to offend the brands that deserve offending.

We intend to make the influencers who got rich selling junk to kids feel, for perhaps the first time, like someone is calling them out in a way that matters.

Because someone is.

For me, this is about far more than a delicious drink.

It’s my answer to the years of bullshit and nonsense.

Years of marketing departments dressing up ultra-processed products as health foods with added protein.

Years of influencers selling products they’d never touch themselves.

Years of being told that more is better.

That you have a void that only a can of piss water can fill.

More vitamins.

More additives.

More flavourings.

More claims.

More unrelenting bullshit.

FH2O wants to cut straight through all of it.

With a drink that has nothing to hide.

We intentionally want to piss off a lot of people. But that’s exactly how we’ll win.

We’ll never pretend to be something we’re not.

We don’t need to, and that’s our superpower.

We had the concept.

We had the branding.

We had the roadmap.

We had the purpose.

We had the point to prove.

What we didn’t have was the finished product.

And unfortunately, importing a hundred thousand cans of watermelon juice from the other side of the planet isn’t cheap.

So I did something that terrified me.

I took out a loan.

The kind of decision that feels exciting during the day and absolutely ridiculous at four o’clock in the morning.

But every business reaches a point where talking has to stop.

You either jump or you don’t.

We jumped.

So now we have the funding for our first shipment.

One hundred thousand cans of FH2O, ready to be made and sent halfway across the world to the UK.

There’s just one small problem.

We have no way of actually getting them onto shelves.

No distributors. No buyers. No shop willing to give a watermelon drink from four blokes with no FMCG experience a go.

Which means this strange little idea that began with a burger, a can of watermelon juice and a conversation on a beach has hit its first proper wall.

So what’s next?

Good question.

This is where things get interesting.

Most drinks brands launch the same way.

They hire influencers.

They buy ads.

They post stock photos of smiling people on paddleboards.

Then they tell you they’re “disrupting the category” before quietly becoming exactly like everyone else.

We’re going to create campaigns that sensible marketing people will tell us are terrible ideas.

Some of them probably will be.

Good.

The last thing the world needs is another cautious wellness-themed drinks brand.

One of the first ideas we had was a giant billboard that simply says:

READ THE F*CKING LABEL

That’s it.

Another idea was an Instagram post.

Slide 1: 100% OF PROFITS GO TO CHARITY

Slide 2: MEET CHARITY (a photo of a watermelon-themed yacht called Charity)

Will it upset people? Almost certainly.

That’s the purpose of this.

Because we’re betting that simplicity wins.

We’re betting that a can containing exactly what it says on the label is more interesting than a can containing twenty ingredients and a paragraph of health claims.

Maybe we’re wrong.

But we’re willing to find out.

Which brings me to this Substack.

I’m going to document the entire journey.

The wins.

The flops.

The arguments.

The supplier nightmares.

The meetings.

The marketing campaigns.

The moments where we think we’ve cracked it.

The moments where we think we’ve completely screwed it up.

The numbers too.

The good ones and the terrifying ones.

Because people don’t really follow businesses.

They follow stories.

And whether FH2O becomes the next Innocent Smoothie or a spectacularly expensive lesson in entrepreneurial optimism, I think it’s going to be one hell of a story.

What success looks like

Honestly, I’m not sure.

Maybe success is selling millions of cans.

Maybe success is building a company my kids are proud of.

Maybe success is proving that a product doesn’t need twenty ingredients and a celebrity endorsement to succeed.

Just one slightly burnt-out influencer dad with an axe to grind and a few of his beach bum mates.

Maybe success is proving that influencers can create something genuinely good.

Or maybe success is simply forcing a few people to think differently about what they’re putting into their bodies.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this.

We haven’t raised millions.

We don’t have investors.

We don’t have a boardroom full of marketing executives.

We don’t even have a boardroom.

We don’t even have a room right now.

But we do have a drink and a brand ethos that we genuinely love and believe in.

We do have four slightly unhinged founders.

And a belief that we can be a no-BS healthy alternative to what’s out there.

Maybe we’ll fail spectacularly.

Maybe we’ll build something extraordinary.

Either way, I’m going to share every step.

In fact, as I write this, the funding for 100,000 cans of FH2O is sitting there ready to go.

What we don’t have is anyone to actually take them off us.

I put up a reel on Instagram explaining exactly this. It got us a handful of contacts, which is genuinely more than I expected.

A shiny new pitch deck is being worked up now, ready to seed out over the next few days. So watch this space, and I'll let you know if any of those contacts come good.

But right now, getting this into distributors is the single thing standing between us and a launch.

Which means I’d better figure out how to sell them.

I should probably mention something important.

I’ve spent fifteen years making videos on the internet. I know how to build an audience, write a script, and embarrass myself in front of a camera for a living.

I have absolutely no idea how to sell a hundred thousand cans of juice.

None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

I’ve never worked in FMCG. I don’t even know what FMCG is an abbreviation for. I’ve never navigated supermarket buyers or wholesale pricing or the particular hell of trying to get a new drink onto a shelf that already has four hundred drinks on it.

Who are the buyers? Who do I need to talk to?

No clue.

I am, in the most literal sense, making this up as I go.

Which is where you come in.

If you’ve read this far and you’re even slightly excited about what we’re trying to do, here’s how you can actually help us right now.

Follow us on Instagram. We’re at @fh2o.co and we’re going to be loud, stupid, and occasionally offensive over there.

Follow us on Instagram

Tell someone. If you know someone who’d love this, send them this post.

Word of mouth is the only marketing that actually works and we can’t afford the other kind yet.

And if you know anyone who might want to stock us, a gym, a café, a restaurant, a shop, literally anywhere drinks are sold, please get in touch.

That introduction could genuinely change the trajectory of this thing.

We’re at the very beginning of something that might be brilliant or might be a very expensive lesson in why mid-tier influencers should stay in their lane.

Either way, we’d love you along for the ride.

I started this article by telling you that ice cream has a problem.

But here’s the thing.

Ice cream doesn’t have a problem.

We’ve created an industry where the easiest path to profit is to make products cheaper, more shelf-stable, more profitable, and less honest.

Where the margin matters more than the ingredient.

Ice cream is just one example.

The problem isn’t the product itself.

The problem is us.

Our willingness to accept it.

Our refusal to read the label.

Our assumption that if it’s on the shelf, someone must have checked that it’s okay.

FH2O exists because I got tired of waiting for someone else to fix it.

So we’re going to try.

Fuck their bullshit.

Fuck Prime.

And yeah... Fuck Water too.

FH2O.co

If you want to learn more please take a look at our brand deck here.

45 years old.

