Rejecting Isms

I don’t trust rigid ideologies.

I grew up too close to one.

My father believed in his “code” with the certainty of a zealot—a kind of private absolutism that shaped everything around him.

Our household operated under a regime of ruthless restrictions—a one-man autocracy masquerading as good parenting. Though for all of that man’s conviction, his morality never seemed to hold together particularly well—its internal logic becoming increasingly absurd and hypocritical the closer one examined it.

The inconsistencies were endless, ranging from the merely frustrating to the deeply painful. Time and again, he’d demand personal responsibility from everyone else while finding endless excuses for his own behaviour. Or expect us to treat him with extraordinary care and sensitivity whenever life wasn’t going his way—only for no such grace to be extended when it was in fact us who were struggling.

The mans’s double standard knew no bounds—in one particularly upsetting episode, he even extended it to the family’s pets, putting our cat down immediately after it attacked the Border Collie, even though the same dog had mauled both me and my sister on multiple occasions.

The experience was bewildering. Deeply unfair.

And of course, eye-wateringly cruel.

I watched, again and again, as dad struggled to live up to his own principles.

All his contradictions—taken together, they were impossible to miss.

Though they did manage to impress upon me one valuable truth—rigid frameworks don’t survive contact with human nature.

People aren’t consistent enough for them.

Life isn’t always convenient enough to accommodate them.

Sooner or later, strict doctrines collide with reality. And when that happens, believers face a choice. Either relax the rules, follow them through to absurd conclusions—or slyly break them.

Too often they choose the latter two paths.

That’s how people end up doing senseless things in the name of what they believe in. Or deny every moment they violated their own principles.

I saw what dogma can do to a person.

How it narrows their entire world until reality itself becomes an inconvenience.

It convinced me that such modes of thinking don’t work.

Not then, now. Or ever.

Neither Left Nor Right

Those early experiences shaped my political instincts long before I had any real interest in the subject itself.

Growing up around so much unquestioning conviction left me deeply suspicious of people who claimed to possess all the answers.

Whether they wore a suit in Westminster, taught in a lecture hall, or marched beneath a protest banner made little difference to me. I would always recoil at any whiff of absolutism—any hint of pushing a given argument toward one ideological extreme or the other.

As a result, I ended up with a fairly simple instinct, something that never fit neatly into either political camp—give people as much freedom as possible, and help them when they fall.

That was always the balance that made sense to me.

If I filled out quizzes online, they usually placed me somewhere around the liberal centre—the kind of outlook associated with pragmatic capitalism tempered by a strong social safety net. Something close to the Liberal Democrat tradition, I was told.

It never felt like an identity.

Just a rough alignment.

And now even that seems outdated.

A New Age is Upon Us

Because political labels belong to particular eras. Systems arise to solve the problems of their time. When conditions change, those systems quickly lose their relevance.

If you walked through feudal England declaring yourself a Green or a Brexiteer, nobody would know what on earth you were talking about.

The same situation seems to be occurring now.

Technology drives economic change, and economic change drives politics. Every major technological shift reshaping society and forcing new political arrangements into existence.

As we enter another such transition, old categories feel increasingly hollow.

Neoliberalism, social democracy, libertarianism—they belong to a previous phase of development. They were built for a different economic structure and a different technological world.

It’s clear we need something new to take their place.

But as of this moment, all I see around me is nostalgia masquerading as vision.

Old ideologies returning under new banners.

Bolsheviks and fascists.

Dreams of past certainties revived for a different century.

Ideas that failed before being tried again as if history never happened.

None of it feels suited to the world we’re entering.

Politically, I feel homeless.

As if I’m the only one not looking backward. The only one waiting for someone to describe the path ahead—a system that matches the technological age now unfolding around us.

Maybe that system doesn’t exist yet.

Maybe we’re still in the confusion that comes before it.

All the Hallmarks of Mental Illness

Though in all honesty, what worries me most is not the policies themselves but the psychological patterns appearing everywhere.

Black-and-white thinking.

Moral absolutism.

Rampant dehumanisation.

The same habits that characterise unhealthy minds also seem to characterise unhealthy political movements.

