Since a few of those terms (a) need a lot of unpacking and (b) still don’t give you any clear idea about what this thing is about - let’s take a really big step back.

This is, at its heart, a science newsletter. It’s driven by the discoveries and the research into the ways we perceive the world, all the things that get in the way (inside & outside of our minds), and the amazing benefits for your health, your mood and your ability to think clearly - for truly, there are amazing benefits - that come from living a life more curiously, as suggested by all the current research.

That’s the theoretical side, of which there’s plenty of. But it’s also about the act of curiosity: the wonder and awe that results from opening your eyes to everything that’s out there, including the things you had no idea about. It’s simultaneously a how-to-do-fun-stuff and a WOW I NEVER KNEW THAT newsletter.

(And regarding that fun - it’s also about the value of doing things on a seemingly pointless whim! This is a great way to work around what I call the tyranny of usefulness - where the value of doing a thing has to be rationally quantified in advance in order to make it a socially acceptable endeavour. That’s a way of thinking that hurls serendipity and spontaneity and all the subtle gifts of uncertainty right out the window - and it kills your curiosity dead, because if you think you know exactly what you’ll find along the way, well, why bother doing it?)

One of the things I do here is to go explore how little I actually know about the world, to search of a good source of those “wow!” moments that make you feel more wide-eyed and hopeful about everything - and to try to uncover, for both of us, things that we both never knew we didn’t know.

(I’ll also give you a few challenges, so you can propel yourself in search of your own moments of revelation and awe. If you want to, obviously! But I promise they’ll be fun - or at least mildly diverting. All the science says so.)

"I’ve been happily rootling through the archives of Mike Sowden’s Everything Is Amazing, a truly excellent newsletter...it delves deep into topics that inspire wonder and curiosity- and this season, it’s focusing on colour."

- Katherine May, author of the Sunday Times & New York Times bestseller “Wintering,” the just-published “Enchantment,” and the popular newsletter The Clearing.

If you’re still unclear about what this is and why you’re reading this, check out the About page, which may not bring the clarity you need, but there are some soothing photos of some places I’ve been, which I’m told are quite calming.

At the time of writing, there are six seasons of this newsletter - covering four years, so far - and it’s getting a bit difficult to know where to point you first.

You could work your way through each season, using the headings in the centre-top menu on the homepage - and I’d be thrilled if you did that!

But this page (when it’s finished) will be a short-cut to the really good stuff, plus a few suggestions on lots of interesting things to read, around the topic of scientific curiosity, awe, wonder and everything I’m mentioning as I go along.

Hope it helps / that’s you warned.

“Everybody needs to subscribe [to] Everything Is Amazing. We need to be reminded now, more than ever, how much there is in the universe to be in awe of."

- Mary L. Trump, psychologist, bestselling author of “Too Much & Never Enough” and “Who Could Ever Love You” and newsletter writer of The Good In Us.

THERE’S ALSO MUCH MORE!

Most of this newsletter is, and always will be, free for anyone & everyone to read.

However, some of it is only available to paying subscribers. This includes:

• exclusive paywalled deep-dives, going out roughly every other week…

• multi-part “mini-seasons” where I throw myself at some big science questions with all the enthusiasm of a clueless beginner. (In the current season, I’m digging into human memory: the latest research into how it works and the best ways we can improve our own)…

• access to my upcoming non-fiction storytelling course…

• chapters of my first book as I assemble it…

• personalised one-to-one ‘curiosity calls’ via phone or video, to hopefully give you a few ideas about chasing your own specific nerdy obsessions with or without a public audience…

• my eternal thanks (THANK YOU!), because this newsletter is now my fulltime job (AAAaaaaAAAaaaaAAAaaaaa!) - and with every new supporter, I can shriek in existential terror just a tiny bit less.

Check out subscription options

“Everything IS amazing, and this newsletter points that out with glee. Lots of very cool facts about, well, everything.”

- Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait, astronomer, writer, author of the Bad Astronomy Newsletter, popular science communicator (Bluesky), and formerly part of the Hubble Space Telescope team.

“Mike’s deep dives into the fascinating stories behind everyday things make him a compelling guide to the world.”

- Jodi Ettenberg, lawyer-turned-curiosity-writer, author of the award-winning Legal Nomads and the newsletter Curious About Everything. (Read more about Jodi at CNN Travel.)

WHERE TO START

• “Oh To See, To Truly See” - my original introduction, on how China Mieville’s thrillingly weird 2009 novel The City & the City is a great metaphor for pursuing a more curious life.

• “Three Ways That Kindness Fixes Everything” - an attempt to mix hard science with some grounded optimism.

• “Avoid Reading Clickbait Hogwash With This One Curious Trick”: why we click sensationalist, twaddlesome garbage, why we incorrectly blame ourselves for it every single time, and what a fun and meaningful antidote to this lunacy might be.

SEASON THEMES

(Every season, I pick a big topic that I’m interested in but fairly ignorant about, and go in search of as many Wows as possible, writing up the results into newsletters and big Twitter threads.)

SEASON TWO: Fake and Unreal Maps

• “The Great San Serriffe Hoax Of 1977” - how The Guardian newspaper ran a fictitious travel supplement as a joke, fooled so many people that its telephone switchboards were overwhelmed with people refusing to believe these islands didn’t exist, and made a ton of advertising money in the process. (Twitter thread.)

• (PAID ONLY) “A Map Of The Internet, Part 1: The Lies Of The Land”: What does the Internet actually look like, from inside and outside it?

SEASON THREE: Optical Illusions

• “The Best Virtual Lightshow You’ll Ever Not See”: the weird and wonderful world of light pillars - which simultaneously do and don’t exist. (Twitter thread.)

PRACTICE

• “In Search Of A Prince Of Serendip”: “Using an online mapping tool, I drew a circle a mile wide around the apartment where I was living in Scotland, and began hunting for serendipity within it.”

• “4 Stupid Ways To Have A Better 2022”: I’m a big fan of the right kind of stupidity, and this newsletter explains why.

• (PAID ONLY) “50 Stupid Ways To Discover The Unknown”: a huge pile of curiosity prompts to get you out the door, having great fun and looking like a bit of an idiot (if you’re doing it correctly).

INTERVIEWS

• Anna Brones Is Living A Curious Life

• Candace Rose Rardon Is Exploring Stillness

• Sophie Stephenson Is Teaching Attention

• Jonny Miller Is Questioning Everything

• Lola Akinmade Åkerström Is Telling The Right Stories

• Brendan Leonard Is Throwing Himself At All The Things

RECOMMENDED READING

Bookshop / Amazon

The Marginalian / Amazon

Author’s website with links.

Images: Joshua Sortino; Susann Schuster; Stefan Kuhn; Martin Vargic; Diane Alkier; Nikko Macaspac; Niloofar Kanani; Cristina Gottardi.

It’s time to wrap up this first season of Everything Is Amazing.

Ten weeks ago I laid out my plans for this newsletter: what I’d write, when I’d write it, how much I’d risk nerding out about my love of scifi, what extended metaphors I would torture and so on.

And the reality? Well, things got a bit ragged in recent weeks, as some very welcome but time-guzzling paid work landed like a ton of bricks. That’s why this eight-week run took ten weeks to arrive - teaching me a few lessons about managing my time better along the way. (You never learn these things until you start!)

Below you can find a summary of everything covered so far. Next, I’m taking a 2-week break, to catch up on work, get some sunshine, climb a nearby mountain (cheers to that, just-relaxed Scottish travel restrictions) and plan out the next season. I’ll be back with you again at the end of the month.

(If you're not yet on the list, sign up below.)

Subscribe now

But before all that: thank you. I know your email Inbox is under siege every day - so I’m very grateful you’ve put time aside to read this newsletter.

And I also know from the calls I’ve been having with some of you - which I’m still doing, so grab one if you’re up for it - that a good number of you have thrown yourself into the challenges and not regretted it! This tells me two things: One: you’re at least as mad than I am, and Two: I clearly need to crank up the gleeful sadism. I promise I’ll work on that for both our sakes. (Okay, mainly mine.)

If you’ve enjoyed things so far, you could do me the hugest favour by spreading the word about it, or encouraging someone you know to sign up too:

Share Everything Is Amazing

Thank you from the bottom of my nerdy, sadistic heart if you choose to do that. The bigger I can grow this thing, the more time I can justify on it and the better it’ll be. (Working theory, mind. Maybe it’ll get worse! Only one way to find out.)

Okay. Here’s the ground we’ve covered since the end of January.

Deep Dives

Oh, To See, To Truly See

“It’s estimated that a staggering 99% of the sensory world is escaping our fullest level of attention every day – and because of all our cognitive biases at work, we can’t always trust our unconscious minds to choose the good stuff for us.”

Takeaways:

• “Unseeing” (automatically tuning out what we assume is irrelevant or uninteresting without paying proper attention to it) is real, and we spend our whole lives doing it every day.

• What we “unsee” is programmed into us by all sorts of internal and external influences.

• This delicously weird book will blow your mind on this topic. Also, I mentioned author Jeff VanderMeer in that piece - and Jeff just wrote this dazzling essay about finding transformative wonder in the world around us. It’s such a treat. (Hat-tip to Jodi for the find.)

In Search Of A Prince Of Serendip

“Perhaps because of the sheer dullness of the example Walpole chooses to illustrate his theme, the term serendipity would take at least a century more to catch on (the first recorded use of serendipitous is from 1943).

But now? Now it’s firmly in the public domain – and good job too, because we’ve never needed it this badly.”

Takeaways:

• We’ve just endured a year-long serendipity drought (thanks, lockdowns) - and it’s been tipping us towards anhedonia, the inability to feel interest and pleasure in our surroundings.

• Overhearing snippets of conversation in public that make you intensely curious about the inner lives of strangers is a soothing way to get out of your own head for a while.

• It’s amazing what you could discover just a mile from where you’re reading this. You’d be amazed. (All you need is a stupid excuse to go look.)

Avoid Reading ClickBait Hogwash With This One Curious Trick

“[By quitting the internet for a year], what [journalist Paul Miller] found…was a lot of emptiness and silence. Both were welcome at first. Being able to hear himself think and take his time over everyday activities? Delightful.

But then novelty wore off - and his problems began…

“By late 2012, I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.”

The internet was part of the problem, yes, but quitting it didn’t seem to be that golden ticket to a richer, less distracted life that Miller thought it would be.

So what will work?”

Takeaways:

• “Waldenponding,” a full, hard ‘digital detox,’ simply doesn’t work for most people.

• Clickbait (easily consumed, largely meaningless online stuff) is powered by diversive curiosity, the love of shiny new things - at the expense of our epistemic curiosity, the deepening of knowledge around what we already know a little about. Happiness is both of these in balance.

• First Law of Curiosity: You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason.

How To Remember What Really Matters

“It’s December 4th, 2016, and American chess Grandmaster Timur Gareyev is dozens of moves into a game against his human opponent….[and] there’s a blindfold over his face.

This isn’t a new thing for Gareyev…but this time, he’s really going for it. Starting at 8.30am in a room on the campus of the University of Nevada, Gareyev has been playing chess simultaneously against 48 opponents without being able to see any of their moves.”

Takeaways:

• Sitting perfectly still for hours seems like a really terrible way to learn and remember something.

• Curiosity releases dopamine, the same neurotransmitter released by exercise, chocolate, sex and other fun things, which seems to help your hippocampus function better - a part of the brain strongly associated with learning and memory.

• We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that some chess players are absolutely ripped.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be A Carrot

“The scientific measurement of curiosity is NFC, or Need For Cognition. This is the closest there is to a unit measurement of curiosity…and it’s more or less our eagerness to learn new things, to be open to new ideas and experiences, and to exert effort in closing information gaps…

Also, interestingly, NFC is negatively associated with social anxiety. It seems like the more curious you become, the less you fall prey to being freaked out by social situations and feeling like a total plonker every time you open your mouth.”

Takeaways:

• Terry Pratchett really understood the kingdom-ruling power of simplicity.

• Your brain is a universe-sized collection of extremely simple things working together to do exceedingly complicated things. There’s a good life-lesson there.

• If you just want to go walking in the mountains by yourself, and someone unwelcomely invites themselves along, send them a link to this newsletter. You’re welcome.

The Unexamined News Is Not Worth Believing

“Welcome to the first, and most important, of the cognitive biases I want to talk about in this newsletter in relation to curiosity:

“…across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.” - link.

Not only are we exhausted from all the depressing news out there, we’re also hooked on it. It seems we can’t stop obsessing over what’s crappy and awful, even if it’s wildly unrepresentative of the amount of crappy, awful things out there.”

Takeways:

• Nothing travels faster, or carriers further, than bad news - skewing our perception of how much of a mess the modern world is in.

• Despite their…often unfortunate reputations, philosophers have so much to teach us. Even the modern ones! (Shut it, Charlie Brooker.)

• An opinion, especially a hastily-formed one, cuts curiosity off at the knees and yanks you off the path towards deeper understanding. A better approach is to sit with a question as long as you can - and to not write an answer off merely because it looks “non-newsworthy”.

Stupid Questions

• How did my colourblind dad works as a Royal Air Force helicopter technician without blowing any of them up? (As part of the answer, did you know colourblindness is a superpower?)

• How hard is it to memorise your own coastline? (Pretty damn hard if it’s Scotland - I’m still practising.)

• What can you learn if you write down everything you can hear?

• What has learning the names of plants got to do with the Ben Franklin effect?

• How do you spark conversations with random strangers during a pandemic lockdown?

• Why do some people hate drinking coffee but love the smell of it? (Answer: because human noses are super-weird.)

Curious Interviews

Anna Brones Is Living A Curious Life

“In the last year, I think for a lot of people, curiosity has been smaller. Pre-COVID, I probably would have said that my curiosity is fueled by travelling, being in new places. And now - I had a friend ask me the other day, “can you think of the last time that you didn't travel for a full year?” And it's been a long time. And so now curiosity is in, like, learning about the tides, or looking at the bark of a tree. And I think that is a challenge: to be able to find curiosity even with the most routine activities, and in the most well known places. Because it's really easy to be curious when you're in someplace entirely new, right?”

Candace Rose Rardon Is Exploring Stillness

”I felt like I wasn't making the time to actually do something with all the experiences I was having and the trips I was going on. There was all this raw material - it's like when you have an SD card full of pictures, and you just never take the time to sit down and unload it onto your hard drive and actually organise and make sense. For me, that process of organising them into folders is - it's so nerdy, but it's so helpful, it makes me feel like okay, I'm starting to make sense of it all, there's some order. You have to go through the raw, messy chaos of life, whether you're travelling whether you're at home, it’s always messy. And then there are moments where you can step back from it all - and start to find some meaning in the mess.”

Sophie Stephenson Is Teaching Attention

“Listening is a byproduct. So when you pay attention, you end up becoming a good listener. I knew I wanted to be a good listener - it became apparent in my role that it was limiting me and limiting the people around me that I wasn't listening to. And yet now I very rarely think about listening. I think more about paying attention. Where's my attention right now? And because of that, I end up not interrupting, which makes me a better listener.”

Ridiculous Challenges

• Week 1: Explore your nearest mile every day; Strike up a conversation with “yourself”; Lagom your possessions; Learn to write at the speed you think; Listen to everything by a musician you really dislike.

• Week 2: Learn to draw your own country from memory; Move a daily ritual outside; Become the world’s top expert on your own birtthday; Reply to your most dreaded letter or email; Spend at least 30 minutes sketching something by hand.

• Week 3: Take a virtual journey; Plant something outside {& create a prompt to return to it); Reread something you loved or hated; Remove “But” or “No” from your vocabulary; Become a digital self-archaeologist.

• Weeks 4+5: Sleep in the garden; Start one of these three types of journal; Drink more water; Learn to fold clothes better; Master the first 60 seconds of your day.

• Weeks 6+7: Talk (properly) to a stranger; Master (or become skilled at) a videogame that’s good for your brain; Pay full attention for five minutes; Learn how to make a fire outdoors; Audit your body and address a nagging problem.

• Weeks 8+9: Teach the basics to someone who doesn’t know them; Delay your gratification; Lose yourself in your own thoughts; Buy a stranger a coffee (or a “coffee”); Dip your toes in two oceans without spending any money getting between them.

That’s a wrap. See you in a couple of weeks!

Images: Chris Lawton; Jeremy Thomas; Kyle Glenn; Icons8 Team; Mike Sowden.

Welcome to another bunch of Everything Is Amazing challenges - the last for this inaugural season of this newsletter (more about that in a couple of days).

As always:

• You pick one (or more!) of these challenges and take a pop at it/them over the coming week.

• If you complete any of them, you will enjoy the unusual phenomenon of Having Done A Weird Thing For Reasons That May Only Become Clear Later. (I explain why that’s a surprisingly good thing here.)

• Still haven’t had a go at anything? Your reluctance to act now pays off bigtime, as today you have a total of thirty challenges to choose from. Here are the first, second, third, fourth and fifth installments - and the remaining five challenges are below.

And since the UK is finally starting to open up a little, for the first time I’ve included a couple of non-lockdown challenges, just in case you have the freedom to get out and about. If not, you could ignore these, or save them for later.

Whatever you decide to do, leave a comment below (the more folk you tell, the better your chances of getting your challenge done):

Leave a comment

This week’s challenges are as follows:

1) Teach The Basics To Someone Who Doesn’t Know Them

Have you ever heard the truism that the best way to learn something is to teach it to others?

“Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed “the protégé effect,” student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake.”

- Annie Murphy Paul

Here’s a challenge that will help two people become more curious (this challenge is very good value for money).

So, there’s you, and there’s another person - and you’re going to agree to do the following: taking it in turns, you’re going to give each other a short lesson on something you’re interested in and knowledgeable about. Let’s say, ten minutes each.

What could you give someone an enthusiastic ten-minute lesson about? Something you really love. Something you get nerdy about. Something you wish more people knew about, because it’s just so damn interesting.

Boil it down. Give them your best ten minutes on the subject. Go all-in.

And then they do it back to you, on a subject they care about.

The value of doing this is twofold. Firstly, you’re creating one end of an information gap - “a little foreknowledge, to break the crust of it,” as I said here. We’re generally not curious about things we know nothing about, but if somebody else can successfully teach us just a little bit about those things, our own curiosity can kick in and take us the rest of the way. And secondly, the teacher is forced to compose and boil down their own thoughts into a form that’s clear enough to be communicated to someone else. It’s a real win-win.

Many, many bonus points awarded if you arrange to do this with a stranger.

So what are you going to teach someone else this week? (Drop a comment under this post if you do this one. I’d love to know.)

2) Delay Your Gratification

You’ve probably heard about this famous test before now.

But there’s an update. According to recent research, it seems “your fate cannot be determined solely by a test of your ability at age 5 to resist the temptation of one marshmallow for 15 minutes to get two marshmallows.”

This suggests that the ability to delay gratification is a skill - something you can strengthen. And there are real benefits to acquiring this kind of self-control.

Have you ever looked out at distant mountains, wishing you were climbing them - and that wonderful faded blue colour they get when they’re far away made that sudden longing even more intense?

It’s because of the air in the way (see the xkcd cartoon heading challenge 1 up there). That’s the science. But writer - and, I’d argue, philosopher - Rebecca Solnit sees this blue as a powerful metaphor for something deeper:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains…

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?

If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

In other words, delayed gratification - the desire to have or achieve something counteracted with the self-control to hold off on it for now - is something you can learn to enjoy. It’s a frustrated enjoyment, sure. A self-teasing sort of thing. But it’s also something that gives you a powerful sense of direction in your day-to-day, and a lesson in looking across great distances without wanting to close them up, literally and figuratively…

Okay, enough philosophy. Let’s get practical.

For this challenge, you’re going to dangle a treat in front of yourself, then yank it away like some kind of jerk.

First, give yourself permission to get a thing you’ve been wanting to get for ages. Say, that book. Or that album. That thing you want, whatever it is. And it has to be a thing that would be available now - either instantly, or in a few hours, or next-day delivery at most, if you decided to get it.

Spend some time psyching yourself up for it. Make yourself really want it.

And then…

Wait.

Nope. You can’t have it. Not this week. Sorry. Next week at the earliest.

Is this making you want this thing 100x more than you did before? How does that feel? Do you actually miss wanting stuff this much? In a world where everything is available pretty much instantly, how does it feel to have to wait like this?

That feeling is what this challenge is for. Have fun exploring it.

3) Lose Yourself In Your Own Thoughts

Your best ideas often occur to you when you're not doing anything much at all. Happens like clockwork, right? You're in the shower. You're out for a walk. You're washing the dishes. WALLOP. Hey, now there’s an idea.

So let's turn that up to eleven. For this challenge, you're going to throw productivity out the window and see if creativity flies back in.