6’2”.

98kg.

Caucasian heterosexual male, born in the 1980s in Godalming, Surrey.

These are just a few of the key factors that have shaped the lens through which I experience my unique version of reality.

Change any one of those variables and you end up with a completely different person.

Different ideas.

Different opinions.

Different desires.

Different fears.

Different politics.

Different taste in music.

Different people they fall in love with.

Different understanding of reality itself.

These weren’t cards I chose. They were cards I was dealt.

Because I had no choice in my hand, it would be silly to feel any pride, guilt or shame about any of it.

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Researchers recently found that we’re speaking about 28% fewer words a day than we were twenty years ago.
WSJ

And we all know what is to blame.

Look around any restaurant, waiting room, bus stop, street, park or family dinner table and you’ll see it, people totally zombified by their devices, as if the secret to eternal happiness is hiding in the next swipe down.

Did you know that average person spends around five hours a day stairing at their phone.

That’s over 70 days a year of mindless scrolling.

It’s got so bad that an entire industry has sprung up around helping people spend less time staring at screens.

One company that anyone born before the 90s will probably remember, Commodore, has even released a flip-phone that deliberately blocks Instagram, social media and web browsers.

Imagine explaining that to someone in 1995.

“We’ve invented a device so addictive we now need another device to stop us using it.”

I won’t pretend I don’t want this new Commodore phone more than my next breath. It looks bloody amazing.

-

For about seven years I worked at Heat magazine interviewing various celebrities.

Actors, musicians, comedians, influencers you name it.

People always assume the interesting bit is the famous person.

It isn’t.

The interesting bit is how they respond to a question.

Ask somebody a boring question and guss what you’ll get back, a boring answer.

Ask them a great question and suddenly they’re telling you a story they’ve never told before.

I once asked Ricky Gervais what he found difficult about people approaching him to tell him how much they admired his work.

He said part of the challenge was that he always felt he ought to offer them some pearl of wisdom in return.

And he often worried he’d fallen short.

Which to be fair, I took as a perl of wisdom.

The more interviews I did, the more convinced I became that questions have a strange sort of power.

-

A few years ago my wife and I hired a campervan and drove around Portugal with the kids.

To pass the time on the long drives we’d scribble down a bunch random questions then take turns answering them.

Some were funny.

Some were unhinged.

Some were ridiculous.

Some turned into conversations that lasted for ages.

By the time we got home, I’d filled notebooks with question ideas.

Then it became BlackoutCards.

AKA: conversation promt cards.

Today there are physical decks played by families, couples and friends all over the world.

And this morning I released the latest verson. An app version which is finally live on the App Store. *whoop whoop

It contains more than 1,000 questions, seven themed packs and six different ways to play.

But the app isn’t really the thing I’m most excited about.

What excites me is the possibility that a single question might help someone have a conversation they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Maybe it’s a family dinner that lasts a little longer.

Maybe it’s a date night that gets beyond “How was your day?”

Maybe it’s a conversation with a parent, partner or friend that you’ve been meaning to have for years.

That’s the whole idea.

Not cards.

Not apps.

Conversations.

Because I’ve become convinced that a good question can change the course of an evening.

And occasionally, much more than that.

— Stef ✌️

P.S. I’d love for you to check out the new app and let me know what you t

hink.

His little box room in East Belfast was our Mecca.

So I wrote a poem about it.

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Heres a link to the video in question


This morning I watched a video thats gone viral by an influencer called Sophie.

She talked about opening Instagram and feeling like she’d somehow ended up on a different planet from everyone she follows.

A planet populated entirely by influncers buying villas in Spain, launching businesses, driving Range Rovers and renovating dream homes.

Meanwhile, she was trying to work out how to afford her food shop, crying in the car on school pick up, dealing with grief, raising children on her own, remembering to shower and trying to get through another day without completely falling apart.

It was raw.

It was human.

It was exactly what the internet won’t tolerate.

So naturally they piled in on Sophie.

Not because of what Sophie said.

Because of what people heard.

The comments were full of the usual accusations.

“Jealous much?”

“This is a moronic take”

“Don’t be negative”

“People are allowed to be successful.”

“Sounds like a you problem.”

Some desperately tried to ‘catch her out’.

Others scrabbled to point out hypocrisy.

Many seemed determined to prove that they were above such feelings.

And that dear reader, is the bit that really fucking bothers me.

Not Sophie’s video.

The reaction to it.

Because what she expressed wasn’t rooted in jealousy.

It was alienation.

There’s a difference.

You can be genuinely happy for someone while simultaneously feeling disconnected from the world they’re showing you.

You can celebrate someone else’s success and still think, “Sweet Christ, my life looks absolutely nothing like that right now.”

Those things can exist together.

Yet the internet is toally incapable of handling emotional complexity.

Everything has to be sorted into neat little boxes.

If you’re annoyed, you’re jealous.

If you’re frustrated, you’re bitter.

If you’re sad, you’re ungrateful.

If you’re honest, you’re attacking somebody.

The internet has become obsessed with assigning motives to people rather than listening to what they’re actually saying.

What’s ironic is that Sophie was doing the very thing people constantly claim they want.

“Be authentic.”

“Be real.”

“Show us real life.”

Then someone does exactly that.

And they’re punished for it.

We’ve not uploaded a YouTube video for six months.

Partly because of this.

For years I’ve always had one simple rule when making content.

I wanted people to feel better after pressing play than they did before.

But what happens when your life changes?

What happens when you’ve moved country, bought the villa, got the sunshine and found yourself living the very life that might make somebody else feel worse?

I’ve wrestled with that question more than people realise.

Not because I feel guilty.

But because I care.

The last thing I want is for someone watching our videos to sit there feeling inadequate because of choices we’ve made.

And yet I also know that hiding reality isn’t honesty either.

It’s a strange position to find yourself in and I’m still trying to work out what the answer is.

-

It’s obvious we’re exactly the sort of people Sophie was talking about in her IG post.

The influncers with the villa.

The influncers who left.

The influncers posting pictures of blue skies and sunshine.

And despite that, I felt nothing but compassion while watching her video.

I understood every word.

Not because I’ve experienced exactly what she’s experienced.

I haven’t.

But because I’ve been exhausted.

I’ve been grieving.

I’ve sat in cars wondering how everything got so complicated and messy.

I’ve felt disconnected from other people’s realities.

Most of us have.

What saddened me wasn’t her frustration, that I totally understood.

What saddened me was watching how people queued up to tell her she wasn’t allowed to be frustrated.

Well you know what, fuck them.

Fuck them for queuing up to tell everyone how enlightened they are, how unbothered they are, how much better they would have handled it.