Complex problems reduced to simple answers. To hashtags.

Doubt treated as weakness.

Disagreement treated as betrayal.

Fellow citizens treated as subhuman scum.

The irony isn’t lost on me, given my childhood.

I still bear the scars from that brutal experience—both physical and mental.

Only to watch the wider world embrace the very habits that caused them.

So it goes, huh?

A Case for Humility

Don’t get me wrong—like I said, I’m not without principles. I have a loose framework that guides how I think about the world. But I hold those ideas lightly. They’re tools, not commandments.

Because the older I get, the clearer it becomes that certainty is dangerous.

The world’s too complicated for rigid belief systems.

Human beings are too contradictory.

The future, too uncertain.

Maybe the healthiest political position right now is humility—recognising that we’re entering unfamiliar territory and that none of us fully understands what comes next.

For now, that’s where I stand.

Not anchored to an ideology.

Not loyal to a party.

Just sitting here, waiting… for the contours of the new world to come into view.

If this essay got you thinking, then tell me why below. ↓

And if you think it deserves a wider audience, feel free to RESTACK too. ↻

Emerging Faultlines

Can you feel it?

It’s like the ground’s shifting beneath us, isn’t it?

A long, pained rumble.

As we go about our days, we can all sense the foundations of power steadily moving. The old world cracking open while a new one forms in plain sight.

Prices are up, jobs feel less stable. Meanwhile, the news sounds less like reporting and more like the opening act of a Hollywood disaster movie—only this time, there’s no eventual cut to black. No pause, or opportunity to just stretch our arms, get up, and casually walk away from it all.

We may in fact be living through the most pivotal period in centuries—and the scale of the transformation interests me greatly.

Because something historic is underway. A brutal, rapid realignment that seems to be pulling our entire reality apart.

In this post, I want to outline why this moment feels so different—and why the forces now reshaping the world may define the trajectory of this age and beyond.

A Generational Turning

Here’s the simplest way to describe it.

We’re living through a turning.

Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe proposed a theory that societies move through recurring generational cycles. Roughly every eighty to one hundred years, a sequence of four eras reshapes institutions and public attitudes.

Each phase lasts about two decades and produces a different social mood.

First comes a High—institutions are strong and society feels unified after a previous crisis.

Then comes an Awakening—institutions come under attack from cultural and political movements.

Next comes an Unraveling—institutions weaken and individualism flourishes.

Finally comes a Crisis—the old order breaks apart and a new one emerges.

This pattern resembles seasons, as spring begets summer, summer begets autumn and Autumn then brings in that inevitably cold winter.

And so, the cycle begins again.

In all honesty, it’s a bit too neat a theory for me. As far as I can make out, history rarely follows such clockwork regularity. Though it does capture something real in its intuition.

The further we move from the founding moments of a world order, the more people question it. The reasons for its creation fade from memory. Then older, more radical ideas come crawling back through the woodwork.

You can see this happening now.

People are fed up with the current system—and with every new crisis we’ve been forced to endure, that frustration deepens ever more. The mood hardens. The appetite for risk grows. These days, voters are willing to roll the dice in almost every election—in an increasingly reckless manner. To hell with the status quo, they say. To hell with societal norms and historical precedents.

And so, politics has slipped back into something more primal—a clash of stark identities.

The same phenomenon you see play out in the world’s most brutal prisons now echoes across the wider civilisational landscape—people clustering into tighter and tighter identity groups as adversity mounts. Old ethnic, religious and cultural dividing lines sharpening where they were once blurred and porous.

The New Political Divide

In today’s fractured Occident, a nativist movement is winning the battle for hearts and minds. It pushes back against globalisation and mass immigration. It promotes a specific vision of Western heritage—often white and Christian—in place of multiculturalism.

The trend isn’t confined to one country either. Similar movements are gaining ground across the Atlantic and beyond.

But the United States remains the most consequential arena. And when America changes direction, the whole world changes with it.

The End of the Old World Order

The USA is pulling back.

The post–World War II system—built around its leadership, global trade, and international institutions—is beginning to fracture. The unchallenged dominance of a single superpower is giving way to a multipolar world.

Power is spreading outward.