This version of "doing nothing" is not the same as procrastinating. It's not completing that tricky level of Angry Birds 2 instead of doing something you’ve been putting off. It's not consuming vast tracts of Netflix on the couch, and it’s definitely not reading the news or scrolling through Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

It's merely sitting somewhere quiet and doing absolutely nothing. Just - processing. Giving yourself to think for a change - on something you’ve been meaning to think about, or on nothing at all.

Although, maybe we can remove the word “nothing”, because during this time you’re going to be doing a lot of positive constructive daydreaming: the state of pursuing enjoyable, intriguing thoughts to see where they lead. (Click on that link for good tips on how to do it).

The space to think is something we all know we need more of, but rarely make time for. Why do you always have to interrupt yourself? Why is that? (I’m hearing the voice of Sophie Stephenson in my head here.)

For most people, intentional daydreaming is a slow road to agony. It may feel okay at first, but then you get fidgety, or sleepy - and sleeping definitely counts as "not doing this challenge". You could stretch, to ease those aching muscles - but too much of that also counts as "exercise", aka. "doing something".

You are attempting to scale the foothills of daydreamy mindfulness here - and it’s sometimes an uncomfortable ascent. If you want confirmation of how tough it can be to keep doing nothing, read my friend Jodi's account of going on a Vipassana retreat for 10 days. It's an eye-opener.

So. Find a place that’s as open as free as you want your thoughts to be - but not so distractingly interesting that you’re continually dragged outside yourself. And just - sit.

How long could you comfortably do this for? Five minutes? Ten? Twenty? Okay - then aim to double it. Allow yourself the time to get thoroughly lost in your thoughts. (Keep a notebook nearby to jot down any unusually brilliant insights.) And if you find yourself getting bored - good! That might be doing wonders for your creativity. 

Also, at some point it will probably turn into a huge pain in the ass, both figuratively and literally. But that's why it's a challenge - right? 

4) (Somewhat-Non-Lockdown) Buy A Stranger A Coffee - Or A “Coffee”

All the strangers around you right now have had a really rough year, and they deserve a bit of a break. This week, in a small but meaningful way, you’re going to be that break - by performing a #randomactofkindness.

This challenge comes in three skill levels. Choose your flavour, take your pick.

EASY: While out for a walk the other day, I found the above bottle of Prosecco on a park bench, with a label stuck on it that reads “I AM NOW ON A DIET. TAKE THIS AND ENJOY. :)” I left it for the next person to come along - taking the photo was enough for me - and I bet it made someone else feel much happier with their day.

You could do something similar.

• Leave something for a stranger: a small box of biscuits, a bottle of something enjoyable, a bag of coffee beans. (Something sealed is the most reassuring way to do it - and maybe something that won’t melt if the sunlight hits it.)

• Leave it somewhere public: a bench in a park, a seat at the seaside, at the base of a statue.

• Leave a note, saying something like: “Hi. Well, this has been a horrible year, hasn’t it? Here is a random act of kindness to make things slightly better. Please take it and enjoy. Cheers!”

MODERATELY HARD: There are people in your world who have made the last year a lot more bearable - or, you know they’ve made other people’s lives more bearable. They could be artists, nurses, teachers, musicians...

And now you’re going to say thank you to at least one of them, in the form of a “virtual coffee”.

If someone makes their living online, they might have some kind of “virtual tip jars” set up. They might also be using the Buy Me A Coffee service, so look for them on there.

But maybe they’re not, so you’ll have to get creative. Maybe you could have something lovely delivered to their front door, at the equivalent price of a coffee?

However you’re going to do it, you’re also going to say thanks - which is where the “moderately hard” part comes in. Include a heartfelt note. Say thanks honestly, and in more than once sentence, for what they’ve done for you this year. Get so honest it makes you squirm a bit. Do that.

And if you’re gifting a “coffee” to a complete stranger who has helped other people, explain to them why that’s been such a great thing to see, and how it’s helped you stay a bit more hopeful about humanity than you would have been.

SUPER HARD: One day this week, in broad daylight, you will stand at the window of a local coffee shop (if they’re supplying takeout right now) or some other shop, and as you're standing in the queue, you'll turn to the socially distanced person behind you and say, "Uh - I know this might sound a bit strange, but...can I buy your [whatever the thing is] for you?"

You will see a number of things flash across their face. Things like:

 - "It's the start of some kind of sales pitch. Oh god, I HATE these people."
 - "Mentally bewildered. Must be. Play it cool play it cool. Looks harmless enough so far..."
 - "OMG this is the most cringey chat-up line I have EVER been on the wrong end of."
- "Awesome! I negotiated a pandemic only to meet my first serial killer. Halp?"

Seeing these thoughts on their face will make you feel enormously embarrassed and self-conscious. Great job. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.

The other person will almost certainly be confused by your actions. And if you’re a man on his own approaching a woman on her own, there’s a whole other level of What The Actual Hell Is This at work here. (Please keep a respectful distance, chaps.)

The aim of this challenge is to not make everyone involved feel super-awkward: it's to take the other person all the way from freaked-out scepticism to cautious gratitude - if you can, of course. They may be too weirded out. This is a weird thing to do, after all. But if you can convince them that yes, you are buying them a coffee/”coffee” for nothing, and no, there aren't any strings attached - you will blow their mind. Because, who does that, in these cynical, selfish times?

All this challenge requires is your willingness to feel like a complete bloody fool for about 60 seconds.

I believe in you. Go make someone’s day.

5) (Non-Lockdown) Dip Your Toes In Two Oceans Without Spending Any Money Getting Between Them

A few years back, British adventurer Alastair Humphreys walked his way across Spain.

“So what?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that the kind of thing adventurers do?” Of course. But Alastair is not just any adventurer.

His challenge to himself was to do the whole walk while busking with the violin to earn enough money to pay for food - undeterred by an alarming lack of both experience and natural talent on said instrument.

No, really:

In other words Alastair, on top of being a professional adventurer, is also clearly some kind of lunatic.

(Last time I met him, he was cycling around the whole of Yorkshire as a way to meet interesting, thoughtful people. Yorkshire, I ask you. I rest my case.)

If you watch the above film, or even better, read the superb book he wrote about it, you may feel a growing urge to do something equally daft. (This is the kind of havoc that professional adventurers frequently wreak on society. Perhaps we need the equivalent of the Sokovia Accords to manage them.)

So either right now, or at some post-pandemic point when it’s practically feasible, you’re going to paddle in two different oceans - and, like Al, you won’t spend any money getting between them.

Because you have a creative brain, it’s already coming up with ways to cheat. You could buy a load of rail tickets beforehand - therefore you’re not spending any money during the journey, right? But come on. You’ll know you cheated. So whatever rules you set for yourself, stick to them unless it’s absolutely impossible to do so. (A fun way to not “spend any money,” as Al discovered, is to earn some cash enroute. How could you do that? I’m sure you can think of something.)

Depending on where you are in the world and the current state of things there, this challenge may be impossible, at least right now. But if you can swing it, it can turn into quite the adventure.

Here's your way forward.

(1) Choose your oceans. Let's say, like me, you grew up in the north of England - and let's say you're there now. You therefore have your pick of four oceans:

• The North Sea, to the east.

• The Atlantic, to the west.

• The English Channel, to the far south.

• The Irish Sea, to the west.

You can pick two of these.

(2) Get from one to the other without a spending a dime / penny / whatever-currency of your own money.

If you’re in the UK, a bike can get you from sea to sea from pretty much anywhere in a few days - and sometimes in just an hour or so. Or you could walk it. Or borrow a canoe. Or something I haven’t thought of because I’m a lot more boring than you are.

One mad option: ever tried hitchhiking? This guy did it across the whole of the States, from coast to coast. (It took him 5 weeks, bear in mind - but he did it.) This hilarious chap did it all the way up Japan. This website is all about doing it well, and staying safe while you do it.

Or - anyone you know heading in that general direction that you could get a lift with, allowing you to walk the remainder of the way?

As long as you don't spend money, anything is game.

(3) Strip off your socks and go for a paddle in the sea. You've earned it. And take a photo of your feet in each ocean, so you can show the world you did it.

How To Hold Yourself Accountable

Social media is swarming with people who want to hold your feet to the fire. Friends, family, loved ones - they are all standing ready to remind you of your bold promises to them and to yourself, at less than a moment’s notice.

So how about sharing your chosen challenge with them on whatever social media platform you choose, using the hashtag #EverythingIsAmazing ? That way, you can’t back out.

(And if you use that hashtag, I’ll see it too, and will be able to give you grief as well.)

Geronimo!

Images: David Tip; Mihály Köles; Nick Page; xkcd; Mike Sowden.

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In today’s edition, some really bad news - and what we can do about it.

In his comic scifi novel Mostly Harmless, the late Douglas Adams makes a pointed attack on the modern news cycle in the form of a joke:

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.”

As a seasoned satirist he considered everything worthy of amiable ridicule, and beyond his love of environmental issues, his near-universal scepticism - which extended to mocking his own work - makes it hard to know what his true beliefs were.

(But also, why do we care? It’s interesting that folk keep trying to unearth his views, as if the only way to render wisdom acceptable is to assign its creator palatable politics.)

Like all good satirists, Douglas Adams used humour to ask some really awkward questions. That quote tackles a complicated idea in a simple form that anyone will laugh at - and since laughter is the best attention-focusing tool ever devised, that idea stuck.

It’s a perfect piece of modern philosophy.

Please stop here and take a second to look at yourself. What just happened, when you read the word “philosophy”?

Did your spirits deaden a little, as dusty old white-bearded gentlemen self-importantly bickered their way across your imagination, using language so impenetrable that you only understood one word in ten? Did you imagine filthy garrets at the tops of crumbling university buildings, piles of yellowing books nobody will ever read, questionable personal hygiene, ragged clothing and tedious arguments in the street that fritter away the chance to do anything genuinely useful with the day?

It’s interesting we now have such a fusty stereotype for philosophers (at least in my corner of the world) and yet the publishing category of “self-help” is one of the fastest-growing in the marketplace. We’re desperate to improve ourselves - and at the same time, so quick to write off ideas on the subject that have been around for centuries, sometimes millenia. 

At least, that used to be the case. Now you have Seneca and Marcus Aurelius repackaged by Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss, Mark Manson cheerleading Kant to his millions of readers, and who knows what else is out there beyond the laughably narrow limits of my own reading.

There are also the people doing modern philosophical work who successfully dodge the stereotype. Take the topic of shame: touched upon in a rather muddled way by Aristotle (“aidōs” - the sense of shame), it’s now the focus of work by philosopher Martha Nussbaum and numerous books & TED talks by research professor Brené Brown . If you think the study of ideas in general has become unfashionable, look at the amount of shared articles from Aeon (“a magazine of ideas and culture”) and Brain Pickings (“an inventory of the meaningful life”). 

I’d say philosophy is alive and well under all sorts of new guises, wearing different clothes and racking up millions of new fans on Instagram or Netflix - most of whom probably think “philosophy” went out with the dinosaurs.

(My recommended entry point to understanding the classic arguments in a form that never makes you feel like you’re being schooled: Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and more recently, Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express.)

Then there’s Douglas Adams, who made thought-experiments hilarious. Who in their least generous moments hasn’t thought we’d all be better off if all the useless idiots in this world could be tricked onto a Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B and fired into the sun? (Come on. Admit it.) 

Or there’s this gem:

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.”

Yet I love his Bad News Powered Spaceship the best, because there’s no better metaphor for why the world feels such a mess these days.

Alain de Botton has a lot to say about the news. He’s another popular modern writer translating ancient ideas into a modern format, and in his book The News: A User’s Manual, he describes the modern news cycle as “the determined pursuit of the anomalous.”  

More about that in a moment, but first, let’s engage in some shabby, mean-spirited low humour.

Alain De Botton is (in my opinion) a brilliant, thoughtful man whom (in a lot of other people’s opinion) comes across as exactly the kind of stuffy academic we all would like to hear less of. Take this lively criticism from writer Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror, who describes De Botton as:

“...a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane - yet if you pick up one of his books and read it cover to cover, you'll come away with less insight into the human condition than if you'd worked your way through a copy of Mr Tickle instead.” 

Reader, I confess I laughed (with a pained expression, because I really enjoy De Botton’s work). It illustrates what often happens with self-identifying philosophers - they get labelled as peddlers of pretentious drivel.

I can’t really fault Brooker because it’s his job to make people giggle, and he himself has brilliantly ridiculed the way the news works:

Anyway - here’s Alain De Botton talking about the news at Google. (It’s possible you feel the same way as Brooker about his demeanour, but what he’s saying is well worth listening to.)

Since that talk’s nearly an hour long, and since our time in this world (and the wordcount of this newsletter) is cruelly limited, let’s return to his main quote again: “the determined pursuit of the anomalous.”

De Botton’s main point is that it’s easy to assume the news is always representative of the state of the world - and in doing so, fail to understand why it isn’t. The news is a kind of extremophile, something that usually only thrives in extreme environments. Only the weirdest, strangest, happiest, saddest, most exciting and most horrific things are most-favoured by its headlines, because that’s what cuts through the digital noise facing us every day. Even quality sources of news fall prey to this, because at a fundamental level, everyday, “boring” reality is mostly unnewsworthy (unless it’s being reported by a really superb writer).

I would suggest that nobody would click a story that read “For the 286th time this year, nothing particularly dramatic happened in [place name] and more or less everyone was, on average, somewhat fine really.”

For a more damning critique of the global news cycle, here’s writer Mark Manson tackling the subject at length (and using language you’d never hear from De Botton).

Manson is one of my favourite online thinkers because of the way he tackles his subjects: bravely and irritatingly. His writing style is conversational and peppered with f-bombs, and every article is designed to wind up a large slice of his readers. If you’ve seen his posts shared on Facebook (where they rack up millions of clicks), the sharer is usually yelling “YES! THIS!” or “UGH I FIND THIS SO OFFENSIVE”. He’s immensely provocative - and that gives him a reach that most news services would envy.

So it’s interesting when you see some of his arguments are for reclaiming the middle ground in everything. Take this defense of being average, later turned into a key chapter of his bestselling book The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck.

I really value Mark’s work, partly because I so frequently object to it in some way - either the tone gets my British back up (all that swearing, for example, good lord), or I find some of his conclusions about the world initially unpalatable. What’s happening in these cases - and also when I agree with him - is that he’s making me think. Riling people up without giving them something of value to argue about is social vandalism, but when it’s done specifically to make them think, it’s a thing to treasure.

For this reason, I’d class Mark Manson as a modern philosopher as well - although he prefers the label “life advice that doesn’t suck.” (Also, he’d say “who gives a f*** what you think of me?” Fair point, I guess.)

Returning to Douglas Adams - the reason his Bad News joke has stayed relevant is because of the way the news reaches us.

Even if (and this is a huge “even if”) we were consuming news stories that fairly summed up the entirety of what’s going on in the world today, we’d still have a tendency to cherry-pick the awful stuff and share it on social media.

Welcome to the first, and most important, of the cognitive biases I want to talk about in this newsletter in relation to curiosity:

“There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.”

(From “Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development” - Amrisha Vaish, Tobias Grossmann and Amanda Woodward.)

Well, dammit.

Not only are we exhausted from all the depressing news out there, we’re also hooked on it. It seems we can’t stop obsessing over what’s crappy and awful, even if it’s wildly unrepresentative of the amount of crappy, awful things out there.

Here, then, is a potential way we can use curiosity to counteract our negativity bias - and those small rectangles of metal, plastic and glass that beam the worst of the woes of the world into our eyes every day.

Gary Arndt is one of the most well-travelled people I know - and in 2010, he summed up his travels in an article at Tim Ferriss’s blog called 20 Things I've Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years.

Here’s the first of his points:

“People are generally good. Many people are afraid of the world beyond their door, yet the vast majority of humans are not thieves, murderers or rapists. They are people just like you and me who are trying to get by, to help their families and go about living their lives. There is no race, religion or nationality that is exempt from this rule. How they go about living their lives might be different, but their general goals are the same.”

Are you suppressing an eye-roll right now? Does it sound like an obvious, dull, lacking-in-excitement conclusion to come to?

Maybe it sounds like one of those platitudes that powers a thousand Inspirational Quotes on Instagram - except, it isn’t. It’s a pithy summary of Gary’s real-life experiences. He went out into the world, met a huge number of people in a vast array of places, and his considered conclusion is hey, most people are OK.

Did you hope for something a bit more newsworthy there?

Hm.

Here’s an idea, then. Imagine a middle ground - a “Goldilocks zone,” to borrow from science - of expectations about the world. A state between the depths of hopelessness and the continual disillusionments of idealism. You’re aware that everything isn’t irredeemably ruined, but you’re also in no danger of sinking into despair because everything isn’t perfect. Much is in need of repair, sure. But this current state of unfixedness feels manageable.

Imagine occupying this tolerable middle ground. A place that’s bearable, even hopeful. An everything-is-okayness.

(I might need to change the title of this newsletter if I continue with this argument.)

So, regarding how things actually are right now, maybe they’re just okay. Not worthy of a news headline, but certainly okay enough to get out of bed and crack on with your day. (Well, maybe things are an unusual amount out of whack right now, yes. But beyond that…)

And maybe an antidote to the constant anxiety the news brings us is to fight the urge to have an opinion about everything.

There’s a scifi novel by Australian writer Greg Egan that works as a hilarious (if complicated) metaphor about this, the kind Douglas Adams would be proud of. It goes as follows:

Some time in the near future, our Solar System is abruptly surrounded by…some kind of bubble. No light can get in or out, so we look up into the night sky and see no stars, just our neighbouring planets against a terrifying background of nothingness. Humanity panics for a while (clearly it hasn’t read the reassuring cover of The Guide), then settles back into its customary state of arguing with itself.

The novel’s something of a techno-thriller, so I’ll skip that bit of it. Here’s the relevant bit:

It turns out that compared to the wider universe, humans are really special. And it’s all about quantum physics - which modern science accepts as a solid working model of how the universe works, despite how mindbogglingly, pants-explodingly weird it is.

According to quantum physics, once you get down to a certain level of smallness (an insane level of smallness, where individual parts of atoms can be seen), something called probabilistic reality seems to kick in. Instead of things down there being in a reassuringly unambiguous state we’d recognise (“that chair is by the window”), they exist as a series of probable states - as in “this particular particle of light (photon) is mostly at point A, but there’s a small but not impossible chance that it could be at point B too, meaning that in a small amount of cases it can magically appear there, even though there’s a seemingly impassable barrier in the way”.

It’s like saying “that chair is almost certainly by the window but it could be on the roof of that passing bus instead.”

(This really is a working scientific principle, yes, and there are machines that depend on it.)

This bizarre “cloud of what-ifs” is called a wavefunction - a smear of possibilities that forms the bedrock of everything. And it seems that in our natural world, wavefunctions exist until they’re observed. When they’re seen, all those possibilities collapse down to one certainty that we’re clearly looking at. The chair is here, not over there, because I’m looking at it. D’uh.

So Egan (who is a maths enthusiast) imagines a universe of alien races that comfortably exist not as we do, but as a steady blur of probabilities. As full-sized uncollapsed wavefunctions. And it’s only the human race that has the ability to turn those possibilities into certainties by the act of observation.

So humanity looks out into space through its telescopes, observes the universe, and unwittingly forces it all into a single wavefunction-collapsed state. An opinion, if you like.

In doing so, it commits xenocide on a scale that even Thanos would flinch at. Entire races cease to exist in the blink of an eye.

In response: the bubble. The aliens decide to quarantine humanity from everyone else - to stop its “opinion” destroying half the universe in an act of mindless observational imperialism.

This is the kind of wild idea that is such a gift from the best science fiction. Totally barmy, of course, but grounded in hard science. And like China Mieville’s tale of Besžel and Ul Qoma, maybe it’s lunacy with the core of a useful idea.

If ideas are like wavefunctions, why are we in such a hurry to collapse them into opinions?

What if we renew our focus on what’s in front of us, tune out the clickbait, continually search for better questions to ask, embrace a little more uncertainty, and fight the pressure to have a firm stance on absolutely everything?

(There are certainly many cases where the conclusions of others should carry weight in your life. Try robbing a bank and you’ll be confronted with a few of them. But an opinion on everything? Why are we taught that’s a good way to behave? Why is it so uncharismatic to say, “I don’t know” these days, especially on Twitter or Facebook?)

Instead, we could hone our curiosity skills and follow in the footsteps of perhaps the most famous philosopher of them all - a man who, like Douglas Adams, rarely gave any clue to his true beliefs, and is best-known for asking questions until he’d irritated just about everyone.

(A lovely quote from The Socrates Express here, where Eric quotes Professor Jacob Needleman: “Our culture has generally tended to solve its problems without experiencing its questions.” Whew.)

If we do that, maybe, beyond the hasty, negatively-skewed, anxiety-inducing blizzard of extreme headlines hitting us every day, we can tentatively piece together answers that might initially look as banal and disappointingly pedestrian as “people are generally good” - but actually fit the world around us for a change?