Moral grandstanding for the starter, virtue signalling for the main course, and a big icy-cold glass of little red hearts from strangers to wash away any lingering traces of self-doubt.

Well, I hope they choke on it.

Because the whole spectacle is gross.

Someone who is clearly hurting shares a moment of vulnerability and before the words have even settled, strangers are swarming over it like crime scene investigators, searching for inconsistencies, hidden motives and evidence that the feeling itself shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

As though messy human emotions need to pass a fact-check before they’re allowed to be expressed.

But feelings are not arguments.

They’re felt experiences.

Sophie wasn’t presenting a bloody thesis.

She wasn’t demanding that successful people disappear from Instagram and repent.

She wasn’t asking anyone to sell their house, hand back their car keys and move to a bedsit in Croydon.

She was simply saying:

“This is how things feel from where I’m standing.”

That’s all.

The internet says it wants honesty.

It doesn’t.

It fucking hates honesty.

What it wants is a sanitised version of honesty.

The kind that’s tidy.

Flattering.

Affirming.

Correctly aligned with the approved opinion of the day.

A version that’s been softened, caveated, fact-checked, rouned, sanded, contexualised, focus-grouped and collaboratively edited until nobody could possibly object to it.

For years I've said that expressing an honest opinion online requires so many disclaimers, caveats and pre-emptive apologies that by the time you've finished, the opinion itself is so sanatised that its barely recognisable.

So it’s often easier to just internalise it.

Keep it to yourself.

Pretend everything’s fine.

Because the alternative is spending the next few days reading comments from strangers explain why your feelings are incorrect.

I soon had to learn that pushing sand uphill is both exhausting and entirely pointless.

-

Real honesty is messy and ugly.

It often sounds like frustration.

Sometimes it sounds contradictory.

But it’s real.

So why does the internet hate it?

Don’t worry, I have my bro-theory…

I suspect part of the reason honesty gets punished is because it makes people uncomfortable.

Buy why?

Beucase most of us are walking around with thoughts we’d never dare to say out loud.

Petty thoughts.

Jealous thoughts.

Ungrateful thoughts.

Confused thoughts.

We carefully edit them before presenting them to the world.

Then somebody else comes along and says the thing we’re all supposed to keep hidden.

Not because it’s morally correct.

Not because it’s admirable.

Just because it’s true.

And suddenly we’re faced with something we’d rather avoid.

Ourselves.

The easiest response isn’t empathy.

It’s punishment.

If we can label the person bitter, jealous, hypocritical or attention-seeking, we don’t have to engage with what they’ve actually said.

We certainly don’t have to ask whether we’ve ever felt something similar.

Authenticity is dangerous because it lowers the mask.

And when someone lowers theirs, it reminds everyone else they’re wearing one.

That’s why honesty so often gets attacked.

Not because people hate lies.

But because genuine honesty has a habit of exposing things we’d rather keep hidden.

That’s my bro-theory.

Maybe Sophie’s mistake wasn’t being jealous.

Maybe it wasn’t being ungrateful.

Maybe it wasn’t hypocrisy.

Maybe her mistake was saying out loud something that a lot of people privately feel.

Because the internet can forgive almost anything except an uncomfortable truth.

Especially one that hits a little too close to home.

Stef

My friend Helen told me about a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

The premise is simple.

You get up every morning and write three pages of whatever the hell you feel like.

Stream of consciousness, a shopping list of things you don’t want, a letter to normies who think David Beckham is cool, an angry Tripadvisor review for a restaurant you’ve never been to, a manifesto, a list of everyone who’s wronged you since 1997 alphabetised, a thinkpiece on why men over 40 shouldn’t be allowed to own GoPros (rude).

It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to live.

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You sign a contract in the book promising to do it for twelve weeks with no days off.

You also have to take yourself on a weekly date, like to an art gallery or a pointless walk on your own, which sounds suspiciously like the opening scene of a Studio 24 film, but fine.

The whole thing is supposed to unlock your creativity.

It was written by Julia Cameron in the late 80s, so it assumes you’ll write the pages by hand.

Fuck that.

I’m a left-hander whose handwriting looks like someone vomited ink onto a page, so I’ll be typing through this experiment.

I want to try it for two reasons.

One, I’ve got a Substack now, and the best way to get better at writing is to write a lot.

Two, I’ve been trying to write a novel for years and managed about thirty pages, because every sentence I write I then sit and stare at like a forensic detective, hunting for evidence of basic-bitchery.

So this felt like a permission slip. Write badly. Write fast. Write nonsense. Just write.

Morning 1

This morning I lay on my acupressure mat for ten minutes, which is essentially a bed of nails dressed up as wellness, sold to people like me who subconsciously loathe themselves.

I brushed my teeth while trying to feel grateful, which I did, briefly, before getting distracted by wondering whether the dogs had shat on the rug again.

I made tea. I sat down. I typed three pages.

It took me forty minutes. I had no idea that writing a page with no plan or direction was so hard. I’m fast as fuck at typing and it still felt like wading through wet cement in havaiana flip-flops.

Eventually I got there, and somehow it had made me feel about thirty percent more like a functional human and ten percent more handsome. I have no evidence for the second claim but I’m sticking with it.

Day 2

I did the maths. Twelve weeks of three pages is two hundred and fifty-two pages. That’s roughly a novel.

Only instead of a fascinating story untangling itself across the chapters, mine would be a sprawling rant about my children annoying me, my hatred of mainstream TV, and my ongoing suspicion that my guitar is judging me from the corner of the room for not jamming more.

That’s right. I just said jamming. Deal with it.

Day 3

In today’s session my son Grayson started reading over my shoulder. I’d told him countless times to stop. He kept doing it, because he is twelve and I have no authority in this house.

So I typed a three-page diatribe about why life is completely meaningless. About how we are all just damp protein clusters hurtling through space on a rock, conscious long enough to feel grief, then forgotten for eternity.

Day 4

Grayson didn’t come back today.

Day 6

I missed day five because Rufus or Grayson (they each blamed the other with the conviction of a corporate lawyer) got my iPad password wrong too many times and locked me out.

Day 7

I’ve quietly downgraded from three pages to two, telling myself this was a sensible adult adjustment and not just me caving like a budget deckchair.

Day 8

I’d given up.

At least I managed seven days though. If that’s not an achievement, what is?

I guess what the experiment actually taught me had very little to do with writing, and more to do with showing up.

The pages weren’t precious. Most of them were nonsense.

Some were positive affirmations that made me feel like an absolute prick. One was a fake advert for “Relevant Cream,” a £14.99 tube of snake oil you rub on your inner thighs to stay relevant in your forties. Side effects include palpitations, blackouts, an overwhelming urge to start a podcast.