China challenges American influence in Asia. Russia asserts itself regionally. And the rest of the international community pursues independent paths rather than lining up behind a single global leader.

The rules-based order that shaped the late twentieth century is weakening as everyone begins to act increasingly in their own self-interest.

In many regions, the law of the jungle has returned.

If a country has the strength to dominate its own backyard, it often does. Treaties matter less than power now. Norms matter less than leverage.

The consequences of that shift have been truly severe.

Reciprocal tariffs are pushing prices for everyday goods up higher and higher. Job markets are tightening accordingly. All the while, some of the underlying, rhetorical conflicts driving these global tensions are breaking out into open confrontation.

Sixty nations are currently at war.

Sixty.

Countries once closely aligned are now fracturing apart. European generals and politicians are openly talking about reintroducing national conscription. Public services are pushed further to the brink as more and more money is diverted to defence. And in the background, bond markets are sharpening their knives, promising a swift devouring of any government that shows the first sign of fiscal weakness.

Yet even these momentous geopolitical shifts aren’t the most important change happening right now.

Because alongside such drastic, painful social upheaval, something even larger is gathering pace.

A technological watershed.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution differs from previous technological transformations in one crucial way. Speed.

Past revolutions unfolded over generations, with steam power, electricity, and computers reshaping society gradually.

This one accelerates mercilessly.

Artificial intelligence sits at its centre. Machines are no longer limited to repetitive tasks. They can recognise patterns, learn and predict outcomes, and generate new content. Cognitive work—once considered uniquely human—is becoming automatable.

I see it first-hand in my day job, as I apply these savvy tools. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. Skills that once felt hard-earned suddenly feel… exposed.

This isn’t simply a new wave of technology. It’s a total systemic shift.

And such a profound disruption goes well beyond the workplace.

Previous revolutions changed what humans did.

This one may change who we are.

Advances in artificial intelligence and biotechnology blur the line between the digital world, the physical environment, and human consciousness. Questions of privacy, ownership, identity, and even personhood are now being rewritten.

The scale of change that is upon us may be closer to what followed the discovery of fire than what followed the invention of the steam engine.

And because this transformation follows an exponential curve rather than a linear one, the timeline is compressed.

We won’t be granted a century to adapt.

By the end of this decade, daily life could look fundamentally different.

A civilisation unrecognisable from the one we take for granted today.

And yet, for all its scale, the real question is how we choose to navigate it.

Finding a True North

These forces—generational change, geopolitical realignment, technological transformation—will dominate the themes of my work over the next few years.

But I should be clear, I’m not interested in hot takes or ideological crusades. I don’t have a dogmatic bone in my body. My views tend toward the middle, guided by a loose set of principles I try to live by rather than impose on others.

What I care about most is social cohesion—and I find the current ideological extremes deeply unsuited to the age we’re entering.

We urgently need new ways of thinking that match the scale of the transformation underway.

My novels are an attempt to make sense of our current great turning. To find a path forward.

Though for all its uncertainty and disruption, there’s something extraordinary about living through a moment like this.

History rarely moves this fast.

The future rarely feels this open.

It may be a dangerous age.

But, by God, it’s also a remarkable one.

If this essay got you thinking, then tell me why below. ↓

And if you think it deserves a wider audience, feel free to RESTACK too. ↻

The Nature of Perfectionism

I’m trying to get closer to perfection.

Not the everyday kind authors talk about—clean sentences, crisp dialogue, tight structure—but something more distant than that. Something that starts to feel almost divine the longer you chase it—an infinite expression of beauty that quickly recedes every time you reach out, your fingers momentarily tracing its exquisite contours only to slip past again and again.

It’s a curse. A glorious, punishing curse. Where every attempt to refine your work brings you back to nothing again, starting over with another fresh draft, another rewritten sentence, another small correction.

That’s what writing is to me now.

An absurd, punishing loop seemingly without end.

There’s always another pass waiting to be made. Another dreaded revision.

And that’s the strangest part—improvement never seems to eliminate the flaws. It only reveals more of them.

You get close enough to believe you’ve finally cracked it—dangerously close.