Well, it’s an idea.

Additional notes:

1) While I was putting this piece together, Mark Manson sent out an edition of his weekly newsletter that opened like this:

The Most Important Trait in the 21st Century - A few days ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about the many people we knew in our lives who seemed to be stagnant - i.e., not changing, not progressing, not accomplishing their goals - and the many people we knew who were not stagnant - i.e., moving up in the world, making things happen, reinventing themselves and their lives.

We asked each other: what was the difference between these two groups of people?

One answer continued to pop up for me: intense curiosity. The defining trait of progressing in the 21st century appears to be a driving curiosity about anything and everything.

No argument from this newsletter, sir.

2) Gary Arndt is now running a fascinating bite-sized podcast called Everything Everywhere Daily, and publishing the episode shownotes on Substack. It’s a really great listen. Check it out.

Images: Thomas Charters; Kyle Glenn; Markus Spiske

If none of that makes sense, start reading from here, and I promise it will continue to not make sense except in a more joined-up way. Ta.

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Today, let’s take a deep, nerdy dive into the delicious/disgusting science of…

Neon signs!

No, I kid. It’s coffee. Because last week I wrote this:

“Here’s a mystery about the taste of coffee: a fair few people like it, but in my experience, everyone loves the smell of it. I have met people who deeply hate drinking coffee, who find the stuff brackish and foul, and yet will twitch their nostrils above a freshly-opened bag of ground coffee and say, “ohhhh, that smells fantastic!”

But I thought taste and smell were basically the same thing (which is why you can’t taste anything if you hold your nose)? And just how different is the smell of coffee to the taste of it - and why is that?

Time to stop and investigate all this properly.”

A few of you immediately replied to say you were in the love-the-smell-hate-the-beverage camp. That’s not an unusual thing. Take this small and extremely unscientific study I did yesterday:

There is much potential bias here (eg. most people who follow me on Twitter are writers who travel a lot, so of course they love coffee; it’s only 49 votes; what, Twitter as a representative slice of the world? LOL; and so on).

But - look at the 0% there, which seems absolutely typical. I have never met anyone who can’t stand the aroma of coffee but happily knocks back the drink. So why is the reverse true?

Take the experience of my friend Eva, a food & travel writer (and budding novelist) living in Italy:

“I wanted so much to like coffee - it's what grownups drank, and I couldn't wait to be grown up. And it smelled so good - rich and earthy. Imagine my disappointment when, at 16, I had my first sip. Disgusting! I tried it a few more times in college when I pulled all-nighters, but each time the effect was the same. It didn't matter what I put in it - it always tasted horrible. I've always found that if someone looks and smells good, it will most likely taste good, too - that's how I got talked into eating organ meats when I lived in Japan, and I love organ meats. But I don't find this to be the case with coffee - at all.

How can something that smells so wonderful be so disgusting? It must be a trap!

I finally came out as a "Coffee Hater" in my early 20s and have remained proudly anti-coffee ever since. Why fight it? I also hate the taste of Coca Cola and never, ever drink the stuff - maybe it's related. I've lived in Italy since 2010 where coffee is sacred. I always decline it but sometimes I can't politely turn down an espresso and, nope, still hate it.

Every now and then I'll mention that I hate coffee and someone will inevitably say, "Even Italian coffee?" Yes, all coffee is hideous to me. And I'm okay with that.”

As far as my research has gone, around one in ten folk who like the smell of ground coffee beans can’t abide the drink they’re made into.

Note that this isn’t “I like coffee but it gives me terrible acidity so I tend to avoid it” (I’m one of those folk, so I have to be careful). No - these are people who feel the same way Eva does: “all coffee is hideous and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

So what gives?

First, some important basics.

As Candace notes in Stuff Every Coffee Lover Should Know, coffee “beans” come from inside the fruits of the coffee plant (they look like tiny cherries). Prise one open and you’ll find what looks like coffee beans, except sporting a rather offputting shade of bilious green-yellow.

This means they’re actually seeds. Or they’re fruit! Take your pick, either is fine. But they’re not beans. Except, everyone calls them beans, and there’s no way round that now and I’m not going to tell you to fight it. That battle is over. The idiots won.

The second surprisingly useful thing I learned from Candace’s book is that coffee is actually bread. Or rather, it should be treated like bread. And this relates to a nasty trick that has been played on grocery shoppers for decades.

You know that incredible fresh-bread scent in the bakery section of big supermarkets? That’s great physical marketing at work, because it never fails to reel you in - and yet it’s also exactly how your kitchen shouldn’t smell. At home, it’d be a sign your bread is losing all its volatile compounds and going stale a lot faster than it would if you sealed it away properly.

Coffee’s the same. Sure, that ground coffee smells fantastic right now - but that means it’ll taste worse when you brew it up. Potentially a lot worse. You’re smelling the flavour in your next cup leaching into the air, as volatile chemicals in the coffee oxidize and dissipate.

(Candace notes the Middle English root of the word “volatile” is “a creature that flies.” Says it all.)

So: once ground, treat coffee like a fresh loaf of bread. Three days shelf-life is pretty good, same day if you can manage it. No matter what preground bags promise (“all the flavour trapped within” blah blah, pull the other one), once those beans get ground, the taste falls off a cliff. As much as 60% of the most flavourful volatiles float away within just 15 minutes of grinding.

The upshot here: grind your own beans, or resign yourself to a relatively crappy cup of coffee every time.

Except, wait. I’m presuming you know how human taste works? Because in my investigations here, I discovered I absolutely didn’t.

What’s the tastiest thing in your house right now? Go get a bit of it. (Chocolate works a treat for this.)

Now - pinch your entire nose closed, front to back, the entire fleshy part of it including both nostrils, right back to where you feel the bone begin. Bingo! Your dose is dow incabable of sbellig adythig.

Now put that tasty thing in your mouth. Let it dissolve on your tongue. Bat it around a bit. Give it a chew.

Report?

There shouldn’t be much flavour (which is weird) but you’ll be getting something else that contributes to what we call “taste.” We don’t think about this often enough, but - why do we describe a taste as ‘silky smooth’ or ‘creamy’? They’re textures, right? And yet we include them in our everyday act of tasting stuff.

Now let go of your nose. POW. Immediately that flavour is back.

We tend to think of taste as a thing made solely in the mouth, but a lot is engineered in the back of the nose - more specifically, in olfactory receptors, special cells that send messages to the brain. Pinch your nose shut and you discover how important they are in tasting anything.

Okay. Now this gets weird.

It’s 2012, and at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen, Professor Barry Smith is speaking to his audience. As the founding director of the University of London’s Centre For The Study Of The Senses, he’s there to talk about taste - more specifically, how absurdly complicated it is:

“What we call taste is in fact the result of inputs from touch, taste and smell that combine into a single unified experience that we either like or dislike. The effects of one sense on another go unnoticed in our experience and yet finding out about these interactions is telling us more and more about how our senses combine information.”

That’s “like or dislike” as an immediate reaction. Our mouths are biologically wired to respond negatively to some tastes - in particular bitterness, which is often associated with poisons, toxins and other harmful stuff.

This is why your first taste of anything bitter (say, beer) is a hearty BLEARGH. You just can’t help yourself. To appreciate its “adult” flavours, you need to teach your palate to overcome this reaction, by way of tasting this “bad" thing again and again until its more rewarding side makes an appearance.

It’s the flavour equivalent of a masochistic-looking hobby that involves fighting all your natural instincts - like, say, running.

But then Smith explains this picture is even more confused by how those receptors in our noses actually work. When you’re smelling something, you’re wafting airborne chemicals over them in one direction: up your nose and into your face.

Yet when you’re tasting that same thing, you’re wafting those same chemicals out of your nose (because when you eat, you breathe out a little bit) over those exact same nasoreceptors. And for whatever reason, they work differently in this direction.

The message they send to your brain from a sniff is different to the one they send as you breathe out - even though the airborne chemicals triggering them are exactly the same.

You can test this for yourself, as I’ve been doing this week to the point of hyperventilation and sparkly vision. Get something that smells nice, pinch your nose, breathe in the smell through your mouth, close your mouth, let go of your nose and breathe it out. It’s a subtle difference, for sure - but when it’s part of what we call “taste” (which is really made of Actual Taste + Mouthfeel + Smell), there’s a big impact.

According to Professor Smith, almost every ingestible substance is like this. There’s always that difference, and for some people, it’s a difference they never learn (ie. force themselves) to overcome. It’s also presumably why things that smell nightmarishly awful like durian and century egg can actually be pretty tasty - and why we can stomach eating cheeses that smells like 6-month-old dirty laundry.

Weirdly, only two things have been found to taste exactly the same way they smell: chocolate (hooray!) and lavender (erm, ok - although I gather it’s pretty good in pound cake).

Okay then. In summary:

1) No, smell-loving coffee-haters, you’re not deranged. In fact, your senses may even be more sensitive and refined than everyone else’s! (It’s a crying shame you’re wasting them on a life without coffee, but each to their own.)

2) If you don’t like the taste of coffee, grimly consuming a few thousand cups of it over the next year should cure you of that nicely. Off you pop.

3) Yes, coffee tastes considerably worse than fresh grounds smell - where “worse” is defined by “the proportion of the aromatic chemicals originally in the just-roasted coffee bean”.

4) It’s not a bean, it’s the seed of a fruit. I know, I know. FFS.

5) Noses are duplicitious and twofaced and should never, ever be trusted.

6) Chocolate’s the opposite of noses. You always know where you are with chocolate. Pillar of the community.

Thanks for reading. I’m off to have a you-know-what.

Further Reading

• “Home is A Mug Of Coffee” - Candace Rose Rardon, Longreads

• “Why Does Coffee Smell Better Than It Tastes?” - Carian Thus, United Artists Magazine

• Did Honoré de Balzac really drink 50 cups of coffee a day? The math says “Merde, Non” - Brendan Leonard

NEXT TIME: Curiosity & optimism (& why everything isn’t f***ed).

Images: Jason Leung; phil sheldon ABIPP; Aaina Sharma; CHUTTERSNAP.

Welcome to another bunch of Everything Is Amazing challenges, designed to sprinkle some healthy chaos into your life, currently presented in a lockdown-appropriate form.

(If you want to know why it’s good to have some healthy chaos in your life, read this.)

The rulebook dances to the following tune:

• You pick one or more of these challenges and have a stab at them over the coming week.

• If you complete any of them, you might enjoy fun, meaningful benefits over time, in random and unpredictable ways. No promises, but yup, it happens.

• First time doing one of these? Fantastic - that gives you a whopping twenty-five to choose from today. Here are the first, second, third and fourth installments.

Know someone else you could rope in? Grab ‘em with the button below:

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Off we go!

1) Talk (Properly) To A Stranger

This is the thinking behind my ongoing Everyone Is Amazing calls (which you can still sign up to here).

The aim here is to talk to a stranger:

Please, steal this idea from me. No, seriously. Do that. It really works. Over the last 12 months, how many times did you strike up a conversation with a stranger? Do you miss it - that little electric sizzle of nervous, delighted awkwardness that pushes you right into this moment, right here now, and keeps you on your toes?

If the answer is “now you mention it, I miss it so much” - then open a free account at Calendly or some other similar service, & put aside half an hour or more, a few days a week. Ask people you miss chatting with in person - then invite people you’ve never met in person. Try it. It might be exactly what you need.

You could copy this method - or you could invent an even more cunning and socially weird one. The way you do it doesn’t matter. Get creative and surprise/outweird yourself!

The aim here is to spark a conversation with a complete stranger in a way you haven’t enjoyed since before the pandemic struck. Maybe that’s about duration - chatting for minutes instead of seconds. Maybe it’s about the quality of that conversation. Maybe it’s something else.

You’ll know what it is. You’ll be able to feel it when it happens.

So exactly how are you going to make it happen?

You have this week to decide.

2) Master (Or Become Skilled At) A Videogame That's Good For Your Brain

I love videogames, especially this one - and frequently recommend it and my other faves to my friends. Yet I'd be the first to say that on average, videogaming is a relatively crappy use of our time.

There is no contradiction there. This 2019 paper concluded some forms of videogaming are good for the brain, leading to “increased grey matter of the hippocampus, DLPFC, and cerebellum [which are] associated with better performance in reference and working memory.” That’s right: gaming literally seems to make your brain grow bigger (although, to be fair, so can loads of other things you could do with your free time).

However, and placing heavy emphasis on what I’m about to say, there are many games that are designed to be mindlessly easy, exchanging your precious time for painfully slow, wholly inevitable game progress that barely requires you to be present, let alone actually doing anything. As a rule, anything with “Idle” or “Clicker” in the title is quite literally a no-brainer. You’ll see a lot of these types on mobile. Be warned - they’re mostly there to switch your mind off.

Or there are the reaction-test games: the FPS (first-person shooters), the gunplay, the pew-pewing and KABOOMing. They’re fun - but it’s also easy to drowse your way through level after level of them in an undemanding cognitive holding-pattern, dulling your mind and getting zero exercise. Hard nope. Bad for the brain, bad for the body.

The best gaming experiences are hard. Not because they're unfair to you, but because you have to learn a new set of rules and skills and apply them in a creatively demanding way that requires real effort. The Civilization games are a case in point - or Crusader Kings III, pictured above. Or the Total War series. Anything with lots of moving pieces to juggle.

To get anywhere in these games, you have to hold a vast number of interconnected concepts in your head at the same time, to anticipate future actions, and to interrogate your memory to find the pieces of a new winning combo - exactly as when playing chess. They're board games on a scale and level of complexity that'd be impractical in a physical product.

Or maybe you could try puzzle games, teaching spatial awareness - the most famous probably being Tetris, but popular in recent titles like The Witness.

Or maybe go for a story-driven offering, the so-called “adventure game,” like award-winners The Secret Of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Life Is Strange or Firewatch. These titles depend on you making narrative choices based on emotion and logic - which is basically normal life, right? It's not surprising that some of these games seem to improve empathy and social skills - which is, of course, the direct opposite of the stereotype about gamers.

Any of these sound fun to you? Excellent! Welcome to the nerdiest lockdown challenge you'll ever attempt.

First Steps

The trick is to closely monitor how much a game is challenging you. If you've learned the rules and quickly find yourself playing half-brainedly just to grind your way to the end, that's a good reason to step away. Beyond that point, the benefits are rapidly diminishing returns - and it quickly becoming a waste of your time.

So pick a videogame that has a learning curve that’s steep enough to satisfy you and doesn’t flatten down to nothing within the first hour - and see just how good you can get at it and what you can achieve in just one week.

(If your computer can handle it, I can recommend learning how to fly using this astoundingly beautiful thing.)

3) Pay Full Attention For Five Minutes

Of the two most common forms of curiosity, epistemic (or academic) is more demanding because it requires focused, sustained attention.

As Sophie Stephenson explained last week, paying proper attention to other people without interrupting them leads you into better-quality thinking and listening - and it’s one of the few ways to discover what you don’t yet know you don’t know.

But this doesn’t just apply to people. Paying better attention to everything is really rewarding - and also, really hard.

Much has been written in popular publications about shrinking attention spans, blaming the Information Age for this alleged withering of our minds - even if the hard science behind such claims is unclear at best. What might be going on is we’re unaware of the increasing demands on our biologically limited ability to focus, juggling more and more things every day - and what feels like a lessening is really a diluting. We just let more stuff in, so we give ourselves less time to lean into each thing - and eventually, that becomes our default state.

Perhaps it isn’t that we increasingly can’t. It’s that we’re increasingly not.

This, then, is a challenge to push in the other direction. I’m calling it the 5-minute attention challenge, because that’s how long you’re going to stare at something. Anything. Watching a single branch moving in the wind. Watching the waves break on the beach. Peering at a flower. A distant mountain. A crumpled Coke can. Your own shoes. Anything.

Choose something, lean forward, and try to give it your full and undivided attention for five minutes.

Unlike the recent journalling challenge, you don’t have to record anything here. Don’t interrupt yourself. Don’t break this spell. Try to see everything there is to see. Take it all in.

Five minutes. That’s all this challenge will take. And yet it might be the hardest thing you do all week.

How about it?

Note: please choose a subject other than another person. There’s a reason that Marina Abramović chose staring at people as a method of uncomfortable, boundary-pushing performance art. Even with permission given, it can be a really unsettling thing - and without it, it’s really invasive, really creepy and liable to get you into all sorts of trouble. Nopety-nope, please.

4) Learn How To Make A Fire Outdoors

Why?

If you’re of a certain temperament, see "basic survival skills you've entirely lost, so when everything in the world turns Ayn Rand meets The Walking Dead, you'll be the first to go."

But also see "how to look unbelievably cool to anyone under the age of 10." Have kids of your own, or frequently hang out with kids of your friends? This one definitely applies to you.

But outside of those two reasons, it’s just a satisfying thing to do. Your lizard brain will love it. You really don’t need a better justification that that - although, if you want one, try “it seems to be jolly good for your health.”

First Steps

• SAFETY FIRST. You never mess around when it comes to fire. If you're not prepared to play it very safe with this challenge, you shouldn't go anywhere near it. It's dangerous to you, it’s dangerous to everyone and everything around you, and you should never approach firemaking with anything but the utmost caution.

  If you are having a go, hone your skills in someone's fireplace, or in the middle of an expanse of concrete where there's zero chance of setting anything else alight. However you do it, think ahead and be a pessimist. What could go wrong? Assume the answer is “everything” and plan according.

  For starting tips, I refer you to the folk at the mighty Ordnance Survey. And if you’re braver, go search for credible advice on starting a fire without using matches - the Veteran Level version of this challenge.

5) Audit Your Body And Address A Nagging Problem

This isn't about "getting healthy". That's way too much pressure and way too complicated for one week. No - this is much smaller, much simpler and far more useful in the short-term.

Ready?

Find somewhere you can put your feet up - and do that. Close your eyes and let your thoughts race around for a while, until they get tired of you not paying attention to them.

Now - how do you physically feel? What's your body telling you right now? What hurts? Is there anything uncomfortable there? Try to pay deeper attention. Is there anything uncomfy that you've stopped being aware of, because it's been so long since you weren't feeling that tiny bit of discomfort?

I would like you to now assume two things:

1) It’s nothing serious. I know, I know, you immediately Googled your symptoms and “discovered” you’re the first person since 1486 to have Stonemason’s Galloping Knee Rot. But no, put that thinking aside. The internet is filled with idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about (especially the ones who write newsletters). Tune them out. It’s nothing serious.

2) If you found a way to make that discomfort disappear, it’d feel really nice. That’s why this challenge is worth doing.

Here's a non-fun personal story from when I was living in Costa Rica a few years ago.

Back then, my "normal" was often having some kind of a headache. It would start with a slight sense of pressure on the top of my head, which would increase until it was a throbbing pain, and by around 3pm I'd frequently be shut down for the day, sometimes for the next 24 hours.

Around the latter half of 2018, these migraines increased from maybe once a week (bad enough) to five times a week, pretty much destroying my ability to work. Fixing this became an exercise in identifying what the problem was.

Was it something Really Bad (like, Steve bad)? Maybe - but sometimes I felt just fine. Sometimes I was entirely symptoms-free. It didn’t make sense. So maybe there was a specific trigger. What was it?

We tried water, since I knew I was dehydrated (better known as Out Of Shape Englishman in Central America Syndrome). That helped - but the headaches kept coming. Negative, ghostrider.

Then I started paying close attention to my stomach. I've suffered from mild acid reflux for years, and one well-known side effect…is migraines.

On the advice of a friend, I tried focusing just on my stomach, treating it with a fascinating mixture of water, chopped papaya and a type of plant-based granulated horse medicine (bless you, Costa Rica) on the advice of my in-house doctor, Mariana - all of it designed to help naturally regulate the amount of acidity in my stomach throughout the day.

The results were extraordinary. It didn’t fully cure me of acidity, but for the first time since I landed in the country, I could stop myself getting a migraine, almost 100% effectively - and so I could get back to work.

None of this would have happened if I'd stoically carried on as usual, if I hadn’t paid attention properly to what my body was trying to tell me. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle (and a lot of afternoons I could have spent exploring Costa Rica, instead of laying on the couch with a bag of ice on my head).

So, I challenge you to avoid kicking yourself with regret.

Here's how.

1. Start By Meditating. A noisy mind will drown out all the messages coming from your body. Download Headspace or Calm, or try Jodi’s free meditations here, and still your mind for a few days - as many as it takes to quieten your thoughts enough to become unusually aware of how your body feels.

2. Audit Your Body. How are your legs? Is that some knee-pain there? How's your lower back - throbbing a bit? Neck stiff? Stretch slightly and see what aches. Scan down your body and focus your attention on each part. What's going on right there? Build a picture, not just as a whole, but piece by piece.