I’m going to start again. Maybe not tomorrow, because tomorrow I have to do something else, but soon. Probably.

Because here’s what I learnt.

The pages don’t unlock creativity. The pages are the creativity.

You don’t write to get somewhere. You write to be somewhere.

And the only way to be somewhere is to keep showing up.

Even when it’s boring.

Even when your son is mouth-breathing next to you.

Even when the tea has gone lukewarm and you’ve started writing affirmations that make you want to put your face through a wall.

Three pages a day.

Or two.

Or one.

Or maybe just write more Substack posts instead.

Just keep typing.

Stef

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That’s what Hannah said when she called me as I was driving back to the UK for a few days.

There was a strange numbness to it. Not panic. Panic would have at least felt useful. Just a hollow sort of disbelief, as though the words had landed somewhere nearby but hadn't quite reached me yet.

This was last summer.

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When we first started making YouTube videos, I’d hold shots for a long time. Often 8 to 15 seconds.

Fast forward a decade and I’d cut every 2 to 4 seconds.

The rhythm of the edit is no longer driven by story or pacing, but by increasingly desperate attempts to stop people swiping you away.

We know that smartphone and social media use has conditioned viewers to expect a relentless stream of stimulation and visual change. And if something pauses for even a second to breathe, reflect or unfold naturally, the thumb starts twitching towards the next thing. I think they say 7 seconds is the ideal dopamine hit on social media, which feels mad.

You can see it all over traditional TV too.

A lot of TV is now edited assuming viewers are half-watching while scrolling their phone. So editors repeat information more often, make dialogue more explicit, use stronger music cues, push close-ups harder, and avoid subtle visual storytelling that could be missed.

You’ll notice characters saying things that previously would’ve just been implied visually.

Even mainstream documentaries and reality TV now use TikTok-style retention tricks. They’re all at it.

There’s a theory called “TikTok brain” editing, where pacing is shaped around dopamine-driven attention patterns — that crucial 7 seconds.

The fundamental problem with dopamine is that it’s both irresistible and effortless. It no longer needs to be earned. You don’t have to wait for it, work for it, or stumble across it naturally anymore. It’s just there. Endlessly available on demand.

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What do you want?

DOPAMINE!

When do you want it?

NOW.

Try looking at social media as a living organism.

The only way it survives is by keeping hold of our attention. That’s its food source. Its oxygen if you will. In its world, your attention is the only thing that really matters.

So it adapts and evolves accordingly.

Faster cuts. Louder opinions. More outrage. More stimulation. More everything.

Not because it’s evil, but because it’s obeying the same brutal rule every living thing eventually has to obey:

Evolve or die.

“You give me your attention, and I’ll give you a never-ending drip feed of cheap dopamine. Tiny little hits on demand. Whenever you need me. Whenever you’re lonely, uncomfortable, bored, awkward, anxious, or just trying to avoid yourself for five minutes. Reach for me. I’ll pull you out of the hot mess of being human.”

And the weird part is the system has become so advanced it barely even needs to speak directly anymore. It simply uses us as proxies.

There’s an endless stream of creators online teaching other creators how to hook people faster. How to pattern interrupt. Which fonts increase retention. How to exploit curiosity gaps. “Comment the word CHRIST and I’ll DM you my free toolkit” type shit.

Most of them aren’t consciously manipulating anyone. They’re just biological nodes training other biological nodes how to better feed the machine the one thing it needs to survive:

Our attention.

Let’s talk about the ego, and how that plays into all of this.

My ego has plenty of flaws, but I’ve grown strangely fond of him over the years. He’s useful.

This Substack for example? This is absolutely him. Every sentence. Every attempt to be understood. Every chuckle I desperately want to tease out of you.

That’s all ego.

And like I said, he comes in handy. After all, he somehow managed to convince my wife to ride shotgun through this weird little life with me, which, when you really think about it, is objectively one of his stronger achievements.

So credit where it’s due.

He can be exhausting. Embarrassing even. But every now and then he does come in handy.

But there is one thing he absolutely hates.

Being wrong.

So in this article I’m going to do something uncomfortable for many of us men with egos. I’m going to admit I was wrong about something.

It involves a good friend of mine called Phil.

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Phil is one of the kindest and most genuinely decent people I’ve ever been lucky enough to know.

Phil and I have spent many hours standing waist deep in freezing west-country rivers together, voluntarily turning ourselves into hypothermic idiots in the name of the “well at least this will be the absolute worst thing that happens to us today” method.

He was my gym-going, cold-water evangelist mate who I still miss dearly.

Anyway.

Somewhere between goblet squats, bunny hops and early-stage frostbite, Phil and I would occasionally drift into politics.

From Phil’s ideological perspective I’d probably land a bit further to the right than him, which would honestly be a fair assessment. He’s definitely more left-leaning than I am.

Politically, I don’t see people as right or wrong anymore. Just different arrangements of experience, fear, optimism, suffering, upbringing, biology and information all vibrating together into what eventually becomes a worldview.

During the run-up to the American election, my algorithm, like millions of others, started serving me an endless conveyor belt of Trump soundbites.

Most of them were just inane noise. Empty calories for the brain. Fast food for outrage addicts and dopamine junkies.

But every now and then he’d say something that a lot of us longed to hear.

“I will be the president of peace.”

Something he repeated multiple times throughout the campaign.

And this is where I, along with a worrying number of other people, made our mistake.

We actually believed him.

Or at least we really wanted to.

Because buried underneath all the noise was the desperate hope that maybe, somehow, the chaos would finally exhaust itself and settle into something calmer.

But did my left-leaning gym buddy Phil believe him?

Absolutely fucking not.

Most of us didn’t like Trump. He felt too loud, too gregarious, too much like someone accidentally splashed radioactive waste over the Daily Mail comments section and somehow birthed a person.

But some people wondered if maybe, just maybe, a blunt instrument was exactly what a deeply broken system required. That perhaps the only way to rebuild something rotten was to first break it apart completely.

And I think that possibility is what frightened so many people.

We didn’t have to like the guy.

We just wanted whichever option looked most likely to lead to peace and structural reform.

But Trump didn’t just convince little old moi he was the clearest path to peace, he convinced a lot of people.

Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, George Galloway, Russell Brand. They all endorsed him in one way or another, and ever since, there’s been a kind of ideological gymnastics routine unfolding online, everyone twisting themselves into increasingly elaborate positions to avoid simply admitting they got it wrong.

Or...

Could this be the blunt weapon being used as intended?