An idea almost fully communicated. A dialogue exchange between two characters that feels as real as can be. A glimpse of how our complex, interdependent and fragile world actually functions.

Then, after expelling a deep breath, you lean forward, your eyes narrowing. You take stock—realising right then and there that you’re not finished yet. That something’s not sitting right. That parts are running rough. Misfiring.

So, you dive back in. Only for the whole damn thing to unravel again.

Of course, it had to go this way. Of course.

It always does.

Still, the movement toward the goal is the point.

The work, slowly bending toward something invisible.

And over time the pursuit itself becomes a way of life.

The Long Road

I often think about craftsmen who spend decades mastering a single discipline—the slow accumulation of skill through repetition and refinement. Like Jiro, the sushi master who spent years learning to cook rice before touching any kind of fish or meat.

My own path hasn’t been so different, I suppose.

I spent a few years learning worldbuilding.

A couple of years focusing on plotting, then dialogue.

And now I’m enduring the long stretch where I wait for the prose to finally fall into place.

Each stage is necessary before the next can begin. Looking back, it feels less like a plan and more like a gradual shaping—the work teaching me what needs to come next.

An endless cycle of rewriting, honing. Tightening. Imbued with the fury of its own momentum.

And I have one person to blame for that.

Ten Lashes

For me, it started early.

When I was five years old my father gave me ten lashes with his belt because I couldn’t swim.

I still remember the leather’s sting—its sharp, electric snap against my skin. The flesh feeling like it had practically been split open. A flood of heat spreading across its surface, the slow swelling following as welts began to rise across my arms and backside in angry lines.

After the belt went quiet, a wave of panic struck me—a sharp knot of dread churning in my gut, signalling that my punishment might not be over yet.

I turned my head, my tears running freely. My heart in my throat.

I saw my father standing there, the belt still in his hand.

He just shook his head. Shrugged.

Said he was saving my life. Said he wanted to see me chart the waters properly the next time we went to the local pool.

In a narrow sense, his approach was certainly effective—I did become a better swimmer after that. But the lesson extended far beyond the water.

And my success only encouraged that bitter, broken man to become more and more liberal with the belt’s usage for a myriad of other just causes. A discipline that scarred, hardened and hollowed me.

For effort was now permanently tied to failure.

And failure carried with it dire consequences.

Improvement became a form of self-preservation.

Over time that mentality calcified into something deeper—a drive toward flawlessness that was never entirely voluntary.

The Two Forms of Perfectionism

Psychologists distinguish between two kinds of perfectionism.

Adaptive perfectionism sets high standards but allows flexibility. It pushes people to improve while still accepting that good enough can be just that—enough.

While maladaptive perfectionism works differently. More brutally. The standards are rigid and unattainable. Every flaw becomes evidence of failure. The result is often anxiety, burnout, and endless dissatisfaction.

Take a wild guess which kind I ended up with.

Living with My Demons

So, that’s the worst kind of perfectionism in a nutshell. The one I live with.

As soon as one problem is solved, another suddenly appears.

As soon as one level of competence is reached, the standard rises again.

The goalposts move continuously.

The gap remains.

For a normal person, growth comes from the distance between what they can do and what they want to do. But for the maladaptive perfectionist, that distance never closes. The ideal version of the work always stays just beyond reach.

You never get to sit back and let the success soak into your marrow. Never stop to admire the fruits of your painstaking labour. Just keep scouring, scouring, scouring. Checking every single detail of that freshly completed job to see if you were mistaken—fundamentally wrong in your guiding philosophy. Wrong in a way that means the entire thing needs to be torn apart. That means you need to go back to the drawing board.

In theory, the process could continue on forever.

And in many cases, it does.

Some projects never leave the desk because they’re never finished enough to release.

I know that impulse all too well.

Given unlimited time, I could refine my debut novel indefinitely. There’d always be another improvement waiting to be made.

But time isn’t unlimited.

The world is moving too fast for that now.

The Perfect Loophole

The technological transformations already underway will reshape our culture within the next few years, not decades. If this project waits too long, it may lose much of its relevance. The moment it speaks to may already have passed.

Strangely enough, that pressure has become a welcome kind of liberation.

For once, perfectionism isn’t an option.