3. Choose Something To Improve. What problem area do you want to alleviate or level up? Get specific. Don't let your virtuous side kick in: "oh, I want to improve everything." This will stop you from getting started on anything. Today, you're getting hyperlocal with your health.

4. Come Up With A Plan Of Action. This isn't a replacement for getting healthy, so don't treat it as such. Your body isn't a car - you can't swap out a part and it's ready to go back on the road. No - this is where you can start getting healthy if you wish. Or you could just focus on this one issue first.

Either way, you'll get something important done.

Investigate ways to start fixing this one problem in a targeted fashion. Go to Google search and see who has done that and has good advice you can try out. Ask a doctor. Check in with a sports-mad friend. Find something that works.

5. Commit. Use a habit-forming app, or scratch a mark on the wall, whatever works. Just keep doing it, and track your progress. Keep going for a few weeks.  Be focused. Be consistent. Make that change happen, through sheer tenacious bloodymindedness.

6. Enjoy The Satisfaction Of Being A Lot Smarter Than I Was. Great job, damn you. I bet you'll outlive me.

How To Hold Yourself Accountable

Social media is absolutely brimming with people who would just love to make you uncomfortable if you promise to do something and then can’t be bothered to do it. Friends, family, loved ones - they are all ready to make you feel bad about yourself, any time you need.

So how about sharing your chosen challenge with them on whatever social media platform you choose, using the hashtag #EverythingIsAmazing ?

(And if you use that hashtag, I’ll see it too, and will be able to give you grief as well.)

Best of luck!

Images: Kate Kalvach; Tumisu; Timon Wanner; Paradox Interactive.

If all of that sounds like…a lot, please start here.

I don’t really understand how the internet works (I think it’s powered by shouting?) but I do know that if you click the button below, it will send further editions of this newsletter into your email Inbox where you can calmly procrastinate about reading them at your leisure:

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Today, it is my pleasure to share a conversation with someone who recently made me alarmingly aware of how noisy and obnoxious I can be in person.

I first heard of Sophie Stephenson’s work when she was featured in an episode of the podcast Living Adventurously, featuring adventurer Al Humphreys cycling around Yorkshire talking to interesting people. I really liked what she had to say about the need to give ourselves time to think - so I signed up to her email list.

Skip forward a year into the first months of the pandemic. Sophie sends out an email - she’s holding a series of free online gatherings, a chance to meet a few strangers, share a few thoughts, invite a little serendipity back into our increasingly socially regimented existence. I quickly sign up for one.

Since lockdowns began, have you been on any casual Zoom calls with multiple attendees? How did they go? Of the handful I’ve done, most quickly devolved into the equivalent of a heated debate in the House of Commons, or perhaps a field of angry sheep - where your only hope of being heard is raising your voice to a volume that drowns out everyone else’s.

Sometimes that’s fun, and gets your blood pumping in a thrilling way (see: pub nights when the football’s on). But other times - say, in the middle of a pandemic - it’s the last thing your already-frazzled brain needs.

It quickly becomes clear that Sophie’s virtual get-together is nothing like that. Not only does she have a really effective system for giving everyone the space to think and speak, she also listens. Really, really listens.

You can tell someone is a good listener, because you feel it. You relax. Your guard comes down. You reach for deeper thoughts, find the courage to articulate more difficult things, and find yourself speaking in that other voice, not the one you use to defend yourself against a fickle, uncaring world, but the one that speaks inside your head and your heart, the one that’s brave enough to blurt out what you really think.

Unfortunately for me, my “other voice” is frequently an excitable gabbler. And when it was my turn to speak to the group, I was feeling so engaged and relaxed that I started gabbling. And then I suddenly became aware of it - and brought my outward facing voice back in to do some damage control in the form of self-mocking humour (my usual defensive shtick when I’m feeling a bit socially awkward).

All this was delightful.

Well, okay, not exactly at the time, perhaps - but it was a revelation to me. I later thought back over that whole group conversation. How much time had I spent giving my full attention to everyone else, instead of thinking about what I was going to say next and how I was going to say it? Where exactly was my attention before I spoke? Answer: on myself. Where was it while I was speaking? On myself.

Since then I’ve had over a hundred virtual calls (some with total strangers, thanks to things like this) and I’ve been trying to devote more and more of my attention to the person I’m allegedly there to listen to. It’s…not always easy for an excitable gabbler like me. But I don’t think this newsletter would exist without it.

Correctly-applied curiosity is like a form of meditation that points outwards, treating the world around you as something far more interesting and insightful than anything you could have found solely within the Spaghetti Junction of your own thoughts. This means that paying attention properly is the super-skill that powers a truly curious life - and it has absolutely everything to teach you.

So, I believe, does Sophie Stephenson. So it was an honour to virtually sit down with her earlier this week and talk about her work.

(This interview was edited for clarity.)

Mike: I'd like to start with the Thinking Environment™ that you teach. One of its components is attention - and I've been looking at attention on the curiosity side of things. I've been reading Rapt by Winifred Gallagher - she's a journalist that took a deep dive into attention as a tool for more focused ways of living. And you describe attention as an “act of creation”. Can you explain that a bit for me?

Sophie: Everything we do in a Thinking Environment is really around helping people to think for themselves. So the underlying premise is that our quality of life -  all the actions, our relationships, our health, our well being, all of that - depends on the quality of the thinking. And what we found is one of the things people really need, or benefit from, is attention, and so we define attention as listening with palpable interest, and without interruption. If you think about a normal conversation, you would have two or more people exchanging ideas, going back and forwards in either a polite way - someone takes turns, or you speak when I say so. Except most of the time, it's filled with interruption, people trying to confirm or clarify or get their point across - but there's not much attention.

And what we know is when you can get this sustained palpable interest in somebody else, and not only not interrupt their words or their stream of thoughts (because often we don't say all of the things that we're thinking), if you can sustain that interest through the pauses as well, it’s powerful. Because the pauses are - there's almost like a wave of thinking, and then there's a pause, the moment we are generating and creating and making connections in order to keep thinking. But most people think the pause is where they can interrupt.

Mike: Yeah, and it's usually where we’re waiting - having already thought of what we’re going to say next, while the other person is talking. I hate that in myself. So awful.

Sophie: I think people often think of listening as passive, not “doing”. But you're actually doing quite a lot in terms of maintaining interest. And it’s that sustained interest which allows somebody to create new thoughts, new connections, new ways of thinking about things, otherwise we're just replaying what we already know.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Is that part of the teaching that you do - making people aware of the ways that we distract ourselves when we should be listening?

Sophie: I think it becomes really obvious, really quickly, where people sit with their listening, and I think there are different ways we listen in different contexts, and it's always that point at which we realise it's starting to impact us or impact the people around us. When people start getting curious about it, it's like, “well what am I missing here?” You get that sense of what you were saying - “I don't like it when I do that”, and you almost get this inconsistency that doesn't align with how you want to be...and yet you can't help myself. Not interrupting is hard, unless you've had it modelled for you. We live in a world that interrupts, and our minds are so used to being distracted that actually paying sustained attention to anything requires practice. People think that listening is a trait - so they think you're either a good listener or you're not. And it's not. It's a skill.

Mike: You said in the podcast you did with Al Humphreys (my favourite episode of that season) - you mentioned you used to not be a very good listener? So, was it curiosity about yourself that led you into this career, where you realised you could help lots of other people with it as well?

Sophie: We teach what we most need to learn!  I wanted to improve my listening, and I found a random reference to the Thinking Environment in another book called Fat, 40 And Fired - and the author said if you do nothing else after reading this, get a copy of Nancy Kline’s Time To Think. And what's interesting is - in a Thinking Environment, we don't really focus on listening. Listening is a byproduct. So when you pay attention, you end up becoming a good listener. I knew I wanted to be a good listener - it became apparent in my role that it was limiting me and limiting the people around me that I wasn't listening to. And yet now I very rarely think about listening. I think more about paying attention. Where's my attention right now? And because of that, I end up not interrupting, which makes me a better listener,

Mike: So it's a virtuous side-effect. That’s really interesting. I’ve found that a lot of becoming more curious seems to be about slowing down and giving yourself the space to be able to pay attention. Do you think with social media - say, Twitter often seems like the opposite of that? Where it forces you to form an opinion quickly? Do you find that social media can push in the wrong direction here?

Sophie: I think social media is a tool, and then there’s how you use that tool. It doesn't need to be a problem. But if you don't think about how you want to use that tool - it’s got inbuilt distraction and addiction. So unless you're really consciously choosing how you use it, it will create a sense of urgency around itself. And what we know about thinking is, we don't do our best thinking when we're rushed, when we're stressed. You might give your first thought to something, but it isn't necessarily your best thought. You need to pause and create some space so you can really think, do I want to respond to this? What do I want to say? Is this useful, is this nourishing, is it aligned with my values, is it actually important?

With a lot of the work I do, the first step is encouraging people to find some ease. I think Oliver Burkeman called it, “we're in an epidemic of busyness” and we wear our busyness like a badge of honour. And yet - are we doing the right things, that bring most meaning to our lives and the people around us?

So with social media, unless you have really thought about how you want to use it, how you want to engage, who the people are you're hoping to support - well, it can have a different agenda than you do. And it's easy to be busy. Actually stopping, creating some ease and some space, and some time to think and work things out, and consciously choose how we respond - that’s the real work. But I don't think it's the tool that's the problem.

Mike: Do you feel over the last year, like there's been a shift towards people giving themselves the time to reassess in that way?

Sophie: I guess I can only talk from my experience. For some people, their basic needs haven't been met, in which case it's really hard to think about anything but that. But I think what this has done is force almost everyone to stop. And that potentially creates a little bit more time to think. For some people, they'll just feel that without new distractions, it's quite scary, you know? You stop, then you're confronted with realising you’re maybe not happy with your work or your life or your relationship - but then we just get busy again somehow. Yet I think what the last year has done is amplify trends that were already there. There was already a shift away from this relentlessness of frantic busyness - people were already starting to question that. So maybe it amplified that and created more spaces where people can connect with other people who are also feeling that. But I think it had already begun. 

Mike: So if we make a ‘new normal’, it’s going to be - not just a reaction to the last year? I’ve heard conversations around an opportunity for change, I don't want to go back to that again. Like, Over the last year I've realised this, and I’ve realised I want to have some kind of change here.

Sophie: I also think it has overtly challenged assumptions that are normally unconscious. Things that were unquestioned unconsciously, and previously taken as absolutes, but now thrown out. And if we don't assume we understand those things, what else do we not assume we understand? Yeah - maybe just really starting to question some of the assumptions we make about work and life and where we should focus ourselves. Absolutely.

Mike: I realised that I had an assumption with a question I asked you by email in advance of this. As a bloke who grew up having conversations with his friends that were usually competitive and sometimes confrontational and very argumentative, I thought this was a male trait, to argue without listening better. But in the interview you did with Alastair, you said you haven't noticed a gender difference in the work that you do. So now I’m wondering - was this just trait within myself, rather than men in general? If so - for someone like me, how would I start to get out of the habit of seeing conversations as things that I should always try to win?

Sophie: I suppose my first thought is: how's that going for you?

Mike:*laughs*

Sophie: I think the first thing is we have to decide it’s important to improve that. I often think in a conversation, my starting point is what I can learn. And the only way I can invite that in is by creating space for somebody else to really share what they think. *holds up a glass of water* Let's say we're talking, and actually what I most want to share with you is down at the bottom of this glass. But every time you interrupt, ask me a question, confirm or clarify something or you empathise by sharing something with me, you effectively top up that glass of water. And so what you're missing is the opportunity to find out, truly deeply, who I am and what's important. I think we just miss the opportunities to really learn about someone else, and learn what's really important to them.

But what I also think we miss is the opportunity to change our minds. Because when you listen really deeply to somebody else, their thoughts act as a generator of yours - as long as you're willing. And so I think there's something beautiful about when you're actually in proper dialogue with somebody, you both end up thinking differently than you did at the beginning, rather than it just being well I'm going to tell you what I think. We have to earn the right to hear somebody else's story, and listening is one really really good way of doing that, because otherwise we're only ever, you know, reading the cover of the book.

And part of it is about being at ease in ourselves. What is it that's so urgent in us that we need to shout about it at the expense of listening? Am I speaking because I want to feel like I'm clever, or I want to impress someone -  because actually, the paradox there is, they're probably not listening to you. You just shouted them down, or you just interrupted them, so they're having a stress response that stops them listening. So what was the point of all this?

You know, one of one of the beautiful things Nancy Kline says is - how do I know that what I'm about to say is more important than what you're about to think?

Mike: Wow. Yes.

Sophie: So in simple terms - if you only did one thing, I would try as best you can to not interrupt someone, if you can. And you know, it will feel odd to begin with. But actually the more you do it, the more you get comfortable not interrupting, and it pays off really quickly. The other thing is: can we also listen to ourselves? How do you listen to yourself? We have all these thoughts going around, and most of us just distract ourselves from all of that, because it's noisy and messy and confused and full of emotion. But can we allow ourselves just to sit with it? And really pay attention to ourselves?

Mike: Like the study of undergraduate students that preferred giving themselves electric shocks rather than sitting with their own thoughts...

Sophie: Yes! And we see that all the time, it's part of this restlessness we have, with who we are and what we’re so busy doing. A realisation that working this way hasn't been feeling good, or there's a problem with something that feels a bit scary, so I'll just get busy. It's kind of deep work. Deep work is the thing that we don't want to sit with. But as Cal Newport has said, sustained attention is one of the most important things in life. And if we're if we're losing that ability to not interrupt ourselves, how can we give that to our work?

Mike: So true. Do you find that when you're teaching people to really give their thoughts time to brew, they come back later to tell you about a richer experience they’re now having with a  broadening and deepening of that experience of thinking?

Sophie: One of the paradoxes of working in a Thinking Environment is people don't need that much uninterrupted time. Just minutes, sometimes, to tackle something that has felt like a mountain. They make these connections so quickly. We don't need a huge amount of time. It's just we don't get any. When I start my courses, we do an exercise where we have two minutes of uninterrupted time each - and then over the course, that might go to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, all the way up to 40 minutes. And just the first 2 minutes can feel excruciating. But so quickly, it feels very very natural. There's an ease to it. It's so easy to think for ourselves when the conditions are right. So when other people are interested, when they are valuing our time with their attention, when we're treated as an equal, it's like all of those things that we need are finally present - and it's really quite simple.

Mike: So why do we complicate all this? I wrote just last week about the difference between simplicity and sophistication, which really just means a high level of complexity, but it seems modern society so often equates “sophisticated” with “good”. Emotionally too, like sending an email that you've been putting off for ages, but the actual action of it is a 2-minute job. Why do we make things so complicated? That's a big question, sorry!

Sophie: A lot of that in my work would be down to not having an opportunity to think about it first. Often there will be assumptions that we make about ourselves or about others, and that stops doing us what we want, so we will have an assumption that it won't be received well. Or that I'll get it wrong, or I'm not good enough. There's lots of these assumptions that we have. And if there is an assumption there, which is both untrue and limiting, you won't take the action, or you won't do the thing. By its nature, an assumption is something we take argely without evidence, largely unexamined, but which drives our behaviour. So you see I'm not writing this email and that’s awful, but that's driven by an assumption -  so unless you do the work to replace that assumption about your behaviour, you're sort of relying on willpower to get it done. That's very tricky to sustain.

Mike: I love that. So - I know you're starting a series of free online masterclasses starting at the end of this month. They seem to be a great way to be introduced to everything you teach. Could you tell me a bit more about that, and what someone could expect, coming into it?

Sophie: I’m so excited to do these!  So - the Thinking Environment is a set of 10 components. Attention is one of them, Ease is another, Encouragement, Difference - and so on. These are the conditions we know that really support people to think well so they can  thrive and flourish.

And so what I'm going to do is, once a month, I'm going to take one of the components, and really introduce it properly to people that know nothing about it - but also there'll be people on the calls that have done lots of work who will be back to refresh, so I’ll share some of my latest thinking on that. But also, it’s to create a space where people can think for themselves so, what would this would look like in my life or work, how could I start bringing it more in, presented hopefully as some new information or a fresh way of thinking about something.

I really want people to leave having learned something they can do differently. It's meant to be an introduction to people that don't know about the Thinking Environment - but given purely from a place of generosity, like, I love this stuff. I love sharing it. Anyone can come along to everything, or pick the component that they think they most need so there's no requirement to come to all of them. I hope it’ll be useful!

Mike: Fantastic. I love what you do, and I love your enthusiasm for it. Thank you so much! 

Sophie: My pleasure! But there was one thing I was going to ask you - and it was about curiosity.

Mike: Fire away.

Sophie: When I look at curiosity, and look at the definitions (I like my definitions) - curiosity is a strong desire to know or learn something. And I'm wondering if, when we're listening to somebody, I wonder if curiosity isn't helpful? 

Mike: Ooh.

Sophie: My thinking is, curiosity has to come from a place inside us, that I'm curious, I want to know, I want to learn. And so it puts the focus on me. Whereas for me when I think about being interested - that's all about the other person. It's a very similar definition, isn't it? Still wanting to know or learn about someone or something  - but maybe one that feels like there's a different energy there?

Mike: Hmm. Yeah, I think - if you go into a conversation with somebody and you have a pre prepared question in your head already, at some level, for you, the whole point of the conversation is to have that question answered. Like, I am listening to you but also you are serving my question. But I guess what it really should be is...a mixture of things. Helping with my question, yes,but hopefully, I'm going to end up with new questions I'd never considered before. And hopefully a set of assumptions that have been thoroughly challenged - or destroyed. Like, Oh, wow. I'm not just wrong, I'm completely wrong. I would hope that is what good curiosity looks like in practice - that mixture of the selfish, I want to close my own information gap, but also the open and aware, I want to learn the limits of my own ignorance, that proof of how little I know about the world. And the awareness that in the back of my mind, there’s this script I’ve made for applying curiosity. And that sometimes I need to turn that script off completely and just listen. And...you’ve just clarified all that for me, which is a perfect example. So thank you!

Sophie: It’s been a pleasure.

Sign up to Sophie’s free masterclasses here.

Images: Glen Carrie; Chris Lawton; Sophie Stephenson.

Tomorrow, I’ll have an interview with someone who has made a career teaching some of the most important skills for a more curious life: how to think and listen better.

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But for now, I’d like to talk about a substance that was once so alarming to the general public that the composer Bach attempted to reassure it with the following line:

"If I couldn't three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish, I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat."

As an obsessive coffee-drinker, I think about coffee a lot. Usually in a banal way, like “ooh, I’m almost out, so I should definitely walk 5 miles through the driving rain to get some more because, priorities” and “how long’s it been since my last one? Can my body handle it or is that a really bad idea? And if it’s a really bad idea, shall I do it anyway?”

But recently, I’ve wondered about deeper things. For example, do I like drinking coffee - or do I like having drank coffee?

I certainly seem to like the taste of it, and get a huge sense of satisfaction from my first sip, that rich, adult cocktail of smoky bitterness that perfectly suits the sensual extravaganza of being outdoors. For me, tea feels like a four-walls drink, something comforting that evokes memories of warm socks, electric blankets and dozing off awkwardly in your chair in front of Eastenders.

In contrast, coffee doesn’t feel comforting. It’s not there to make friends with you. You drink coffee to step up, not wind down. Coffee is unsympathetic to your needs and if you don’t regulate your consumption of it, it will hijack your brain and turn it into the equivalent of a full-volume, nonstop loop of Nyan Cat - for hours.

Ah, that delicious, jittery state of having-had-coffee. The buzz of the caffeine, the rightness of how the day feels afterwards, the way its aftertaste can last all morning if I made it strong enough.

And yet I remember a time I really hated the stuff, same way I really hated my very first taste of beer in my early teens.

Why…doesn’t that feel weirder to me? Has my coffee-addicted brain rewired itself so much that when I think I love the taste, I actually love the effect of being psychoactively drugged? And if so, does coffee actually, objectively taste any good, full stop?

Here’s a related mystery about the taste of coffee: a fair few people like it, but in my experience, everyone loves the smell of it. I have met people who deeply hate drinking coffee, who find the stuff brackish and foul, and yet will twitch their nostrils above a freshly-opened bag of ground coffee and say, “ohhhh, that smells fantastic!”

But I thought taste and smell were basically the same thing (which is why you can’t taste anything if you hold your nose)? And just how different is the smell of coffee to the taste of it - and why is that?

Time to stop and investigate all this properly.

I’m starting here (above), with the latest book from Candace, with whom I chatted about stillness a few weeks back. She’s spent years professionally nerding out on this topic - yet I’m not even sure if her taste-buds can be trusted here. Take her first experience of trying coffee, from her gorgeous Longreads piece on the subject:

That makes me wonder: does Candace actually like drinking coffee, or has her brain been drug-programmed in the same way mine might have been? Hell, do any of us actually like the taste of this thing?