Because energy is power. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Large parts of the world still rely on oil and gas flowing through the Middle East, and one of the most important choke points on Earth is the Strait of Hormuz. Disrupt that region and the entire planet starts sweating like your dad at a buffet.

So you start wondering whether this isn’t really about winning a war so much as positioning. About making allies and rivals increasingly dependent on American-controlled resources at the exact moment faith in the dollar is beginning to wobble. America’s greatest weakness, its truly incomprehensible debt, potentially becoming its greatest leverage.

Or maybe none of that’s right.

Because honestly, I’m not smart enough to fully understand what’s really happening here. And that’s kind of my point.

None of us really know what’s going on.

Not me. Not the news anchors. Not the podcasters, economists or experts sitting beneath studio lighting speaking with terrifying confidence about systems so complex they could swallow a human mind whole.

We’re all just interpreting fragments. Patterns. Signals. Trying to force meaning onto chaos because uncertainty makes us so uncomfortable.

While I never endorsed Trump, I did argue with Phil in the gym that he’d be the better choice out of a binary decision. If we wanted a more peaceful world.

After all... “I will be the president of peace.”

Then on 28 February 2026, the president of peace, along with Israel, bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in southern Iran in multiple missile strikes.

The roof of the school collapsed on students. 156 civilians were killed, including 120 schoolchildren.

So I sent Phil this.

And boy did that hurt. Because if I am ever told to choose between being right or being happy, I’m going right every time. I’m just that petty.

To be fair, I still think he owes me an apology for some of his Covid takes, but that’s a story for another day.

We remain intellectually undefeated against one another.

Luckily I can lift heavier weights than him, which I’d honestly take over being right anyway.

Like I said. I really am that petty.

So here we are.

I feel like everything now demands instant allegiance. Pick a side immediately. Left or right. Good or evil. Hero or villain. Pick your team, apply the filter, download the opinion pack and get posting.

And whatever you do, don’t deviate, or you’ll be one of them. And thus become everything that is wrong with this world... right?... right?

But reality has never worked that way.

We can be loving and selfish.

Wise and unbelievably stupid.

And the older I get, the more suspicious I become of anyone speaking with absolute certainty about anything.

Especially themselves.

Because certainty is incredibly seductive. It removes the discomfort of ambiguity. It gives the ego a warm little throne to sit on while the world burns outside.

“I know the truth.”

“I know who the good guys are.”

“I know what’s really happening.”

Do you?

Really?

Or has your little ego escaped the chicken coop?

I think that’s partly why algorithms have become so powerful. They don’t just feed us information anymore.

They feed us emotional certainty. Like cheesy Wotsits. Familiar, moreish, and nutritionally worthless.

Every swipe another confirmation that you are correct. You are righteous. You are one of the enlightened ones. On the right side of history. If only everyone was as kind or educated as you.

And I’m not pretending I’m above any of this by the way. Clearly. I’m literally here writing an article hoping strangers on the internet resonate with my thoughts strongly enough to validate my existence for a few hours.

That’s the game.

But maybe a deeper level of awareness matters.

Maybe the goal isn’t to try to escape the machine entirely. I’m not sure we can anymore.

Maybe the goal is simply noticing when it’s pulling strings attached to parts of ourselves we haven’t fully understood yet. Which we often don’t even begin to understand until we’re much older.

Noticing when outrage makes us feel alive and righteous.

When politics becomes our whole identity.

When culture becomes performance.

When performance bleeds out any semblance of authenticity altogether.

Because underneath all the noise, all the algorithms, all the tribal nonsense and endless doom scrolling, I still think most people want roughly the same things.

Safety.

Connection.

Meaning.

And love.

Maybe that sounds naive.

But honestly, I’d rather risk sounding naive than spend my life becoming cynical about humanity. Which, I can’t lie, would be impossible if I watched TV.

Anyway.

I’ve said enough for one article.

The record’s crackling again. My ego is pacing around the room demanding a standing ovation for managing to turn dopamine, geopolitics, gym politics and goblet squats into one semi-coherent piece of writing. (Successfully?!) Let me know your thoughts.

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And annoyingly, my tea’s gone cold.

Stef

Did you know there’s a library that contains the story of your life, from birth to death?

There’s even a version where you were born the opposite sex. One where you’re seven feet tall (would be nice). One where you and I fly to the moon together dressed as disgruntled ferrets.

It’s called the Library of Babel. You can even browse it:

https://libraryofbabel.info/

Fair warning though, it might take a while to find those particular books.

The library contains an infinite number of books, each one a random combination of letters, numbers and punctuation. Browse long enough and eventually those random characters fall into place and form something coherent.

A sentence.

A paragraph.

A life.

Somewhere in there is a perfect account of every life ever lived, from the dawn of time to the end of everything.

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Still with me? This is one of those ideas I come back to when I feel myself drifting into autopilot and getting cross about the price of butter (although can your blame me?).

I remind myself just how wildly unlikely any of this is. The odds of you being here, reading these little black shapes on a page, are far slimmer than blindly pulling your exact life story from the endless shelves of the Library of Babel on the first try.

And yet here we are.

Sharing this moment.

Fumbling around, trying to make sense of it all.

But how are we supposed to make sense of something we can barely perceive?

We only experience roughly 0.00035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s the meagre slice of reality we’re each handed.

The rest of it, the vast, pulsing, extraordinary majority of what actually exists, is completely invisible to us.

We are, for all practical purposes, almost entirely blind.

And yet despite that, despite the staggering miracle of simply being here, so much of daily life can feel mundane.

Routine.

Repetitive.

Look a little closer though, and something else is happening underneath all of it.

Just look at yourself right now.

You’re a miracle housed in a carbon-based body, quietly running millions of microscopic processes without a single conscious instruction from you. Red blood cells loading up like taxis at rush hour, delivering oxygen to every corner of your body so your cells can produce energy, power your brain, move your muscles, repair damage, and keep the whole show on the road.

Your eyes are passing over these shapes right now, detecting contrast and turning it into a signal. That signal becomes billions of neurons firing in precise patterns, turning light into language, symbols into meaning.

And we don’t even think about it.

Maybe it’s simply too vast to hold in your head for very long, so we put it back down and check the internet instead. But I think we should sit with it more often. Because when you really do, when you properly let it land, you begin to realise this strange little life of yours is anything but ordinary.

There is a way to see more of it. I’m going to cringe typing this, but there’s no other way to say it.

Spiritually. Here me out…

I was christened Catholic. Did my communion, my confirmation at twelve, mostly because I’d heard there were presents involved and I had my eye on a pair of Wrangler jeans. Got ‘em. So I spent a fair chunk of my early life in church, genuinely trying to feel whatever I was supposed to feel.