The work has to be released before it reaches its final form.

Maybe that’s always true, whether we admit it or not.

Because in the end, perfection belongs somewhere outside the world of finished things. To the infinite.

While books, they belong to time.

And time doesn’t wait.

If this essay got you thinking, then tell me why below. ↓

And if you think it deserves a wider audience, feel free to RESTACK too. ↻

Childhood Aspirations

I’ve always wanted to write—for as long as I can remember.

The impulse being there long before I could understand where it even came from.

The need to imagine. To explore strange new worlds. It was buried deep in my bones—less a choice than a fundamental aspect of my existence.

Though, don’t get me wrong, I was no fool—I knew that as an aspiring author, I’d have my work cut out for me.

That writing would demand a lot of learning.

And discipline.

Still, I didn’t anticipate that the first challenge I faced wouldn’t even be related to the craft.

That it would simply be learning to live inside my own head.

A Mind at War with Itself

For most of my childhood, I knew something wasn’t quite working. Every school assignment felt like a daily battle—as if dragging a sled full of rocks uphill. Every attempt to concentrate dissolving into a swarm of competing thoughts.

I could never really understand how other people managed to move so cleanly from one task to the next while I spent half my life wrestling with my own attention.

Eventually, things became impossible to ignore.

During my final year at university, I went three days without sleep.

Three impossibly long days.

On the eve of my most important exam, things finally came crashing to a head.

As I paced endless circles around my tiny student flat, my thoughts spiralled in kind. It was like trying to hold a dozen conversations simultaneously while somebody kept turning up the volume.

The noise… it became unbearable.

In that moment, all sense of self-control duly deserted me. I shrieked and I shrieked, my fists flying, smashing furniture, punching holes through doors and nearly putting my head through a brick wall.

The hours that followed are hazy.

I remember my neighbours’ faint shouts, my girlfriend arriving in tears. An ambulance being called. Then blue lights. Sedatives.

Nothing.

A few weeks later, I was sat in a psychiatrist’s office, my eyes bloodshot, drifting wearily toward the carpet as a soft-spoken doctor informed me I was suffering from a severe case of Generalised Anxiety Disorder.

I leaned back in my seat, let out a sharp breath—my past suddenly snapping into focus.

The repeated crack of my dad’s belt.

Blood running down my forearms after I’d been savaged by the family dog.

The sound of mechanical doors sliding shut as I stumbled along a train platform sobbing, wondering if my parents were ever coming back.

Memories that had never seemed connected before now formed part of the same story.

And with them came the faint outline of a way forward.

Over the following years, I rebuilt my life through a combination of high-dose SSRIs, real-world experimentation, and stubborn persistence.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the constant background noise I’d lived with since infancy began to recede.

For the first time in my life, I could finally choose where my attention rested.

Feeding the Habit

After graduating from university, I didn’t waste a second, immediately pursuing my childhood dream of writing fiction.

At first, telling stories was simply a hobby I enjoyed.

Then something rather dangerous happened.

In came the first encouraging comment.

Followed by a trickle more.

Nothing crazy. Just the ordinary kinds of praise writers receive if they stick with it long enough.

But at the time the effect was intoxicating, convincing me to spend another thousand hours at the keyboard. To fall headlong into the craft—like a man making up for lost time.

Experimenting across multiple formats and genres.

Hours disappeared without me noticing. Entire weekends evaporated. I’d sit down intending to write for thirty minutes and emerge four hours later wondering where the afternoon had gone.

There were even a few modest successes scattered along the way. A handful of awards in another medium. Some encouraging reviews under another name. Nothing life-changing—just enough to persuade me I wasn’t completely wasting my time.

And enough for writing to take greater precedence over everything else.

Slowly, day by day, almost without my noticing, the rest of my existence began reorganising itself around the craft.

The Life of a Nomad

I turned down promotions that would have doubled my income for the simple reason that they’d have consumed too much time.

I kept paring things back, tightening my belt—finding ever cheaper rentals to lay my head.

I began to shop at outlet stores and pound shops.

Let my clothes and shoes wear thin.

At one point, I spent years sleeping in a friend’s spare room barely large enough for a mattress and my rucksack. Watched mould spread across the walls and ceiling like a slow infection.