I need answers.

But really, I’m hoping to find better questions. After spending my entire adult life pouring gallons of coffee down my gullet, I’ve never taken a long, hard look at it. I could chase this topic in all sorts of directions (“is coffee bad for our health?” is an evergreen newspaper headline) but I’ll restrict myself to looking at the taste vs. the smell of it. That should be more than enough.

Like when I was looking into my late dad’s colour-blindness, I’m hoping there’s a lot here that I don’t yet know I don’t know. That would be…deeply stimulating.

More soon.

Images: Mukul Wadhwa; Max D. Photography; Candace Rardon/Longreads.

(These aspirational analogies have nothing to do with the fact that I’m myopic and clumsy. Total coincidence.)

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OK. So…I think we need to talk.

A month after the first national lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon the UK, I was living in a wooden cabin on the west Scottish coast (the same one I’m writing this in, because a year later I’ve come full circle).

A cabin in the coast. It sounds idyllic - but the relative isolation was getting to me.

I was at the edge of a suburb, but for lockdown reasons, I wasn’t seeing anyone when I went for a walk. I wasn’t a local so I didn’t know anyone around here. My usual approaches for making new friends - blundering ineptly into small-talk, tripping and falling into people’s gardens, being savaged by their pets and so on - were denied to me. In the unlikely event I did manage to make a new friend, we’d have to stand metres apart and shout at each other. Socially it was all a great big Nope.

I’m sure you have your own version of this. It hit us all hard in this way.

So the weeks passed - and while I was in a really beautiful place (thank you, Scotland, I am so grateful for how welcoming you were), I also started feeling profoundly alone.

Loneliness came at me from an unexpected direction. Rather than feeling sad, I felt uninspired. Blunted, like a knife that needed sharpening. I realised I needed a certain amount of serendipity - like overheard conversations, like different perspectives and counter-arguments, and like the madcap, fast-paced bouncing around of ideas that requires another person to be fully present.

I realised all these things usually helped me write, and helped me find things worth writing about - but for now, they were gone.

But what about social media? Hey, I still had that!

Yeah. Well. If ever there was a time that showed me how utterly inadequate the internet is - and in particular how social media is - as a replacement for real-life social interaction, it was 2020. (I know many, many others felt this too. Reckon you might be one of them.)

So I fell back on my best and most reliable survival strategy - one that has stood me in good stead for nearly five decades now.

I decided to do something stupid.

Firstly, I created a web-chat invite system on a free web calendar - the kind of thing normally used by important business-type people, which added to the fun of it.

Then I invited all my online friends to book a call with me for exactly no reason whatsoever.

These were individual, one-to-one calls. I’d done a few massive Zoom calls early on, which felt like going to the pub: ie. fun, joyful, noisy, incoherent and completely exhausting. I also didn’t want something structured and formal that felt like a meeting:

“Sorry, I’ll…I’ll have to interrupt you for a second, Helen. John? I’ve noticed you haven’t spoken yet. Do you have anything to bring to our alleged friendship?”

(Zoom fatigue is real. And it is hilarious that someone has now made a service that helps you fake a reason to escape it.)

As well as keeping it person-to-person, I wanted something unpredictable. And I figured there wasn’t much that was less predictable than having a call for no stated reason whatsoever - so that’s how I publicly described it.

I asked.

And dozens signed up.

And we chatted - and it was delightful.

It really scratched that itch, and I felt recharged again. (And everyone I spoke to seemed to feel the same way! Or at least they didn’t immediately un-friend me, which I’m taking to mean the same thing.)

Recklessly giddy with triumph, I threw my net wider. Anywhere I could, I posted the link - and after it got picked up by an influential friend’s newsletter, I started getting calls with complete strangers. Journalists, a scientist, a brilliant young Renaissance-brained musician from Texas, an architect, a salmon fisherman. All sorts of folk I’d have been hard-pressed to meet in person, let alone talk to.

All in all, over the following 3 months, I had just short of a hundred calls. Every one of them felt like a tiny dose of blessed normality, to help keep both of us moving forward towards the full-sized variety just over the horizon.

And now it’s time to do it again.

Starting later this week, I’m opening up a few calls a day to whoever is mad and brave enough to sign up, using this Calendly page:

> Book an ‘Everyone Is Amazing’ call on this page <

You could do two things with this.

1) Steal the idea from me. No, seriously. Do that. It really works. Over the last 12 months, how many times did you strike up a conversation with a stranger? Do you miss it - that little electric sizzle of nervous, delighted awkwardness that pushes you right into this moment, right here now, and keeps you on your toes? If the answer is “since you mention it, YES” - then open a free account at Calendly or some other similar service, put aside half an hour or more, a few days a week. Ask people you miss chatting with in person - then invite people you’ve never met in person. Try it. It might be exactly what you need.

2) Book a call with me. Yes, really. Here’s the link again. It’ll be fun - or, it’ll be over in just half an hour! Either way, it’ll be a tiny adventure for both of us.

So that’s what I’m starting this week (and adding to my new listening-journaling and outdoorsy name-learning habits).

What’s filling up your free time right now?

(Hit Reply or drop a comment below.)

Images: Mike Sowden; Jan Tinneberg; Calendly.

It’s week 4 of the Everything Is Amazing challenges (well, 4 and 5, really, since I took a week off). Here’s why they’re worth doing - I mean, this isn’t just whimsical sadism on my part.

The rulebook shakes out thusly:

• You pick one or more of these currently lockdown-appropriate challenges and have a go over the coming week.

• If you get it done, you’ll enjoy fun, meaningful benefits over time, in random and unpredictable ways. (That’s the payoff of seeking a more curious life.)

• If you don’t get it done, you will suffer the horrific and terrifying fate of having exactly nothing happen to you as a result. Think about that for a while. Think about it some more.

• First time doing one of these? Lucky you - that gives you twenty to choose from today. Here are the first, second and third installments. Spoilt for choice, mate.

If you like the idea of inflicting sadistic whimsy on someone else, use the button below to get started:

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Right then. Here’s the week 4/5 kaboodle.

1) Sleep In The Garden

It’s starting to get a bit warmer out there (although your mileage may vary depending on geography) - so it’s time to make the neighbours think you’ve lost your damn mind.

Ah, the joys of sleeping outdoors! I've written a lot about this. It's a pet obsession of mine So I will try to restrain myself here.

Being out in nature can do fantastic, wonderful, spectacular things for your mental health, clarity of thinking, and sense of well-being. But it's also kinda of a tough thing to do, the first time you do it. What if someone spotted you? What if a cow trod on you - or a bear?

I get that, so I won't ask you to sleep in a ditch (although bonus points WILL be awarded if you do that, and maybe an invite to my first book launch because I think we'd get along brilliantly).

Instead, you're going to sleep under the stars in a completely safe place that you legally own. You can set up a tent if you like, although, you know, woah look at those stars if you opt for the roofless version and it’s not raining. You can pop in and out of your house as many times as you like - for a sandwich, for a mug of cocoa or a glass of wine, for a wee. Whatever. Go crazy!

The only rule is that when you actually sleep, you sleep outside.

When the first lockdown descended in England last year, the sons of some friends of mine decided to raise money for charity by sleeping in the garden as long as they could. They managed to sleep outside for fifty days in a row (raising £1,580 in the process).

I’m challenging you to achieve just one-fiftieth of that. Easy peasy. You'll wonder what you were worried about.

(Afterwards, I mean. At the time you'll be freaking out a bit - but it'll be a good kind of freaking out. Yes, there is indeed a good kind. You’re about to discover it this week.)

2) Start One Of These Three Types Of Journal

If you equate “journalling” with “angsty, self-obsessed narcissistic nonsense,” okay! If you want to do that, go ahead. Sounds awful, but it’s a free world.

However, the actual definition of a journal should be “attention-focusing communication technology.” That’s what unites all the many, many types of journals out there: they make you pay attention to an unusual degree, and to record your thoughts in a meaningful way.

We’re used to hearing about diaries, which can be fascinating things if they’re written by the right person (I’m absolutely loving Michael Palin’s three-volume collection right now) - but there are other types.

Here are three you could test out this week, to see if they suit you.

a) A Zero-Bullsh*t Journal

When you were a kid, you probably kept a diary to hold all the things you could never say in public - all sorts of information that could destroy your life if your parents or friends got hold of it.

That's probably why you ended up burying it somewhere secret, or feeding it into a paper shredder at your dad's or mom's workplace, or just burning it in the garden.

(Fun-only-in-retrospect fact: I accidentally set fire to the side of my parental house in this way. NEVER put the smoking remains of your diary straight in a black plastic bin, so it can catch fire and send a sheet of blue flame up the side of the house that melts the kitchen’s plastic guttering until it falls across the garden and leaves an evil-smelling line of bubbling slag that it takes you an entire summer of Saturdays to scrape up and scrub away. Think of it like, “Mike did this so you don’t have to.” Thanks.)

However you stopped, you almost certainly did. Adults aren't as good as kids at being that recklessly honest. Until now, that is.

Your challenge this week is to buy a diary or notebook - and start writing the actual truth in it. 

Because it’s the actual truth, you will never let another human being read this diary. You will conquer the fear of someone accidentally discovering it by using all your grown-up ingenuity to render it unfindable or unreadable.

I say again: do it so nobody will ever see it except you.

And for that reason, you can speak the language of your unfiltered thoughts - the things you feel secure in thinking because nobody can hear you think. This diary will become a true and accurate recording of those unsayables.

And yes, that should be absolutely scary as hell. Sweat freely. It's allowed.

You have 7 days to document the unexpurgated truth about your life - and if you feel like it, you could keep going once the time is up. And if not? Seven days from today, you can burn that diary or notebook in the garden! Just make sure you dunk the smouldering remains in cold water straight afterwards. Do it for me, ok? Thanks.

(b) A Listening Journal

“One of the best parts of this class for me was a very simple exercise, one that I have often assigned in classes but very rarely practiced myself: keeping a listening journal. There are a few ways to approach the assignment: some that involve quite active listening, some that involve more passive reception, ones that involve making a recording, and others that just involve a pencil and paper. In my experience, there is no wrong way to do it, as long as you find yourself listening somewhere. It’s essentially a form of meditation.”

- Radio producer Craig Eley

(c) A Nature Journal

This is one of the rare instances where I would recommend you check Facebook. There are some really big nature-journalling groups on there - like this one - and they’re filled with exactly the sort of people you’d expect: thoughtful, observant, calming, and utterly uninterested in yelling at each other, which certainly cannot be said for the rest of that platform.

As for how to write a nature journal, that’s up to you. I’m currently taking a buffet approach to the one I’m working on, recording and researching a plant, a bird and a rock in rotation. Maybe you just want to sketch what you see (that’s a previous challenge, by the way, see number 5 here), or use the microphone on your phone to speak into and record your thoughts. Or something else. What would feel the right approach for the experience you want to have? Do that.

3) Drink More Water

This challenge is really simple, and at first glance, looks really lame. 

But here's a personal story.

A few years ago, I lived in Portugal for two months. I'm British, so when temperatures soared to 38 degrees C and I stupidly didn’t up my water intake, I started suffering.

And then the day-ruining headaches started.

I ended up spending the best part of 10 days curled into a ball because my head was pounding so much - and after hydrating properly for a week (with the help of my then-other-half who is a doctor and knew I needed to replenish salts as well as fluids), I still felt so lightheaded that I could hardly walk straight. 

Welcome to the exciting world of severe dehydration. 

Your body is 70% water and contains anything upwards of 30 litres of water, without which you would grind to a painful halt. When you're unusually hot (or when you’re unusually cold), when you're stressed, or when you're ill - all that water leaves your body at a frightening rate, and if you don't replenish it, you will feel remarkably terrible in record time. 

Unfortunately for me, I seem to have now become easily dehydratable (even years later I seem to be super-sensitive to it) and it’s a thing I have to keep close track of, or it’ll trigger a migraine. But it’s certainly not just me. In a mild way, it seems everyone is a little low on water, and it’s stopping their bodies from working as well as they should. Especially the brain, which is over 70% water.

If you’re trying to do anything taxing with your brain, like improving your longterm memory to chess Grandmaster standards, you haven’t a hope if you’re dehydrated.

Right now, your body is probably struggling. Just a little. But enough to become highly aware of when you're getting enough water. Try it. Take a drink - and if it makes you realise you were a bit thirsty and didn’t know it until now, you’re mildly dehdrated. (Keep drinking. You'll feel amazing.)

That's the goal for this week - to increase your water-drinking by at least 25%, and monitor it carefully to make sure you're hitting that target every day.

Sounds laughably easy.

And yes, it's actually quite easy. It's so easy that it’s the kind of thing you end up not doing because the bar feels so pathetically low it’s not worth attempting (watch out for that, it’s a common trap).

But attempt it anyway, because the benefits for your well-being and long-term health could be extraordinary.

4) Learn To Fold Clothes Better

Hot on the heels of the whiteknuckle-ride of “drink more water,” am I really suggesting that everyone reading this doesn't know how to do something as insultingly humdrum as folding their clothes? Am I being that judgemental?

Yup. Because there’s folding and there’s folding.

Your ability to fold is on a scale. Most people are down towards the bottom, the "oh, b****cks to it, I suppose that’ll do" skill-level of clothes-folding. Until recently I was firmly in this category. Yes, they don't exactly stack on the shelf because they're a bit of a mess, but hey - close enough, right?

Then I discovered that further up the scale is the WikiHow category of folding: still fairly obvious, but including classic folding techniques like the travel roll (if roll your clothes properly, they don't crease in your backpack).

Then you're into the realm of professionals - and crazy, crazy stuff like the 2-second shirt fold, and for business travel types, how to fold a suit, pants and shirt to go in a suitcase with nary a wrinkle.

If you show someone else the T-shirt technique in action, it will blow their mind. And if you could get so good that you could fold it in less than a second, well, it's basically a magic trick and when the pandemic is over, you should hire yourself out to children’s parties.

As for "why is folding clothes important" - well, it, erm - it looks cool? And wrinkles are ugly. And you're proving you're a well-rounded human being, especially in front of the opposite sex. And, and....

Okay, maybe this isn't the most pulse-thumpingly meaningful challenge in the world.

(But it is spectacular if you do it right.)

5) Master The First 60 Seconds Of Your Day

A while back I watched the film Groundhog Day with my partner - and she was greatly impressed by the oft-repeated scene where the bedside alarm hits 6am, Bill Murray leaps out of bed and rushes over to the sink to slap cold water on his face.

"Oh my God. I could never do that," she said to me. "Too early! Too quick!"

But she sounded impressed as well as horrified. Let's face it - Phil Connors may be a bloody awful human being (at the start of the film anyway) - but he really nails the first 60 seconds of his morning routine.

There's a lot of stuff online about how your morning routine is the most important part of the day - mainly aimed, as far as I can see, at self-employed young folk in startup land who haven't yet learned how to get out of bed before noon.

For the rest of the world, the response might be, "Ha, must be nice to have that kind of time." (And if you have a family, your time is rarely your own, and never for the whole morning.)

However, I'd argue that everyone has complete control over the first 60 seconds of their day, no matter what the emergency. (For example, a house always takes longer than 60 seconds to burn down.)

Now, 60 seconds may not sound like a lot. But it's enough time to stagger to the sink and throw water on your face (I've seen the film a dozen times, I can confirm it). It's also enough time to do 10 pushups, or 10 situps, or stretch your body a few times. If you're quick, you could get a headstand in. You could go up and down the stairs twice! You could do a lap of the house!!

In short: you could do something that gets your body moving - ensuring you never have a zero-day for exercise.

(This also includes being in the shower at the end of those 60 seconds, so you're not putting it off because the bed's warm and the shower is c-c-cold - which is always why you're always the last person to use it, and always abandoning half your morning coffee as you rush out the door. Cut that out now. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.)

What could you get done in the first 60 seconds of your day?

This week you will decide, and then you will start doing it - for keeps.

Motivational tip

Social media is absolutely filled with people who would just love to make you uncomfortable if you promise to do something and then can’t be bothered to do it. Friends, family, loved ones - they are all ready to make you feel bad about yourself, any time you need.

So how about sharing your chosen challenge with them on whatever social media platform you choose, using the hashtag #EverythingIsAmazing ? (And if you use that hashtag, I’ll see it too, and will be able to give you grief as well.)

Allons-y, then!

Images: Geronimo Giqueaux; Md Salman; Marcos Paulo Prado; Bluewater Globe

This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about this, arranged like that. The great William Arthur Ward famously said, “The mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains” - and let me tell you, my friend, today’s installment is a real treat.

But first, here is a clickable button, into which I have invested rather too much of my fragile emotional wellbeing:

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Right then. Let’s dim the lights and get started.

It’s December 4th, 2016, and American chess Grandmaster Timur Gareyev is dozens of moves into a game against his human opponent.

The next piece is repositioned, and Gareyev waits for someone to tell him what just happened. He has no choice here. He can’t see the board, or his opponent, or anything - because there’s a blindfold over his face.

The only time he saw the board was right at the beginning, before the first move was made. Everything from then until now has relied on Gareyev’s imagination working in tandem with his astonishing memory.

Having been told what his opponent’s move was, Gareyev updates his inner imaginary chess board - and then moves to another game entirely. Now he’s up against someone else, in a different game that’s been going on just as long as the last one.

And after each player makes their move, the same happens again.

And again.

This isn’t a new thing for Gareyev. In Texas in 2012, he blindfoldedly squared off against 19 opponents at the same time. In December of the same year in Hawaii, he pushed this up to 27 opponents (this time done in stages), and in May 2013 in St Louis, he did it against 33 other chess players. These were all good chess players, mind. When you’re making a record-breaking attempt, the players you face have to be up to a certain standard.

But this time, he’s really going for it. Starting at 8.30am in a room on the campus of the University of Nevada, Gareyev has been playing chess simultaneously against 48 opponents without being able to see any of their moves: 43 players in the room with him, and a further 5 players who are participating virtually. The existing world record is 46 simultaneous games blindfolded. He’s aiming for two boards better than that.

Will he beat the record?

Whenever you read stories like Gareyev’s, about seemingly superhuman feats of physical or mental prowess, they’re often delivered in inspirational terms. So-and-so did such-and-such thing, and since they’re only human like you are, anything is possible. Go shoot for the moon!

This is essentially correct, partly because we rarely know what we or anyone else are actually capable of.

(Take the fascinating study of “sweat science,” the study of pain’s role in endurance sports. To us non-athletes, pain usually seems like the body’s way of yelling STOP NO WHAT THE HELL STOP DOING THAT ARE YOU AS DUMB AS A ROCK? Surely pain is a sign you’ve hit your limits? Well, no - in fact you’re probably nowhere near them. Listen to that podcast episode I link to up there, it’s fascinating.)

But also, stories like this usually gloss over the bloodcurdling investments in time, energy, concentration and self-imposed misery that precede such feats. That hard work is implied, sure. But it’s a harder sell as a narrative. You too can live your dreams, just by doing this reasonably uninspiring thing at least 50,000 times with highly infrequent meaningful validation over the next twenty-ish years.

Instead, I would like to take the Tools Of Titans route here - to look at this story and suggest it says something amazingly useful that we can bring into our own lives. And this nugget of amazing-usefulness wasn’t even in the original story I read about Gareyev. I stumbled across it on a chess enthusiast’s website, delivered as something of a no-brainer that everyone within the sport knew already.

Here’s a picture of Gareyev midway through his record attempt:

Yes, he’s on an exercise bike.

And Timur Gareyev mostly definitely does not have the stringbean musculature of the stereotype weedy, bookish chess nerd:

This is entirely logical. Gareyev completed his final game at 3.39am on Sunday morning, an almost unbroken run of 19 hours and 9 minutes of nonstop blindfolded chess-playing on 48 different fronts - an incredible feat of strength and stamina, up there with ultramarathon running and planking nonstop for 8 hours (no, that’s not a typo, you’re safe to click).

Professional chess players already know how important it is for them to stay fit. To everyone else, the idea of ripped, chiseled Grandmasters comes as a surprise - and more fool us, to be honest. It should have been obvious.

But this example has wider implications, and makes me think about my time studying Archaeology at a university.

For the theoretical, classroom-based parts of our course, we’d file into lecture halls, the kind that are recognisable the world over.

And then we’d sit, almost motionless, for hours, trying to crank our brains up to their highest state of activity.

I understand why it’d be deemed impractical - eg. the cost, and the prejudiced ableism implicit in such a blanket approach, and so on - but why not get those learning students on exercise bikes instead? Or treadmills? Or doing something that gets their heart-rates up to a higher level?

(Keep your thoughts out of the gutter, please. This is a PG newsletter.)