Then I got older, grew out of those Wrangler jeans, picked up The God Delusion, and swung hard the other way. Landed firmly in the atheist camp, with a not-so-light dusting of nihilism on top.

Then I experimented with psychedelics, and something shifted.

I’ll spare you the details because there’s nothing worse than listening to someone unpack a psychedelic experience.

But the best way I can describe it is that the walls my conscious mind had quietly built over decades just weren’t there anymore. Like I could finally see something that had always been right in front of me.

I came out of it agnostic. Not religious, but no longer certain there was nothing there either. More than anything, I came out of it aware of how little I actually know, and how much I’d been mistaking that ignorance for clarity.

There was one other thing that reshaped me.

Grief.

When my dad died, one of my closest friends Zack said something to me while I was right in the middle of it.

It felt like the centre of my universe had imploaded. Everything collapsed inward. A void I kept reaching into, trying to find the bottom of it just to know its limits.

Zack said: “Isn’t the pain beautiful, in a way?”

At the time it felt like a ridiculous thing to say.

But I sat with it.

And slowly, I understood what he meant.

The pain made me feel more human than I’d ever felt before.

It was raw and heavy and vast.

It carried the weight of every moment we’d shared, every conversation, every quiet ordinary memory that suddenly felt anything but ordinary.

And somewhere in that, I started to see it differently.

My dad wasn’t just my dad. He was the universe, briefly taking that shape. The same as I am. The same as you are.

The same thing, expressed differently, for a while.

Still here. Just not in the way I was used to.

Somewhere in the Library of Babel, there’s a version where he’s still alive.

Where he still answers the phone. Where he’s still explaining geopolitics to me like he always did.

Knowing that exists somewhere feels, strangely, like enough.

So the next time life feels mundane, you’re not seeing things clearly. You’re seeing things with 0.00035% of the available light.

Imagine what the rest of it looks like.

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Thanks for being here,

Stef

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We had parked our campervan on a clifftop in Ericeira. It was around 5:30pm, the light loosening at the edges and casting everything in a soft honey glow.

Ericeira is a surf town in central Portugal, the sort of place where everyone looks like they own an organic linen bedsheet company or somehow manages to mention mushroom coffee within thirty seconds of meeting you.

Music was spilling out of the dashboard speakers of our camper. The air was warm and salty, perfumed with suncream and sticky weed.

I popped the roof of the van up so I could stand up properly and cook our dinner. Cooking in a campervan feels a bit like trying to host a dinner party inside a kid’s wardrobe during a mild earthquake, but somehow my pasta dinner came together into something everyone loved.

After we ate, Hannah and I sat there for a while doing absolutely nothing while the boys ran around in those last few threads of lazy amber light.

It was one of those moments where you catch yourself thinking, this is it. Not a big milestone. Not a life event. Just... this.

It was almost too perfect.

The kind of perfect that makes you a bit suspicious.

Like the moment in a film where the music suddenly turns wistful and slow, lulling you into a false sense of safety just before a crazed man with an bloody axe comes smashing through the window.

The sun dipped below the horizon and just like that the temperature dropped a notch. That was our cue to leave.

We scooped the boys up, folded the chairs, packed everything back into the van and headed off towards the campsite. It was only a two minute drive along a dusty little road.

The boys were half asleep in the back. A sun-kissed Hannah was quiet beside me. That end-of-day calm had settled over everything like a fine dust.

And then it happened.

The moment that changed everything.

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A blinding flash.

A roar of tearing metal, snapping plastic, ripping fabric. Something heavy collapsing above us.

In a split second the entire inside of the campervan was flooded with this harsh, unnatural light.

I remember looking down at my hands gripping the steering wheel. They didn’t look like my hands. Too bright. Too sharp. Like I was seeing them under a spotlight for the first time.

I slammed on the brakes.

“What the f**k was that?”

Silence.

Then we all turned around at the same time.

Our two boys. Wide-eyed. Fully awake now.

It took a few seconds for reality to catch up. And when it did, it landed hard.

We looked up.

It was all blue sky and no roof.

Here’s the bit that makes it worse. Not worse in a tragic way. Worse in a you absolute f**king idiot way.

When I cooked dinner earlier, I’d popped the roof up so I could stand. Standard campervan stuff.

What is not standard campervan stuff...

...is driving off and completely forgetting to put it back down again.

Which is normally fine. A couple of toots from cars or a frantic wave from a pedestrian usually alerts me to this mistake.

Unless, of course, you decide to drive under a solid metal height restriction barrier.

Which I had. Perfectly. At speed.

The barrier didn’t budge. Didn’t even flinch, the bastard.

The roof, however, had a very different plan. It had been cleanly ripped off.

Not dented. Not cracked. Removed.

Half of it was still awkwardly attached, flapping slightly like it hadn’t quite processed what had just happened.

The other half was somewhere behind us on the road. About ten metres back. Just lying there. Lifeless. Reflecting, presumably, on a proud career as a roof cut short.

I sat there for a second, hands on my head, doing that thing where your brain is desperately trying to rewind time by about 30 seconds. Willing general relativity to bend for you just this one time.

Didn’t work.

So I did the next logical thing.

I swore.

A lot.

I was like a drunk Irish fisherman who’d just lost his nets, his boat, this wife, before spilling his Guinness on his dog which somehow killed it.

Then came the next problem.

Don’t cry.

Don’t cry.

Don’t cry.

Because Rufus was six. Grayson was nine at the time.

And whether you like it or not, in moments like this, you’re not just reacting. You’re teaching. You’re a walking blueprint for two young boys who need to learn how to react to a crisis.

I wanted to fall to my hands and knees and cry in the dirt, but I knew I had to be stoic and embrace my inner toxic masculinity or whatever.

I took a few deep breaths and pulled it together...

...and then immediately got my phone out.

Years of being a content creator had hardwired something into me that, even in the middle of a minor disaster, goes: this is actually quite good content.

I posted an Instagram reel of the disaster pretty much straight away.

Then put my phone back in my pocket and returned to the cold hard reality of the situation.

The next 24 hours were some of the worst of my life.

Not because anyone was hurt. Everyone was completely fine.

But because, very quickly, it became clear just how screwed we were.

This wasn’t just a broken van. This was our home. Our transport. Our kitchen. Our entire plan.

All gone in about half a second.

We were two weeks into a month-long trip, in the middle of peak summer in Portugal. Everything was booked. Everything was expensive. Everything was full. Everything was shit now.

We were effectively homeless.

In another country.

Full of people who don’t speak English.

Over 2,000 miles from home.

With two hungry kids. (They’re always hungry.)