Shrugged at the squalor of it all, carried on working on whichever story had captured my imagination at the time.

I kept telling myself this nomadic lifestyle was temporary. That I’d settle down once a book was finished.

Then more years passed.

As did my appetite for the conventional path.

One by one all the traditional markers of respectability drifted down my priority list.

Only writing remained.

By this stage, I was making decisions according to a very simple criterion—would it leave me more time to write, or less?

Whenever the rent crept up or the shifts started swallowing my days, that was it, I moved on.

I always moved on.

Then, two years ago, when the cost of living began to soar, I took my unorthodox approach even further.

I got on a plane and flew to the other side of the world to keep things moving in the desired direction.

Now I work online, making what little I earn last longer.

I check in and out of Airbnbs. Frequenting temporary spaces. Making temporary friends.

Sometimes I fall into strange arrangements with hosts.

They’ve got big houses, big plans. Quite often they need a steady lodger. In some rare cases, it’s not even about the rent at all—just a surfeit of empty rooms and too much silence.

Offers get made. Money gets traded.

I continue honing my craft, staying as long as I’m wanted. As long as I’m needed.

No longer.

The Art of Letting Go

Writing aside, this new existence certainly has its moments.

A catalogue of quiet joys.

Long conversations with strangers who’ve led rich lives.

Plates of unfamiliar food shared across kitchen tables.

Halting conversations in broken Spanish.

Hours spent dancing in some grungy barrio, followed by a peaceful walk home as the sun rises and the birds begin to sing.

All these experiences I might never have stumbled across had I chosen a more conventional road.

Still, it should be said—while my lifestyle has afforded me a great degree of excitement, it hasn’t always been easy.

It’s been lonely at times.

And beneath all the romance of it, after I strip away all the mythology and the justifications—I can’t deny that I’m still running from a few painful things.

Old wounds from another life.

But I’ve learned a great deal along the way.

How to become less attached to the material world, for one.

How to care less about status.

And ego.

In turn, this process has begun to shape how I approach my writing.

Because a strange thing happened somewhere along the way.

Gradually, almost without noticing, I found myself becoming less interested in exploring people’s inner lives.

Characters who once spent pages pouring out their hearts grew much quieter.

Authorial commentary and plot justifications fell silent too—with entire scenes soon left standing on their own.

Before long, I found myself deleting more than I was adding.

Crossing out entire paragraphs.

Removing pages of expository dialogue.

Trusting the reader to make sense of events without me hovering over their shoulder all the time.

The stories felt cleaner afterwards—as if I’d wiped all trace of my fingerprints from their cherished surfaces.

It was a fundamental shake-up in approach.

With the same impulse slowly bleeding out into the rest of my life.

Going With the Flow

I gradually lost my taste for navel gazing.

Stopped documenting what I was doing day to day on social media.

Stopped feeling the urge to explain who I was and what I believed to new acquaintances.

It’s now reached the point where I’m not especially keen on promoting myself. The idea of building a personal brand feels increasingly artificial.

You’ve doubtless already come across the obscured selfies I post on Substack.

And, until today, I haven’t shared much about my private life beyond my interests in media.

With my notes remaining more focused on ideas than people.

It’s ultimately why I write under a pen name too.

Of course, there’s a certain irony to me saying all this.

The fact you’re reading this post is due to me finally stepping out from behind the curtain—the uncomfortable reality being that I need to get my name out there, whether I like it or not.

People buy from people, after all.

But if there’s one thing I’m sure of—it’s that no matter how much promotion this job requires, the deeper satisfaction will always come from the simple practice of writing.

From the act of returning to the page again and again.

Watching something slowly approach the form it was always meant to take.

In my mind, devoting one’s life to such a craft is no kind of loss.

Quite the opposite.

Whether that’s wisdom or simply obsession, I really don’t know.

But, for now, such a path brings me a quiet kind of contentment.

And, given the life I’ve lived—I think that’s honestly more than I could ever reasonably ask for.

If this essay got you thinking, then tell me why below. ↓

And if you think it deserves a wider audience, feel free to RESTACK too. ↻