All this is important because of how our minds actually work. Regarding learning, what we call “the thinking brain” is not just the complex, 3lb mass of salty water and wrinkly tissue inside our skulls that looks like it’s been in the bath too long and won’t allow us to tickle ourselves. (Try it! Hard proof that human evolution lacks a sense of fun.)

Instead, we learn with our entire central nervous system, for which the brain works as a kind of data processing centre. You may as well say “we learn using our whole bodies.” So it stands to reason that anything that gets our blood pumping a bit harder is going to help the many places where a lot of that blood goes - including the headquarters of our mind, just behind our eyes.

So far, so obvious. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for the benefits of walking for creative thinking - for example, the “walking meetings” of Steve Jobs.

But Gareyev’s example suggests something else - that exercise helps us remember stuff better.

For his world record challenge, Gareyev was using both his short-term and long-term memory in ways few of us will ever achieve:

Gareyev’s main strategy…was finding ways to make each game stand out in his mind. “I try to create a story,” he says. That way when he got back to a board, sometimes approaching an hour since his last move, his brain had something to latch onto.

He did this with a combination of symbols from memory palace training; spontaneous, abstract imagery; and freeform associations tied to board number, player name, and his mental image of each opponent.

“If it’s board number 13, maybe I’ll play something risky because it sounds unlucky. Or board 21, that’s like blackjack so it has to be some kind of gamble,” he says. “If board 14 is a little boy and he plays Scandinavian, then that’s a theme. I capture a piece, it could be like a burst or a diagonal shape or I could see water flowing based on the theme.”

But it didn’t always go to plan:

On board 18, facing one of the least experienced players at the exhibition, he got off track when she didn’t move her knight away from an attacking pawn. By the time he got back to that board, he assumed her knight must be somewhere else - and then for a while he couldn’t figure out what was happening in that game. “I literally blanked and then I was like what happens here?” he says. “I couldn’t figure out [what was happening] all the way until the middle game when I lost a piece.”

- from “Blindfold Chess King Reveals His Memory Tricks,” Inverse

But at every stage there was the exercise bike, keeping his whole body in a state of sweaty excitement - and keeping his mind racing fast enough to overcome the catastrophic effects of sleep deprivation.

In this way, he was able to implant short-term memories in a way that stuck, and access deeper, long-term memories that told him how to play chess, comprised of thousands of games broken into smaller patterns of the boards, like pieces of a jigsaw.

No doubt about it. He’s a true mental athlete.

But you can do something like this too. You do it all the time.

You’re doing it right now.

Take the following image:

I hope you laughed. I certainly did. (It might take a second.)

This is funny because of our amazing, amazing ability to recognise an alternate meaning of a word, and then use it to recontextualise an entire sentence, fast enough to be of practical use. It’s a staggering feat of recall - and yet we don’t even have to think about it. It just kind of happens.

This is because we’ve been practicing this particular skill, speaking a language, for almost our entire lives. We’ll never have the time available to make that deep an investment into our memory-banks ever again. And this is a quiet tragedy, when you consider the energy spent desperately taking photos to serve as later prompts for our memories - even though there’s good evidence that photo-taking may actually diminish what we remember. (Thanks to Candace for that link there.)

So we need an accelerant - something that speeds up the whole process. And, obviously, we need something that actually works.

Exercise seems to fit the bill nicely: here’s the New York Times summing up some recent research on it. So does sex, which is arguably the most fun kind of exercise. And chocolate, of course. And a whole bunch of other nice-feeling things.

But applied curiosity seems to do it too - which was not something I was expecting when I first started looking into all this.

The common factor here is the triggering of dopamine: the neurotransmitter that seems to regulate feelings of reward (aka. satisfied pleasure), motivation, memory and attention. A burst of exercise will give you a big squirt of dopamine that seems to make it easier to use your hippocampus, the part of your brain most strongly associated with learning and memory.

And it appears that a lusty dollop of curiosity will do much the same thing.

(An interesting thing about the hippocampus: it’s so sensitive to stress that in cases of major depression, it’s been seen to shrink in volume by as much as 20%. Remember anhedonia, the state of chronic incuriosity that is a symptom of depression? It doesn’t seem like a leap to suggest that losing the ability to enjoy your surroundings also carries with it an increasing risk of long-term memory loss and impaired memory formation in the present.)

Okay then. That’s a lot of sciencing scienced. Let’s take a breather and recap.

Firstly, if increased physical exertion is linked to better memory formation and better thinking in general, then I would like to put forward the following wholly unoriginal, egomaniacally-named working principle for your consideration:

Sowden’s Second Law Of Curiosity:

“To learn better, break a sweat.”

If you want your brain to get to work, get your body to work as well. You could even consider your normal heart rate a guide to getting your learning brain into gear - say, anything that pushes it 20% above your average resting rate, putting you into a good state for learning something new or working with your deeper memories.

Secondly, “trying lots of different stuff for no damn reason” (aka. my First Rule Of Curiosity) seems to have the potential for making your memories a hell of a lot better - making them richer, and making them stick.

And as happy serendipity would have it, just as I was putting together this newsletter, my friend Audrey tipped me off to a piece just published a few days ago:

“Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.”

- “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain” - Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

So I couldn’t have wished for a more validating segue (or bigger spike of self-congratulatory dopamine) - or a clearer mission statement for this newsletter going forward. Not only can curiosity clearly improve your experience of the world in a lot of unexpected ways, it also looks like a pretty solid method of unf***ing your brain after a worldwide pandemic.

That feels like a lesson worth learning. What say you?

Images: Jeswin Thomas; Lennart Ootes; Xbxg32000 at Wikimedia Commons; Despair; Bruno Nascimento; Heather Barnes; Tibor Janosi Mozes

If you’re reading this on the Web and wondering why the hell you ended up here, you can save yourself future self-recrimination by signing up to the email version below:

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Okay. Let’s get started.

Here’s a Mysterious Living Thing (MLT) growing just outside my current home:

It was planted by my landlords outside the cabin I was occupying last March when the pandemic began, which I’ve now returned to. It wasn’t much to look at back then, but I set myself the task of looking after it, watering it every day, and…er, I didn’t exactly know what else. Did it want sunshine or shade? Did it require exercise?

A lot of the natural world I encounter comes under this personal MLT classification. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it definitely makes things easy for me, and it’s honest about how clueless I am about the natural world, how vanishingly little I know. It’d be nice if I did know, of course. But I usually don’t - and this plant was just another example.

Then I discovered the PictureThis app:

Oh wow. Okay then! My pandemic plant-child was an Evergreen Spindle - or perhaps “japanese spindle tree” (fancy foreign names make everything sound better). What an amazing app. I feel so much smarter.

Except, the next day I’d forgotten the name. Japanese something? I pulled out my phone and used the app again - aha. Yes. That.

The next day, same thing.

And this kept happening. Nothing really stayed in my head - but why did it need to?

If I want to turn flying, feathered MLTs into birds, I could use the amazing Warblr app, or BirdNET. If I want to put a name to insects or animals, I could use iNaturalist. Using them makes me feel like a genius, sending me straight to the answers I need with stunning speed and accuracy. It’s like magic.

And since it’s so damn easy to use these services, and since basically everywhere has phone signal these days, why bother learning names, and the identifying features that lead you to that name? Why devote time and effort to making those things stick in your memory?

What’s the point if there’s always an app that’ll do it for you?

The implications of this are alarming, to say the least. As I’ll be explaining later this week, offloading most of our longterm memory onto the internet isn’t just making us unhealthily dependent on our phones. It’s also short-circuiting our curiosity, leading directly into misery-inducing anhedonia and shoving us down a slippery slope towards a numb, depressed state of disconnection from everything around us.

(I swear I’m not being over-dramatic. More on this in a few days.)

Plus, it’s not always that practical. Yeah, you can merrily app your way around the plants in your garden. But birds are fast. By the time you bring your phone up, they’re gone. The ecologist who took this photo a few days ago got lucky - and the photographer who captured this jawdropping display invested months in bagging it.

There’s a good reason these bird-identifying apps use birdsong. We’re still not quick enough for anything else.

Oh, if only we had something even faster than a camera lens attached to a microchip. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Here’s the challenge for myself this week.

Following the classic Animal-Vegetable-Mineral format, I’m going to learn either a species of plant, a species of bird or a type of rock or mineral, one per day in rotation, using the back garden, some nearby woodland and the stretch of beach at the bottom of my street.

I will learn to identify them at a glance - and I will learn at least one of their popular names (nothing more for now, since the Latin stuff can get tricky really fast).

To learn something’s name is a powerful thing. It’s an invented name, of course, a human name. We don’t have anything else right now. (Who knows what names other creatures use for themselves?) In Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea, learning something’s True Name is to gain total power over it - but also, in her world and ours, naming goes the other way, a little like the Ben Franklin effect. Once you can put a name to a thing, you feel drawn closer to it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you find you care, in a way you never could when everything was just yet another Mysterious Living Thing...

So that’s my aim here. I’ll report back later.

(What about you? I have fifteen suggestions here, here and here - plus an explanation of why it’s so important to have a go at something, the more random-seeming the better.)

Images: Victor Freitas; Mike Sowden.

This is a quiet week for Everything Is Amazing, for the best kinds of reasons.

Normally things would look like this, and will do again from this coming Monday onwards.

But right now, I’m taking a moment.

Here are the two reasons why.

1) Um. Welcome!

It’s a month after this newsletter began, and before starting it, I made myself a rough plan: this many folk signed up by that date. Begin small, grow it quietly, stretch out the amount of time where I can savagely self-deprecate about it in public (this may just be a British thing) - and generally just take it steadily.

Well, that’s not what happened. Thanks to a few very kind & influential mentions here and there, I’ve blown past all that. At this point, there are around twice as many of you signed up than I was expecting. (Thank you!)

That has given me pause, in all the good ways.

2) So I Guess That Means…Woah.

My favourite podcast is WNYC’s Radiolab. It’s a show about how delightfully surprising the world is, if you look at it through the right scientific, medical, philosophical, political or even spiritual lens. It’s a show about weird ideas that might blow your mind. And it’s terrifically well-made.

But the main reason I love it is the way the presenters refuse to sound like experts.

Well, not really. They’re refusing to sound like what the incorrect popular stereotype of an “expert” is: the classic tedious know-it-all who delivers answers as Commandments that you should never, ever have the cheek to argue with. (“Oh, how dare you, little person. Don’t you know who I am?”)

I don’t quite know how this idiotic definition of expertise took hold. Maybe as a way to empower weaponised ignorance for the benefit of anti-factual populism? Dunno. I’m not the person to ask.

But I do know that it’s not how actual expertise works.

In the sciences, an expert is someone who knows more than most people about a thing. It doesn’t mean - and it never means - that the person knows everything about that thing, or is always correct, or is the absolute last word on the matter, or that their ideas shouldn’t be questioned, or they shouldn’t try to make themselves available for any healthy counter-argument.

(All those things would be examples of really bad science. That is not how the sciencing is done.)

Also, that omnipotent model of expertise is also a recipe for a total bore. Unassailable certainty is so miserably dull. Where’s the adventures in learning, discovering, exploring, playing with exciting possibilities? Where’s the journey here?

Radiolab gets the importance of ‘journey-learning’ better than anything I’ve ever heard. The presenters - who pretend they haven’t just spent the last week researching the living crap out of that week’s topic - guide you along a path of discovery and revelation and into those “woah!” moments that make your lower jaw sag. They’re so, so good at doing it.

(I’ve written more about their technique here.)

So with this newsletter, I wanted to channel a bit of that.

And I had a big advantage over Radiolab: the depth and breadth of my ignorance. I’m not a celebrated science writer or award-winning journalist. I am an enthusiast who is sharing everything he’s learning as he goes along.

Over the last four weeks of Everything Is Amazing, I’ve written about:

• How unseeing may be a popular trope of recent science fiction, but it’s also a real-world thing that kills our curiosity, because of the way our brain have to filter everything coming from our senses to stop us blowing a neurological fuse…

• How anhedonia, the inability to feel curious interest and pleasure in your surroundings, is a common symptom of clinical depression…

• How you’ll never guess what you’d find near your home if you drew a circle around it - and how forcing yourself to listen to music you really hate can be…well, “fun” isn’t the word. “Calming”? Definitely not. “Useful”? Perhaps that.

• How, in order to get truly curious about something, you need to know a little bit about it already, so an information gap can form…

• Why you don’t need to stick a foreign word on something to make it sexy…

• How colour-blindness (like any unconventional way of seeing the world) is practically a superpower…

• Why a good way to “find your passion” is to try lots of different things for no damn reason...

• How a listening journal is a really fun way of focusing your attention...

• And why unwanted sound, aka. noise, is awful for your physical health.

Along the way, my reading list grew and grew. I started with Ian Leslie’s brilliant Curious, then went sideways into Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt (on the importance of paying attention to the right things in life) and a bunch of associated science papers - and now I’m reading up on the neurobiology of memory, because next week I’ll be explaining why actually remembering stuff (instead of farming out our longterm memory to the internet) is so, so important…

Everything I’ve learned has led somewhere even more interesting - which has been going on ever since I started reading about curiosity, but in this last month it all got turned up to eleven.

And looking back, I’ve found I’ve been writing about the senses. I started with sight. I moved on to sound. I’m soon going to tackle smell (partly by chatting with a doctor recovering from COVID-19 who got curious about her new inability to smell things). None of this was premeditated. It’s just where things are leading me.

I guess that’s now my topic for the rest of what I’m loosely calling this first “season” of Everything Is Amazing. Which means I have all sorts of new reading to do. Hooray! And also, oh blimey. More coffee needed, then.

So that’s why I’ve been taking a week here. (That, and the need to catch up on a bit of paid work last week.)

I’ll be back for the second half of this thing from Monday. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, if you want some great curiosity-based reading (plus some interesting research on how noise really messes up our bodies), I urge you to check out this edition of Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter.

See you next week!

- Mike

Images: 👀 Mabel Amber 👀; Vlad Bagacian; Element5 Digital.

Thanks to Brendan Leonard’s very kind mention in his most recent Friday Inspiration roundup, it’s my pleasure to welcome a new bunch of you to Everything Is Amazing. Hello!

I hope you know what you’re in for, or we’re both in huge trouble.

Just in case you don’t, here’s an explanation of how this newsletter works - even though it actually doesn’t apply to this week. Because of a glut of non-newsletter work shenanigans, I’m currently running a bit behind. (Forgive me.)

So, no time to waste. Let’s crack onwards, as there is a remarkable lady I’d like you to meet.

Since this week I’ve been learning how to keep a listening journal, I figured it was a good time to share this chat from the middle of last year, for reasons that should become clear in a moment.

Candace Rose Rardon has the most ridiculously impressive portfolio these days, both in depth and width. She’s written for National Geographic, BBC Travel and Longreads. She has painted murals for the offices of Google. Her photography is gorgeous. Her sketchwork essays are stunning. She wrote two episodes of the recent HBO Max series A World of Calm - and for Calm’s incredibly popular meditation app, she has written and performed some of their famous Sleep Stories (alongside the likes of Harry Styles, Matthew McConaughey, Idris Elba, Laura Dern, Kate Winslet and Lucy Liu.) She has also written a book on tea, and has another on coffee coming out very soon…

And right now, she’s the author of a Substack newsletter, Here And Now, which you can subscribe to by clicking here.

Creatively speaking, Candace is an astonishingly versatile all-rounder - a Swiss Army Knife in human form, seemingly able to tackle absolutely anything. (I’ve given up trying to understand how she does all this. Haven’t a clue. It’s just a Candace thing.)

So when my short-term career plans fell apart last year because of the pandemic, leaving me confused about how to pick up all the pieces, I knew I had to ask her for some advice.

In May of 2020, across three half-hour(ish) chats on three separate days, and with truly heroic patience, Candace allowed me to question her and chuck around ideas on the topic of finding stillness: a state of living where you can actually hear yourself think for a change.

From a loose semi-interview on day 1, we leapt into a back-and-forth about the science of noise on day 2 - and hunted for practical, usable advice on day 3.

It was a lot of fun to do. And the discussion only went completely off the rails a few dozen times, which shows heaps of progress in our decade-long friendship.

(And after my phone went off in the middle of recording the second episode, exactly when I was talking about how unwanted noise is a menace, I finally learned what that Mute setting on smartphones is for. That kind of lesson can’t be taught, friend. At least not to me, anyway.)

I hope you enjoy having a listen, by clicking on the embedded audio links below.

NOTE: If you’re reading this as an email, clicking the audio buttons might send you through to the Web version of this article, where the audio will be playable. Below the Soundcloud player for each episode, I’ve also included a few links to books and articles we mention.

Episode One (28 minutes)

• “The Magic Of Yurts” - Candace Rose Rardon, Calm blog; “The Power Of (Not) Unplugging” - Candace Rardon, National Geographic

• “The Signature Of All Things” - Elizabeth Gilbert

Episode Two (38 minutes)

• “One Square Inch Of Silence: One Man’s Quest To Preserve Quiet” by Gordon Hempton

• 4’33” by John Cage, live At The Barbican

• “The Science Of Working In A Coffee Shop” - Fevered Mutterings

• “WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson” - RSA Animates

• “‘It’s positively alpine!’ - Disbelief in big cities as air pollution falls” - The Guardian.

  Further reading:

• “Sounding The Alarm: How Noise Hurts The Heart” - Cypress Hansen, Knowable Magazine (found via Curious About Everything #4 from Jodi Ettenberg).

Episode Three (31 minutes)

• “The Art Of Stillness” by Pico Iyer

• “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” by Dr. Stevey Covey

• “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl

• “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” - “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard

For more from Candace, sign up to her free newsletter here - and check out more of her work here.

Images: Candace Rose Rardon.

Subscribe now

*My parents drove five miles down the road before they noticed I was gone. Who does that? My parents, apparently.

Today, my world is really noisy and my clothes reek of coffee.

For around the 27,852nd time since Christmas (I measured this subjectively, please don’t write in) a proper hoolie is blowing through this part of Western Scotland. The wooden cabin walls around me are vibrating, and occasionally giving alarming, splintering creaks, with the force of the wind outside.

As I said recently, I’ve been taking my morning coffee outside, “to get myself outdoors as early as possible, [and] to start my day, however briefly, with a faceful of sky and a few lungfuls of fresh, clean air.”

That’s been working nicely for about four days out of every week, since the beach is close enough to walk down the road with my mug in hand:

(I have no idea who Margaret is. Neither does my landlord.)

But on the other days, I’ve had to get creative. No clutched cups for these conditions - instead I hug a thermos close to my chest as gusts of rain or sleet try to wrench it out of my hands.

Today, it all went tits-up in an exciting new way: after unscrewing the lid of my flask, I turned exactly the wrong way against the wind, and a few cubic metres of super-compressed Scottish sea air plunged into my thermos and fountained its contents all over me.

(Side note: the smell of coffee on these clothes is not unpleasant, and is waking me up something terrific. If someone ever makes a laundry detergent from used coffee grounds, I’m investing everything I’ve got.)

So, it’s noisy around me right now. But the relaxing kind. The kind of natural ambient noise it’s so fun to work to. (And if you’re missing the brain-friendly hubbub of a cafe right now, I have a few tips for you here.)

But instead of pushing this natural symphony into the background, why don’t I pay more attention to it?

Later this week, I’m talking to a Calm ‘Sleep Story’ author who quietened her world down by living in a yurt in a remote corner of Canada for 3 months.

One revelation from our chat: it wasn’t “silent” in the way you’d expect. It was just an entirely different arrangement of sounds. One that was a lot more fun to listen to than, say, the roar of traffic or the clatter of roadworks.

She quickly realised she went there not to escape the world, but to listen to it properly.

So what would I hear if I started listening properly to this corner of Western Scotland?

Not by going up onto mountain-tops and into deep forests and the like, because we’re still in lockdown until at least April - but listening to where I am, right now, at the edge of a small town with the beach nearby? What does one of these glorious late Winter sunsets (above) actually sound like?

This week, I’m taking the advice of fellow Substacker Craig Eley, a radio producer and sound enthusiast:

One of the best parts of this class for me was a very simple exercise, one that I have often assigned in classes but very rarely practiced myself: keeping a listening journal. There are a few ways to approach the assignment: some that involve quite active listening, some that involve more passive reception, ones that involve making a recording, and others that just involve a pencil and paper. In my experience, there is no wrong way to do it, as long as you find yourself listening somewhere. It’s essentially a form of meditation.

But of course, as Douglas Kahn has said, “sound leads elsewhere.” Like in meditation, it might lead you inward, but it might also point to something outside yourself. Sound tends to lead me to its source, with many possible levels of specificity (animal -> bird -> black-capped chickadee; engine -> motorcycle -> Harley-Davidson).

A “listening journal”? Written in all the different places I’m spending my day-to-days right now? Why, that sounds even better than a mugful of coffee flung all over me.

So that’s my curiosity challenge for myself this week. I’ll keep you posted.