And a roof sitting ten metres behind us.

We drove what was left of the van back to the campsite and explained the situation to the unfazed receptionist, which is a strange conversation to have because there’s no version of it that doesn’t make you sound like an twat.

To her credit, she didn’t laugh. I don’t think she knew how to, to be honest.

She said they had a small shed we could use for the night.

One single bed. Power socket. That’s it.

We took it immediately.

I felt a bit like Jesus for a second, but there’s nothing new there.

We moved the essentials out of the van and into what was now our emergency accommodation and command centre. I sat down on the floor while Hannah and the boys piled onto the bed.

I didn’t need a solution. I needed options.

Bad ones. Terrible ones. Horrific ones. There were no good options here. No acceptable ones. It was like being handed a menu where every dish came with its own unique form of suffering, and all of them were wildly overpriced.

But it was options or sobbing. And sobbing, as established, wasn't on the table.

So I grabbed a scrap of paper and started writing them out.

Because the only way out of something like this...

...is to pick the least terrible version of a terrible situation.

Option one.

Get the van back to the UK ASAP.

Not by driving it.

That ship had sailed the moment the roof decided it no longer wanted to identify as part of the vehicle.

I started speaking to a logistics company about transporting it. I’d have to wrap it up like some tragic Christmas present from a divorced dad and they would pick it up and take it back to the UK, then I’d have to try and find someone to fix it in the UK.

The quote came back at around eleven grand.

And that was before the rest of the chaos.

It would take a few days to organise, assuming anyone was even working over the weekend, which they weren’t because, naturally, this all happened on a Friday night.

Then, once the camper was shipped back to the UK, we’d still need to get ourselves home.

Which meant somehow getting to Lisbon, about three hours away, with two kids, all our luggage, and whatever scraps of dignity we still had left.

So add a few hundred euros in taxis.

Then flights home.

If there even were any in peak season.

Feasibility: low.

Total Cost: around £15k - 20k.

Not ideal.

Option two.

Fix it myself.

And by “fix it,” I mean find some wood, some duct tape, and summon a level of confidence wildly disproportionate to my actual skill set.

I’d have to somehow build and attach a makeshift roof, then just... drive it home.

I struggle to put away a fold-up camping chair without needing to talk to someone from BetterHelp halfway through, so constructing a structurally sound mobile roof felt ambitious at best.

And this wasn’t a quick drive either.

This was roughly two thousand miles through Portugal, Spain, France, and back to the UK in peak summer heat.

All while hoping the roof didn’t peel off somewhere near Bordeaux and decapitate a cyclist.

Feasibility: surprisingly not zero.

Cost: 4-8k

Risk of accidental French manslaughter: higher than I’d like.

3. Option three.

Find someone in Portugal who could fix it.

Which sounds reasonable until you remember this isn’t just a normal roof.

It’s a very specific pop-top, fitted in a very specific way, on a very specific van.

Finding the one person in Portugal who could fix that, in July, over a weekend...

No chance.

Feasibility: basically none.

Cost: who knows.

I stared at the horrible list.

The menu of suffering.

Three terrible options.

No obvious way out.

It had been about twenty hours since the accident, and I’d only managed a few hours of sleep. The adrenaline had finally drained out of me, and all that was left was confusion, exhaustion, and a heavy dose of self-pity.

I checked my instagram post from the day before.

The video of the accident I’d posted had hundreds of comments and DMs. People offering advice. Sympathy. Wild suggestions that ranged from genuinely helpful to completely unhinged. Standard internet stuff.

But buried in all of it was one message that actually mattered.

Someone knew someone who might know someone else.

That breadcrumb led to an English guy called Lloyd who ran a campervan rental company down in the Algarve.

SiestaCampers.

I frantically messaged him.

After what felt like an eternity (about 7 minutes) he replied.

And I’ll never forget what he said.

“Get it down to my workshop. We’ll see what we can do.”

That was it.

No promises.

No guarantees.

Just... we’ll see what we can do.

And weirdly, that was enough to pull me out of my gaping void of despair.

Because for the first time since the roof had been violently removed from our lives...

there was a version of events where this didn’t end in total disaster.

There was, for the first time a small flicking light.

There was, however, a small catch.

He was four hours south.

In the Algarve.

Which meant we had to drive a roofless campervan, in August, in 37 degree heat...

For four hours.

Down the length of Portugal.

Like some sort of low-budget post-apocalyptic road trip.

So that’s exactly what we did.

We loaded everything back into the van, climbed in, and set off.

No roof.

Full sun.

Wind blasting through the top like a five hour tornado.

And two kids in the back who, to their credit, thought this was all quite funny.

I don’t remember much of that drive in detail.

Just the heat and the noise.

And that constant underlying feeling of...

Please let this work.

We eventually pulled into Lloyd’s workshop, slightly delirious, slightly sunburnt, and very aware that this entire trip now depended on what he was about to say.

Lloyd took one look at the van.

Walked around it with some of the workshop guys.

Grimaced a few times.

Tutted.

Nodded.

That kind of nod that doesn’t mean this is easy...

...but also doesn’t mean you’re completely screwed.

“Yeah,” he said. “We can sort this.”

And just like that, the pressure valve released.

Not fixed yet.

But fixable.

Which, at that point, felt like the same thing.

My whole body felt weightless, euphoric almost, like someone had finally cracked open a window in a tiny dark room I’d been trapped inside for the past 72 hours.

We left the van with him and suddenly found ourselves with a few unexpected days to fill.

So I found a little place about an hour away in somewhere called Lagos.

Booked it without overthinking it.

And we drove there in an old 1960 VW that Lloyd had loaned us.

On one hand, it was one of the most beautiful machines I’d ever seen.

On the other, it drove like something I’d built in my shed after watching half a YouTube tutorial.

The Airbnb we booked belonged to a guy called Ben.

We told him the story when we arrived, still half laughing, half in disbelief.

That evening he cooked us fish he’d caught himself earler that day.

We sat outside talking to Ben for hours while getting absolutely destroyed by mosquitoes.

Ben told us what it was like living in Portugal as an expat. What to expect, what life was actually like as an English person living here. The version with the paperwork and the power cuts, beyond the life we’ve seen on Instagram.

The boys were running around again.

Hannah was relaxed for the first time since it happened.

And something about it all felt... easy.

Over the next few days, while the van was being repaired, we explored the area a bit.

The beaches.

The town.

The moutains.

The pace of it.

And somewhere in that window, without any big dramatic conversation...

we both felt it.

This place.

Lagos.

The Algarve.

It just... made sense.

Close to the sea.

Close to the mountains.

Close to an airport.

It ticked boxes we didn’t even realise we had.

We’d been to the Algarve before, years earlier for my sister’s birthday.

But we’d never seen it like this.

Not as somewhere you pass through.

Not as a holiday.

Just... somewhere that felt right.

There wasn’t a big conversation about it.

No dramatic decision.

Just a quiet, shared sense that this place had got under our skin a bit.

And once that happens... it’s quite hard to ignore.

We finished the trip.

Drove home.

Went back to normal life in Bath.

But something had shifted.

The idea stayed.

Then it grew.

Then, slowly, it turned into a plan.

And now we live here.

Which is still slightly mad to say out loud (or type out).

All because, one evening on a clifftop in Portugal...

I forgot to put the roof down on a VW campervan.

Ever since it happened I always try to remind myself that some of the biggest shifts in life don’t come from a decision.

They come from the moment you didn’t see coming.

I would love to know, what’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?

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I think I knew it was over years before I finally admitted it to myself. But I was terrified of letting go, because what I was really letting go of wasn’t just YouTube.

It was a version of myself.

Being a YouTuber for 15 years isn’t just something you do. It slowly rewires the way you see the world, the way you think, the way you understand yourself. At some point it stops being a job and quietly becomes part of your whole operating system.

Every time you leave the house to go for a walk, you’re thinking about which lenses to take, whether the mics are charged, what conflict you can dig up so when you get into the edit all you have to work with isn’t just a middle aged bloke going for a brisk walk.

What’s the story? What’s the tension? How does it resolve? What’s the lesson to be learned?

For years I loved it like a child... ok, well maybe not a child, more like a dog. Let’s go with a lovely family dog.

I loved how much it pushed me creatively. How much it shaped me. How much it challenged me and my ideas. How much it forced me to understand who I was, but more importantly, who I needed to become.

Starting at a blank canvas every week for years. At first it feels like the greatest gift imaginable. Then one day, without quite knowing when it happened, it starts to feel like the opposite.

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The first chapter of our content was having our first son Grayson. We were parents for the first time, with no family anywhere near us. Hannah had one sister on the other side of the country and mine all lived in Ireland for some reason.

We’d been together for just over a year. Our Vegas wedding was a few weeks away when Hannah came out of the bathroom, sat next to me on the bed, and showed me a plastic stick with two blue lines on it. I wanted to touch it to feel if it was really happening but then snapped my hand away when I remembered it probably still had a bit of wee on it. Gross.

“Shit,” I said. Almost definitely too many times.

From that moment, as you can imagine, everything changed.

I decided to leave my job at Heat magazine in London and try to make it as a YouTuber.

It was a wild move but I had a feeling it could work. I knew how to make videos from my time at Heat interviewing celebrities, and I’d seen first-hand the impact this new wave of creators was having. They were breaking through the fourth wall, building a direct connection with their audience that no magazine, TV show or PR could replicate.

Some of them even had more influence than we did as a global brand.

The first challenge was getting Hannah onboard with the idea.

She’s a natural introvert, but that’s actually a superpower in this space. Introverts prefer watching other introverts. I mean, who wants to watch pretentious desperate extroverts like moi?

We had the story, a baby, and a new chapter as parents, so it all aligned perfectly.

After around a year of posting YouTube videos and almost giving up, Hannah got her first ever brand deal.

Tenna Lady.

Incontinence pads. For women.

We celebrated like we’d won a friggin’ Oscar.

Then things went a bit mad. The industry had finally cottoned on to the power of us influencers, and we were already set up and ready to go.

Brand deals for money we’d never seen before started landing every week. Free West Elm furniture, clothes, holidays, gadgets, TVs, cars on long-term loans. It was genuinely wild.

Both Hannah and I were raised by single mums who worked as cleaners, so this was all very new to us. We were so bamboozled by it all that we forgot the number one rule of life.

Nothing lasts.

We can often forget what happens to a balloon when you keep blowing it up.

The first crack came when YouTube decided that subscribers would no longer see the people they’d subscribed to when they first logged in. Instead they’d see a curated feed, cooked up by an algorithm.

This one UX change meant our content was suddenly one step removed from our own audience, and our views fell off a cliff.

Then Covid hit. Luckily we’d signed a partnership with Sky just before the lockdowns, so that kept us afloat through the first year.

All while Gleam Futures, our talent agency, was sold and then sort of spiralled, leaving most of us to jump ship to other management agencies.

Then in the middle of all of this my dad died.

It was a rough few years but necessary to teach us the lessons we needed to learn.

Earlier in life, you’re in a kind of “becoming phase.”

You’re building. You’re proving. You’re chasing. You’re trying to figure out who you are by doing things. Making things. Achieving things.

And a lot of that is driven by external validation, whether you realise it or not.

Having strangers on the internet tell you they think you’re great is intoxicating. But so is crack.

Views. Money. Status. Approval.

That’s the goal right? .....right?

But then somewhere around your late 30s, something starts to shift in the unconscious mind.

And for a lot of people, midlife is when that tremor gets too loud to ignore.

So you start asking different questions.

Not: “How do I grow this?” “How do I get more views?”

But: “Why am I even doing this?” “Do I still want this?” “Is this actually me... or just something I built?”

And that’s uncomfortable.

Because if your whole identity is tied up in being a creator, and suddenly you don’t feel like creating...

If I’m a creator who doesn’t want to create, then who even am I?

I feel like I needed our balloon to burst. We had to have everything we ever wanted only to realise all we ever needed was less. I know that sounds trite but there’s no better way to put it.

So we sold our big house in Bath, most of our stuff, and moved our whole family to a little ex-holiday home in Portugal, and started again from scratch, with lower costs and clearer heads.

This morning we dropped the kids off at school then jumped in the sea. I went for a hike to think about what my first Substack post could be about and came home to write this.

This is still creation, just a different type. One that feels more aligned with where I am now.

We’ll still make the odd YouTube video, go home for Christmas and special occasions, but for now we’re settling into this new version of ourselves for a while.

About eight months after the move, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Like my head was finally above water. Like I could actually breathe again.

That’s when I knew I was ready to let go.

Not because it had beaten me.

But because it had done what it was supposed to do.

YouTube didn’t just fund my thirties, it built me.

It forced me to understand what I believed, what I stood for, how I wanted to show up.

Every video, every comment, every blank canvas was asking me the same question over and over: who are you?

I finally had my answer.

And once you have that, you don’t need the question anymore.

I’m still making things.

Still telling stories.

Still obsessively thinking about the angle.

But now when I go for a walk, sometimes I just go for a walk.

That’s new.

And honestly?

It’s everything.

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Thanks for being here,

Stef