(So what will you be up to? I have fifteen suggestions here, here and here - plus an explanation of why it’s so important to have a go at something, the more random-seeming the better.)

Images: Mike Sowden

It’s week 3 of this, so I’m guessing you know the drill.

(And yesterday I explained why these challenges are so important for building a habit of curiosity. Go read that if you haven’t yet done so.)

In a nutshell:

• I ask you to pick one or more of these (currently lockdown-appropriate) challenges and have a go over the coming week.

• Finito. No punishments or medals if you do or don’t do - but if you have a crack at something here, you’ll enjoy fun, meaningful benefits over time, in the most random and unpredictable ways, I promise you.

• Done exactly none of these challenges to date? No problem! That means you have fifteen to choose from today - so check out the first and second installments for the other ten. Off you pop.

Oh, and if there’s someone else you’d love to rope into all this madness, use the button below to lasso them:

Share Everything Is Amazing

Right then. Here’s the week 3 lineup.

1) Take A Virtual Journey

Welcome to my favourite lockdown hobby.

Yep, a virtual journey is nowhere near as thrilling as the real thing - and I suspect this’ll still be true when we’re all wearing Virtual Reality headgear. (Take the ever-changing cocktail of smells wafting in through the cracked-open window of a train carriage. How would you ever simulate that?)

But the next best thing is still surprisingly good. It’s also incredibly relaxing. I have been using virtual train journeys to tamp down my anxiety on particularly nervous & jittery days, and it has worked beautifully.

So, over the coming week, commit some serious time - at least a couple of hours - to one or more of these.

(a) A train ride. YouTube is absolutely chock-full of entire journeys filmed from the driver’s cab in HD. Try the 2-hour journey from St Moritz to Tirano (Switzerland), over the Bernina Pass - or, less relaxingly, the spectacular 10-minute, 1500-foot Gelmerbahn funicular descent. Or this gorgeous trip through the mountains in Montenegro, filmed in 4K. There are hundreds more, maybe thousands. Go find yours.

(b) A walk along the streets of a city. This site is the best I’ve seen (h/t to my friend Reine), that comes with the bustling noises of normal city life, but I’m sure you’ll find others. It’s a booming creative industry right now, for understandable reasons.

(c) An opened window in another country. WindowSwap is recorded footage of the view outside someone’s house in another country (interspersed with a few adverts, it looks like). It’s an evolution of that world-webcam thing that used to be all the rage a decade ago. And it’s even more chilled out. Go boil up a beverage and sit with a different view for a while, letting your thoughts drift to entirely new places.

2) Plant Something Outside (And Create A Prompt To Return To It)

One day a few years ago, while living in Costa Rica, I noticed my vegetable rack contained a wizened old sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas). It didn't look very appetizing, so, inspired by Andy Weir's The Martian, I chopped it into pieces and planted them in a corner of the garden.

A few months later, thanks to the incredible fertility of the soil there, I had a tiny forest of large, ground-hugging leaves.

A month later I pulled some of them up to find a wee crop of tiny potatolets. I felt very proud of myself, even though the potatoes had done all the work. Yes! I was going to survive until Earth sent a rescue mission!

Now I regret it. I should have left them a bit longer. Or - well, forever. Yes, food gardening is delightful, but the fun for me was having helped something grow. Adding something to the biosphere for a change. But also, beyond such environmental concerns, that profound, quiet satisfaction of making, of nurturing and supporting another life.

Maybe I'll return to that house in a few decades and find they've spread over the whole valley, destroying coffee plantations and bringing the Costa Rican economy to its knees. (I hope everyone there remembers my intentions were good ones.)

These last couple of years, I’ve been renting my way around Europe - but wherever I’ve gone, I’ve tasked myself with leaving some kind of plant (a houseplant or something on the property) in better shape than when I arrived. It’s a deeply satisfying little ritual to maintain when so much else in my life is movement and upheaval.

Planting something and watching it grow is good for your soul. It's leaving a living mark upon the world, doing a tiny bit towards making it a more beautiful place with cleaner air - and it's something you can return to at a later date, to tally your own progress against, and think, "Yay for teamwork!"

This week, I challenge you to do this with something longer-lasting than potatoes - say, a tree - but do it outside your own garden.

You could pick a corner of a bit of local wasteland that hasn’t been tended for decades. You could find a special place in a local wood, or at the banks of a stream or river (watch for signs of flooding - that’s probably not a great place for newborns to grow).

Or you could plant something on a piece of public but neglected land - somewhere where it won't be in the way if it flourishes, but somewhere where it will be appreciated when it does.

If you do this, you will be joining the ranks of guerilla gardeners worldwide, helping beautify land that desperately needs it.

You'll also need to make a note of the exact spot where you do your planting, so you can leave a note for your future self - or use this free service to send an email 5 years into the future.

This could be the start of the most meaningful non-human relationship you’ll ever have.

3) Reread Something You Loved Or Hated

…because rereading is a dying art.

If you look at all the reading challenges online (eg. Goodreads), you’ll see they're implicitly or outspokenly focused on new books. The problem here is the way our brains work. For an idea to really, truly sink in, we need to be exposed to it multiple times.

(This is a big thing in internet marketing.)

So sometimes - just sometimes - for a book to work its full magic upon us, and for a story to really get under our skin and write all its important lessons on our hearts, we need to go through it more than once.

I suggest both "loved" and "hated" because both of these are strong emotional reactions, which are usually a sign you're having your ideas challenged in some way.

(The second time I forced myself through Dan Brown's excruciating Da Vinci Code, I learned a lot more about how I didn't want to write. That kind of thing.)

First Steps

• What's your favourite book? And when was the last time you read it? Who were you, back then, compared to who you are now? (If a lot’s happened since that time, maybe you’ll have a richer, deeper or at least different reading experience if you had a go at it now?)

• What's a book you really loathed? When exactly was that?

• What’s the very first book you ever read? Or the second, or third? (Family members might be able to help you here.)

4) Remove “But” and “No” From Your Vocabulary

For one week, you cannot use either of these words in conversation with another human being.

The most common use of the word "but" is when you're trying to justify why you can't do something:

"I'd love to paint but I just don't have the time." 

"I'd love to learn the guitar but I’m not musical enough."

"I'd love to go for a walk but it’s raining."

Used in this way, "but" closes doors. In fact, it slams them shut and locks them. Anyone on the receiving end of your "but" might walk away thinking you're negative, overworked, inaccessible or entirely lacking in adventurous fun.

But when it's you you're using your "but" on, that's even worse. You get used to coming up with reasons to not attempt things. The language you use kills your ability to think about it - with depressingly predictable results.

So, hold your "but", as it were. Every time you need to use that word, stop yourself and reword your reply. A good place to start is replacing it with "and" or "why":

"I'd love to paint and I just don't have the time. Why? Hm…."

This forces you to keep talking around the problem - hopefully long enough to find solutions, the kind of solutions that "but" prevents you from seeing.

(Bonus points awarded if you carry a tiny notebook, and make a note every time you replaced "but" with something more productive. )

And “No”?

Maybe you saw the film Yes Man with Jim Carrey? It's actually based on a bestselling book by English writer Danny Wallace. He spent a year saying Yes to absolutely everything and everyone. From the book cover:

"Danny Wallace lived as if the word NO didn't exist. He won $45,000, met the world's only hypnotic dog, earned a nursing degree, and travelled the globe."

Maybe travelling the globe is out right now, but what about other things? What craziness could you recklessly commit yourself to, because you’re temporarily incapable of saying No to it?

The rules are: you have to say YES to everyone, and you can't tell them you have to say YES (that's cheating and it ruins the spirit of it all).

Are you ready to agree to anything?

(Hint: the answer isn't "No".)

5) Become A Digital Self-Archaeologist

It's been years since you started using the internet. Possibly decades. Can you remember how it all started?

My first year on the internet was mainly spent in chat-rooms, marvelling at how I could talk to people in other countries - in real time. I used ICQ, IRC and e-mail to make lots of new friends, and I was so sure we'd be friends for life that I wrote their e-mail addresses down in a notebook, which I recently rediscovered...

Even after 18 years, I was able to track a few of them down - and we swapped stories about our earliest days surfing the Web. It was truly incredible what I'd forgotten about those early times.

You'll have forgotten too. You may think you remember, but wow - nope. The gaps are so big you don't even see them anymore.

So it's time to dig up your digital past and find out who you were back then.

First Steps

1. Pick your favourite online platform. Is it Facebook? Is it Twitter? How about e-mail? Do you have a blog? Go back to your earliest entry and start reading around.

2. Talk to your friends from back then. They'll remember stories that haven't entered your head in years (and vice versa).

3. Excavate your storage spaces. If you've got into the habit of backing up data externally and between old and new computers as you buy them, that data will tell a story. Go unravel it, using every document, every picture, every trace of your digital movements down the last decade or more. 

4. Dig up old hardware. If your parents are the ones who owned your very first computer, they'll probably have it kicking around somewhere, gathering dust in a closet or in the loft-space (this is what parents do with computers). And maybe you won’t be able to transfer data off that computer, since most 5.14-inch floppy disks have gone the way of the Dodo, thanks to bit rot) - but you may be able to have a read of what's on that ancient hard-drive. Maybe. Who knows? Worth a shot.  

Get digging. There’s a whole lifetime to uncover down there.

A word on kicking your own backside:

If you really want to sign up to this, click through to the Web version of this article and leave a comment, right now, saying which challenge you’re doing over the coming week.

Go on. I’ll wait.

Or if that’s not enough accountability for you, leap onto your favourite social media platform and publicly announce you’re doing it, maybe with a link to the Web version of this post so everyone knows it’s all my fault and not yours.

But however you do it, if you tell at least one other person, it will vastly increase your chances of nailing your challenge. Or more accurately, your chances of not backing out of it.

Tally-ho!

Images: Ravi Roshan; Aliis Sinisalu, Jill Dimond, Johan Godínez; Wikimedia Commons; Roland Lösslein.

This newsletter is running a little late. Luckily someone (it looks like xkcd’s work) made a cartoon that explains why:

(h/t Jodi - and congratulations to the Perseverance team.)

Hi! Welcome to new subscribers. Everything Is Amazing is a newsletter about chasing your curiosity. How to do it, why to do it, all the stuff in your brain that gets in the way - and so on.

It’s also about mysterious worlds hidden in plain sight, travelling without going anywhere (timely, yes), and stupid challenges for the stupid win. More of those arriving tomorrow.

And if you’re intrigued but haven’t yet subscribed, I just spent ages designing this stylish button for you:

Subscribe now

OK.

It’s time to come clean about what this newsletter is really about.

It’s 2012, and journalist Paul Miller is feeling overwhelmed.

"Since 2005 I have had a job that required me to be on the Internet for at least 12 hours a day. And whatever I would do after work would be on the Internet too…

But I found it very distracting and I wanted to spend time studying and writing uninterrupted. I wanted to read books that I could have read at any time, but instead I was reading Reddit. I wanted to write things I wanted to write for a long time, but instead I was tweeting."

So Miller decides to get offline - for 12 whole months.

His employers at online magazine The Verge agree to let him write about his new, wholly offline life, which gives him enough money to live on. He sets up an iPad locked in Airplane mode, and once he’s finished writing each article, he physically hands the machine over to a colleague for uploading to the Web.

There are new challenges, for sure. Miller can’t research anything online, so finding a single statistic turns from a 10-second keyword search into a physical journey to a local library and a half-hour trawl through its archives. Suddenly, so much information is further away in time and space, harder to access, and rarely instantly available on demand. (He always has to plan ahead.)

But on the whole, his new lifestyle seems to suit him:

"I am so much more productive; I do in two or three hours what I would typically do in a full workday. I write more and in longer stretches and my mind is less cluttered. There is less to distract me while I am writing. There is no Internet to jump in and out of."

And his employers are delighted:

"I don't know that we could run an Internet-based business without a staff on the Internet, but because of Paul's experiment and generally much happier he seems without the Internet in his life, a lot of our staff members have taken vacations without the Internet," said Nilay Patel, the managing editor of The Verge.

"They go offline for the week or weekend and they come back very refreshed and rejuvenated and they come back with more complete thoughts.”

- “No Internet For One Year: Tech Writer Tries Life Offline,” Joanna Stern, ABC News

So that’s it then? The internet is the root of all evil - a mindless, soul-crushing, rage-inducing distraction that is ruining our mental and physical health? And therefore the secret to our wellbeing is to unplug from the Matrix and take a radical ‘digital detox’ (brilliantly nicknamed “Waldenponding” by writer Venkat Rao)?

Not so fast.

One year later, Miller sums up:

“I was wrong.

One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul."

It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free.

And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened. I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect.

But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I'm watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

I didn't want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey.”

- “I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet,” Paul Miller, The Verge

What he found outside of the internet was a lot of emptiness and silence. Both were welcome at first. Being able to hear himself think and take his time over everyday activities? Delightful.

But then novelty wore off - and his problems began.

By removing the Web, he broke all the human connections that had made him feel part of overlapping networks of folk he wanted to be around. He discovered, for the first time, how the “virtual” isn’t something that can easily be unpicked from the “real,” since in today’s world, each depends upon the other in ways we rarely think about…

And he discovered this:

“By late 2012, I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.

A year in, I don't ride my bike so much. My frisbee gathers dust. Most weeks I don't go out with people even once. My favorite place is the couch. I prop my feet up on the coffee table, play a video game, and listen to an audiobook. I pick a mindless game, like Borderlands 2 or Skate 3, and absently thumb the sticks through the game-world while my mind rests on the audiobook, or maybe just on nothing.”

Waldenponding was a bust. The internet was part of the problem, yes, but quitting it didn’t seem to be that golden ticket to a richer, less distracted life that Miller thought it would be.

So what will work?

I’ve spent a few weeks of this newsletter throwing the word “curiosity” around, so maybe it’s time to define this thing.

It’s a curiosity in itself that despite being the focus of thousands of years of human enquiry, the science of curiosity is in its infancy. Partly this reflects how little we still know about the working human brain, the hardware running our curiosity-software. And partly it’s because it crosses so many displines: a bit of psychology here, a little philosophy there…

But, very broadly speaking, everyone agrees there are two major types of curiosity.

The first is called diversive. It’s the thrill of the shiny and novel - the kind of thing you experience every day when travelling somewhere new, as Anna said last week.

It’s also why you can’t stop clicking those infuriating headlines like “You’ll Never Guess What Happens Next” and “These Three Things Will Shock You”.

Clickbait like this (often displayed in chumboxes of attention-grabbing garbage) is weaponised diversive curiosity - the attraction of novelty, combined with a largely false promise of something you really want to know the answer to. And the end result? It feels like your fault. You hate yourself for clicking it (even though you were actually tricked into doing it). It’s a really toxic cycle of triggering and shaming.

The only good clickbait on the internet is at Clickhole, a parody site:

Diversive curiosity is why you can’t stop scrolling. Or signing up to anything described as “the next big thing.” Or doing pretty much anything where you’re not really enjoying yourself, only sort of digging in a half-comatose kind of way, but you guess it’s better than doing nothing?

Novelty for novelty’s sake is deeply distracting - and incredibly shallow. It’s training for a lifetime automatically skimming the surface of things without going deeper (making you perfect prey for internet advertisers). It teaches your brain to sip the world instead of drinking deeply from it. It fritters away a few spare minutes here and there, again and again, until you’ve lost hours, days, weeks, even years to…

Who knows? You can’t remember. Nothing stuck.

To balance this out, there’s the other type of curiosity.

When you latch onto something specific and get healthily obsessed with it (aka. ‘nerding out’), that’s your epistemic curiosity kicking in.

This sometimes gets called “academic curiosity,” because that’s how you’re trained in higher education. You get more and more specialised about what you know.

But the best illustration of the power of epistemic curiosity is to watch something like this:

A musician is someone who returns to the same piece of wood, metal and cured animal intestines (or whatever the modern equivalent is), again and again and again, until they are amazingly good at coaxing enjoyable noises out of it.

To get as good as my friends The Urban Folk Quartet (above) is the super-focused work of decades. And it requires huge amounts of epistemic curiosity. What more could I learn about this one thing? How much more is there to know? What can I learn about it that nobody else has learned before? How deep does this thing go?

Going full-on epistemic is like falling in love. Continually. Endlessly.

But choosing a thing to focus epistemic curiosity on is really, really hard.

Take that message the aspirational internet has been flinging at you for years: “Find Your Passion!”

Ah. What a nice thing it would be to know that you’ve found a vocation or hobby, or a small bunch of them, that you can singlemindedly devote huge chunks of the rest of your life to. How comforting!

Except, at the very same time, that same internet is firehosing us with triggers for our diversive curiosity that make us unable to choose. What if I pick the wrong thing? If I do this thing for the next week, I’ll miss distractedly half-assing 50 other things! What do I do? HALP.

It’s a psychological tug of war that leaves you trapped in the middle, frustrated and miserable - and, as with clickbait, you usually blame yourself for it.

It’s a really horrible feeling. And it stops us becoming healthily obsessed with really interesting things that would improve our mood no end.

And I think I have a solution.

Well, it’s not really my solution. I’m just channeling an amalgam of advice from people way smarter than me. (Start with Cal Newport, for example. Move on to Jenny Odell. Then read this by Nir Eyal. Then check out Ian Leslie’s book. And so on.)

But I’m going to be cheeky, and invent a law named after myself.

Sowden’s First Law Of Curiosity:

“You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason.”

Yeah, I don’t think it’ll catch on either. Oh well.

But the point here is this:

If “finding your passion(s)” is so hard to do when your rational, logical brain gets involved (because it’s so easily and completely hijacked by that tug-of’war of logical motivations)…

Then why not leave the whole thing to chance?

Or more specifically: why not just throw yourself for a short period of time into a whole bunch of random things, one after the other?

The “for no damn reason” part of that Law is really important here.

One of the jobs of curiosity is to make you aware of things you didn’t previously know. Unfortunately, because we think we should be guided by “sensible” reasons to do things (conveniently forgetting how emotion-driven almost all our decisions are), we’re always deciding on our next actions based on what we currently know - not what we don’t yet know, or what we don’t know we don’t know.

(Yes, this is head-spinning stuff.)

In contrast, the gifts of applied curiosity are usually only seen clearly with hindsight. “When I first started looking at this thing, I never would have dreamed it would lead me here.”

But with training, you get a feel for the good stuff. Just an inkling.

This is the ‘gut feeling’ that journalists develop over time, and have such difficulty explaining to someone else. They know there might be a story in the thing they’re becoming curious about - but they don’t yet know the shape of it. So they say to their editors (or to themselves) “give me a week to find the story here,” with the unspoken understanding that it might go absolutely nowhere.

Anyway.

All this means that making “sensible” and “rational” strategic decisions in advance is actually of very little help here - because they’re all based on the ignorance that comes before discovery leads to enlightenment.

To learn something absolutely and utterly new to you, you need to add a little chaos to the proceedings. Something random and unpredictable.

Maybe even something stupid.

Like, say, a series of random-looking weekly challenges that send you in unexpected directions!

That’s my aim for you here.

So if I’d met Paul Miller in a coffee shop back then, and if I’d known back then what I know now, I’d say this to him:

“Firstly, skip Borderlands 2, mate. Try The Long Dark instead, it’s terrifying and stressful and you’ll have a really great time.

Secondly - you have a year offline, right? A whole year? And you have enough work lined up so money isn’t much of an issue, if you budget accordingly? Well then.

How about trying out 52 different things you’ve never done before?

Mix it up a bit, though. Do a bunch of stuff you’ve always wanted to do but never had the time, but also, get your friends to recommend some entirely new things as well. A nice balance of what you know will be fun, and what you don’t know will be fun.

But look: only do each thing for a week at a time. If something proves really amazingly great, make a note and return to it later. Keep going with the different things for now. The relentless variety will keep you from sliding into boredom and bad habits, the sheer pace of it will plug the gap that the removal of the internet has left in your life - and asking for suggestions from friends will help you keep connected with them. That’s what I’d do, sir. How about it?”

Then he’d give me a thumbs-up, quickly finish his drink and head out the door - and I’d never see him again, because he’d choose a different coffee shop in future. Yeah, nice place, good coffee. Too many weirdos.

But I hope I’d have made him curious enough to just give it a go.

He’d never guess what happens next.

Images: Chris Lawton; SabbraCadabra; ROBIN WORRALL; nikko macaspac; Markus Spiske; Ruslan Gibadullin; Danielle MacInnes; Free-Images.

Into week 3 of Everything Is Amazing we stumble - and to start things off, I’m returning to those strangely non-exploding helicopters I mentioned in the first week.

You may be wondering what the hell all this is. Bless you! That’s at least two of us then. But in essence, you’re reading a newsletter about applied curiosity (yes, it’s all a bit weird really). Click below to get it when it’s hot:

Subscribe now

Right then. Let’s take a look at the dangerous business of taking a look.

In the first week of this newsletter, I set myself the challenge of understand how my colourblind aircraft-engineering dad managed to not just get into the British Royal Air Force in the first place, but also spend the rest of his career, (to the best of my knowledge) not getting his wires crossed at critical moments - which might have ended really, really badly.

As so often happens with applied curiosity, this initial inquiry turned out to be the least interesting question I could have asked.

I started by speaking on the phone to a very accommodating retired technician who worked in the RAF in the 1960s.

(Far too late, I remembered a friend’s brother was more recently stationed there - and I should have remembered, because we both went to visit him in Cyprus in 2006. Always self-audit the connections you already have before seeking new ones!)

The answer to How Did My Dad Pass The Entrance Exam? Well, in the RAF in the 1960s they were indeed filtering applicants for colour-blindness, going back at least as far as 1943, according to this personal account. For the job he did, he shouldn’t have been able to pass the interview.

And yet he clearly did.

This suggest either wily shenanigans on my dad’s part - or a certain looseness in interpreting these rules that seems to have existed to ensure a healthy intake of new recruits? It’s possible he was allowed to show it wouldn’t be a problem, and based on the strength of his other skills, that was an acceptable way to proceed until he proved himself.

Or - it was known within the RAF, as it was known in the other British Forces, that while colour-blindness was technically a disability for recruitment purposes, it was also, in certain circumstances, an enviable superpower. More about that shortly.

So what about How Did My Dad Not Blow Everyone Up?

Take a look at this:

You’re looking at the Rolls-Royce Gnome turboshaft engine - originally developed by de Havilland to meet an American design. It’s the engine that powered both the Westland Wessex and Westland Sea King helicopters that my dad worked on.

Note the colours of its wiry innards. Mainly, the distinct lack of them. Yes, there are bright red caps on pipes in there - but the wiring is almost completely in shades of grey.

If the dangers of colour-blindness in aircraft engineering had been known about since at last the 1940s, aircraft manufacturers had decades to put something in place to minimise this problem that affects around one in ten men (and is more pronounced in Caucasians - nobody knows why). They needed a no-brainer of a solution in place here.

The answer was obvious. Don’t use colour to identify between engine parts. Or if you do, you also make that difference clear in at least one other way that doesn’t rely on colour.

This begs a wider question: if this was widely understood in the Forces so early in the last century, why on earth did the UK still keep using red and green in its domestic electrical wiring?

It was only in March 2006 that Britain finally changed the colours of its wiring to completely remove red from the lineup. However, the official reason was “to harmonise the UK wiring colours with European cable colours for consistency and to avoid confusion.”

(Oh, those meddlesome Europeans and their…more sensible, rather safer wiring colour choices.)

Unfortunately - but also for understandable practical reasons - the new legislation didn’t require for existing wiring to be replaced with the new colours, so that still left a huge amount of old British wiring in place. Wiring you can’t see the colour of and you also don’t know if it’s the old or the new type? This is why we still don’t have colour-blind electricians.

(If you were ex-RAF and used to largely monochrome wiring, and decided to take your electrical skills into the domestic market, you must have found all this absolutely baffling.)

Anyhow. Let’s talk superpowers.

Being colour-blind in the modern world is a life of tiny, infuriating annoyances. For example, if you can’t see green, it’s much harder to tell whether a banana is ripe or not, because we intuitively use the colour of the stems as a cue:

Or how about reading traffic lights at a glance? It’s not such a fast process for the colour-less-aware. They have to count.

(Both these images are from this excellent overview of the issues.)

But there is one way where the colour-blind seem to have a distinct advantage over us trichromats (standard-visioned folk) - and it takes us back into the military.

The dominant colours for military camouflage are green for vegetation and sandy beige for desert conditions. This seems to apply worldwide, except for a few exceptions (what the actual hell, China). But if you have red-green colour blindness, you don’t see green or beige. You see shades of another colour - with highly unusual sensitivity, it seems.

A study by biologists at Cambridge University and the University Of Newcastle Upon Tyne found that colour-blind men were “extraordinary connoisseurs of khaki.” Many anecdotes exist about the US Army’s preference for colour-deficient snipers and spotters during WW2, because of their ability to spot subtle shades and patterns against a jumbled background. And an article in Nature in 1940 said this:

”Superficially, therefore, it would seem highly improbable that colour-blind persons could detect a camouflaged building that an ordinary observer would miss. This suggestion, however, which has come from the United States recently, is not wholly without foundation, as there are at least three ways in which certain colour-blind observers might see more than the ordinary person. For example, in a building camouflaged with large irregular patches of colour, the actual outline of the building may be lost in the jumble of these patterns. But the colour-blind person may be scarcely conscious of the variegated colours, so that to him the outline of the building may be almost unaffected by the camouflage.“

All this makes me wonder: did the US Army make this guy colour-blind as well? Because it’d certainly make sense.

The final rabbithole I threw myself down here was into the world of user interface design (UI).

I had the very good fortune to pick the brains of Zak, Lead Product Designer at RiptideIO and Head of Product at Prismatext. It is Zak’s job to think about colour in a way very few of us do - because his target audience is absolutely everyone.

To design a user interface for something online - aka. making The Bit You Use To Click On And Type Things Into - you have to make something that is equally visually comprehensible to everyone. If anything looks confusing, the client you’re designing it for could lose clicks, meaningful engagement or a worrying chunk of their revenue (or all three).

This therefore means designing for colour-blind people. Not by removing colour altogether, because that’s a key part of every designer’s arsenal of attention-grabbing techniques - but by using it in a secondary way, in tandem with other visual design elements.

Take this toolbar, which we’ve all become oh-so-familiar with over the last year:

Yes, Zoom uses red for “End Meeting” and green for “Share Screen” (and a bit of red to denote disabled features) - but you don’t have to rely on it, because of the super-obvious word labels. That’s good design at work, that is.

To start to get my head around the ways colour can be experienced and used, Zak pointed me towards this mindblowing Radiolab episode. I recommend it heartily to you (along with…every other Radiolab episode, as it remains the greatest podcast ever created).

What Zak impressed on me was the fact that each of us sees our own version of what we collectively call “colour”. Our eyes work just a little differently to each other’s - meaning, say, the blue I see in the sky may not quite be the blue you see, even though we both use the same word for it.

You may remember this being illustrated in dramatic fashion back in 2015, when the entire online world lost its mind over the colour of a dress.

(For a non-colour example of feeling like you suddenly don’t understand how other people work at all, take a look at the surprisingly common neurological state of aphantasia - where some people lack a functioning mind’s eye. It’s worth noting that to aphantasiacs, this seems so normal that when they discovered other people could create imaginary pictures inside their heads, it completely rocked their world.)

Another factor: consider the way that our technology itself shows colour. There is, for example, a big difference between a colour on a printed page vs. a colour shown on a computer screen - and another big gap between different screen types and between different inks on paper.

All this adds up to a startling fact. In a subtle but profound way, all of us aren’t on the same page. Or the same screen either. When it comes to colour, my Besžel is your Ul Qoma, and neither of us is aware there’s any difference.

So what else don’t we know about here?

There’s just so much here. I could keep going for days.

But I hope you can see what happened here. I attacked a fairly simple question from a number of angles, and what I ended up with - were much better, much more interesting questions.

(Oh, and an answer too! I forgot about that bit.)

This is the essence of a really good deep dive. The solution you were initially seeking is OK, good to know, whatever, but WHAT ABOUT THAT OTHER THING RIGHT, and instead of feeling like a puzzle solved, it has all turned into a mystery deepened. The amount you can learn, and the fun you can have in the world, has magically increased…

And all you had to do was look hard enough.

On Wednesday, I’m returning with some weird science - and on Friday, your third load of challenges will pile into your Inbox in a hot, sweaty mess.

How are you getting on with the current batch?

And sometime soon, I promise I’ll be brave enough to show you what a pile of foetid dingo’s kidneys I keep making when I draw Scotland from memory. (Not today. I figured this email was plenty long enough already.)

Images: Robert Katzki; Marvel Studios; Wikimedia Commons;

How did you get on with last week’s challenges?

If your answer is LOL, um, ask me something else, that’s fine! If you didn’t attempt any, then you have ten to choose from this week, not five.

And if you did attempt one and failed, well, so what? Have another go. You are the mouse. This is your cracker. FIND THE WAY UP.

If you’re reading this post online and you’re wondering why you’re here, welcome! You can read about Everything Is Amazing here - and sign up for free updates below:

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The specifics about how this particular weekly email works (as explained in more detail here):

• I ask you to pick one (or more!) of these challenges and have a go over the coming week.

• The End. Really, that’s it. This is about expanding your horizons and becoming more curious - so it’s up to you what you do next.

Here are your challenges for the week ahead.

1) Learn To Draw Your Own Country From Memory

That’s been my task for myself this week.

This is deceptively difficult. You may think you can accomplish this easily - but just have a go. Your memory isn’t a wholly factual account, it’s an opinion (see Challenge 5, below) and you’ll have squashed some bits of geography and stretched others. This is a shape you must learn - and lodge firmly into your memory, as a framework you can plop other memories into. This is how you really get to know a place - and it starts with the edges.

You should also do this because it's patriotic. God bless wherever-you're-from. And because, just imagine being stopped in the street by a chatshow host who is doing a skit on how most people can't draw their own country - and you nail it, on national TV! (Yes, I’m stretching - but at least it’ll be a fantastic party trick.)

So, get good at this. Get as good as Doug Mack got. Get that good.

First Steps

Day 1. Memorize the very crude, very broad outline, and locate and label the five biggest cities. Everyone should be able to do this. Make sure you start by being part of everyone.

Days 2 to 7. Keep iterating, adding more detail every day.

Day 8: Test and compare. Man, look how far you’ve come!

2) Move A Daily Ritual Outside

This week, writer and artist Anna Brones (whom I interviewed this week) teamed up with adventurer Alastair Humphreys to encourage everyone to have a coffee outdoors:

I’ve decided to go the whole hog with this idea. From now on, coffee is an outdoor beverage for me. I can only drink it somewhere without four walls and a roof.

My reason for doing this is simple: I’m still fairly rubbish at mornings, so I use a jolt of sweet black coffee to hotwire my brain into action. I need that coffee, no way around it. And I’d also like to get myself outdoors as early as possible, to start my day, however briefly, with a faceful of sky and a few lungfuls of fresh, clean air.

If I can only drink coffee outdoors, and I can’t not drink coffee first thing in the morning, then - bingo.

It seems to be working so far:

So what part of your daily ritual could you shift somewhere under the open sky, to ensure you’re getting a healthy bit of The Healthy Outside into your day, without fail?

If you accept this challenge (and you commit to doing it), you’re about to find out.

3) Become The World Expert About Your Own Birthday

The day you came into the world is a special day in history. No, I'm not talking about you (no offence) - I'm talking about all the non-you stuff that also happened. Do you know that stuff is? Do you know what world-changing events took place, what inventions were invented, or which famous people popped into existence or departed it on the same day you did?

This is your chance to find out - and learn a little more about the era you were born in.

First Steps

• Start with Wikipedia'ing your birthday. It'll give you a list of every event in history that happened on a particular day of the year. (Here's mine.) Click anything that looks interesting.
  

• Next, go deeper - and Google the specific day you were born, to see what appears. Top of the results should be another Wikipedia page, showing things happening in the month you were born - and the rest of the results should give you an even deeper dive. (I just learned the Walt Disney Resort opened on the same day I arrived into the world. One of us went on to entertain millions! The other is in Florida. No, I kid. I got my ass kicked by a mouse.)
  

• Learn some dates and names, and remember them so you can lengthily recite them at parties - until you stop getting invited, which should be fairly quickly.

4) Reply To Your Most Dreaded Letter Or E-mail

This will only take you ten minutes - and may be the hardest thing you’ve done all year.

But look, it’s time. You deserve to get past this.

You know the story. A long long long time ago, that e-mail landed in your Inbox, or that letter slithered through your letterbox, or into your mailbox outside. It required a more thoughtful, considered response than usual, so it would have been disrespectful to dash off a quick 100-word response…and so you didn't reply immediately.

And then, gradually, day by day, you didn't reply ever.

That e-mail or letter is now far too big to simply “reply” to. Too much time has elapsed. There’s a relationship there that feels blighted, even ruined. With the accumulated weight of What This Thing Has Become, you wouldn't even know where to start. So every day, you flinch away...

...until now.

First Steps

• The podcast ReplyAll did a lovely episode on chronically unreplied-to e-mails. You should have a listen. It'll give you some of the strength you’ll need.
  

• There is a wider reason you’re doing this. Well, two reasons. ONE: this is occupying so much, so much bandwidth in the back of your mind that it’s preventing you from being hopeful and curious about a number of very important things. You’re only going to discover what they are when you slay this beast once and for all. And TWO: when The Monster is defeated, you are going to feel like you can accomplish anything - and the knock-on effect from that feeling is going to be a dramatic force for good in your life. You want that. You need it. And this is the only obstable in your way.
  

• Glass of wine. No distractions. Turn your worrying brain off. Pretend this is no big deal. Ten seconds of pants-off lunatic bravery. BEGIN.

5) Spend At Least 30 Minutes Sketching Something By Hand

When I was an archaeologist, we were always told to photograph and draw the things we found in the ground. At first this confused me: if you have a photo, why do you need to draw it as well? I asked the site supervisor and he explained:

- the camera doesn't care what it's looking at. It'll capture everything, in one great big gulp of photons. The skill of the photographer is a major factor here, but on the whole, a photo doesn’t have an axe to grind - it’ll just record everything in front of it.

- a sketch artist can't record everything, so he/she has to choose - and in making decisions about what to record, they really, really concentrate, and look really hard at what's in front of them. They interpret it. Why does this thing deserve to be on my sketch? What's it for?

Sketching makes you a lot more aware of what you're looking at - and it teaches you to pay close attention, in a way you rarely would with a camera (unless you're a pro-photographer).

It'll automatically make you a lot more aware of the world around you - and a lot more curious about it.

First Steps

• If you've never sketched before, try these warm-up exercises from Ralph Ammer.
  

• Candace Rose Rardon is a professional sketch artist, and she has some good tips for sketching in public here. You can also see her advice on travel sketching here at National Geographic.  

A word on accountability:

If you really want to commit and kick your backside into gear, click through to the Web version of this article and leave a comment, right now, saying which challenge you’re doing over the coming week.

Or if that’s not enough accountability for you, leap onto your favourite social media platform and publicly announce you’re doing it, maybe with a link to the Web version of this post so everyone knows it’s all my fault and not yours.

But however you do it - if you tell at least one other person, it will vastly increase your chances of nailing your challenge…or more accurately, your chances of not backing out of it.

Crack on, then. No time to waste!

Images: Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk; Annie Spratt; FreeWorldMaps.net; Fabian Centeno; Anna Brones; Mike Sowden.

By the way: if you enjoy this interview and want to publicly share a link to the Web version, please excitedly mash the button below:

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I now have the daunting task of introducing Anna Brones to you.

She’s a writer, basically. About food, but also art, and travel too, and writing, and…um. She’s also an artist, in pretty much every way you might think. And a publisher of magazines and books. But also a documentary film producer. Oh, and a teacher. She’s Swedish-American and also a fluent Francophone and who knows what else, and - this is where I’m giving up. Sorry.

I have no idea how to describe Anna, but it’s a fact that her work has been featured in the New York Times, by the BBC, in the Guardian, Slate, Taproot Magazine, Fresh Cup, Bicycling, we could be here all day. You’ve encountered her work before now. Maybe you saw her Women’s Wisdom Project on your travels around the internet? Told you. Yep, that’s Anna.

Anna Brones is a true Renaissance woman - and the perfect super-accomplished person to chat to about applied curiosity, so I was delighted to (virtually) sit down with her this week and do that.

This interview was edited for clarity.

MS: So, over the last ten years, I've just been bewildered by your output, with the sheer amount of stuff that you've done. I mean, there was a period where I was checking in to see what you're up to, and oh look, she's got another bloody book out.

AB: *laughs*

MS: There was Hello Bicycle. There was Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break. There was Live Lagom. There was the book you did with Brendan Leonard - what's that called? Best Served Wild, right. And frankly - who knows what else. I mean, you seem to do just so many different things. For excellent career-based reasons, many people latch onto a particular idea, and then kind of carve that into their thing and then chase that for about a decade. But you seem curious about lots of different things and you pull them in, do a really good job of encapsulating them in a piece of work, and then off you go into something else. Why is that?

AB: Now, that's a nice way to spin it. But - I just get interested by something else. Abandon whatever I'm doing and don’t stick with anything. *laughs*

MS: But that was something that Leonardo da Vinci did. And [physicist] Richard Fenyman. They got very interested in something, and then would reach a point where their interest would plateau. And then they’d stop and go off and do something else - but always have it in their head, to connect together with something else later.

AB: I think it's largely a personality trait. And I think I've always done a variety of things and I think I will always continue to do so. The thought of just having one thing...I mean, even as papercutting has become more important in my work, I can sense that I don't want to adjust too much to that - I don't think I would do well in something where I was only doing the same thing all the time. 

MS: So you need endings, and a kind of...seasonal infatuation with an idea.

AB: Yeah, kinda. I think I have a little bit of the bird with the sparkly object thing, because I just like to try things. My self-critique would be that I often have a hard time sticking with something, because it's easy to just pop to something else when you work for yourself. I can often find that difficult because when I was working for somebody else, x y and z would be my tasks. So now sometimes I can end up feeling like I don't have a lot of continuity, which I think is why it's been helpful to do the digital advent calendar, because I've done that for four years straight now, which feels like a really big commitment. I feel really proud of that.

MS: When I first met you in a virtual sense, we were both working for the same magazine - and that interests me too, because now you seem to prefer to do things as an independent creator rather than like a staff writer. Has that been a very conscious career choice from some point?

AB: I don't know. I have a lot of friends who work for themselves, and somehow I think like you kind of just fall into it a little bit? I don't know. Some people work for a long time in a corporate industry or whatever, and then find they're burnt out and fed up, and they decide to jump ship - and rely on a savings account where they made their corporate dollars. And that was never me. I always joke I should go get a corporate job for a while so that I can like, save up, and then decide I'm bored and then drop off. But I think when I was younger, I always felt very much not the type of person that had a 5 or 10 year plan. That just never felt like it was in the cards for me. And now I'm just always trying something new, going down this path, going down another path, and I just sort of ended up where you end up.

MS: But there is a kind of a thrill that comes with...what rightly terrifies quite a lot of people. If you do have a certain amount of uncertainty ahead of you, then some uncertainty can be the same thing as possibility.

AB: On good days it's exciting, and on bad days it's scary and depressing, what am I doing with my life and so on. The ebb and flow. And the only way to get through that is knowing that it's going to change. 

MS: Right.

AB: The poet Rupi Kaur did a little writing prompt just on Instagram Stories right at the beginning of the year. And she said something which I'm gonna paraphrase: ‘uncertainty has always been there. We've just been too busy to notice it.’ 

MS: Absolutely.

AB: This last year for a lot of people has been really scary because of the uncertainty. And I think it's a reminder that we sort of live with an illusion of knowing what's going to happen, because I think even if you work a full time job for someone else, and have that job security, there's still an uncertainty to that. It's just that it's a bit more masked.

MS: I completely agree. This has been an enormous shake up. A lot of it is traumatic. But with every shakeup, there's always opportunity in the rebuilding stage. 

AB: Yeah. 

MS: So - how important is curiosity for the kind of work that you do? And how does it manifest itself in the work?

AB: It’s essential. Curiosity drives you to ask questions and seek answers, which ultimately is you learning, researching, developing, evolving. It’s just an essential part of who we are and how we show up, and I think that - in the moments that I don't feel great, it's usually the moments where I don't feel any sense of curiosity, or don't feel a drive to seek out something new. I think it's pretty important for anyone who does like some type of creative quote unquote work, obviously.

MS: *laughs* 

AB: Yeah, I put the concept of creative work in quotation marks because it’s a reminder that everybody has to use creative thinking skills, whatever they do.

MS: Yeah, there's a little bit of, perhaps, imperialism that goes with [exaggerated flamboyance] “I'm a creative.”

AB: Yeah, we just have a myth surrounding it. So - I think when I've been really curious about something, it's probably when I usually produce my best work. I think curiosity also presents itself in a variety of ways. In the last year, I think for a lot of people, curiosity has been smaller. Pre-COVID, I probably would have said that my curiosity is fueled by travelling, being in new places. And now - I had a friend ask me the other day, “can you think of the last time that you didn't travel for a full year?” And it's been a long time. And so now curiosity is in, like, learning about the tides, or looking at the bark of a tree. And I think that is a challenge: to be able to find curiosity even with the most routine activities, and in the most well known places. Because it's really easy to be curious when you're in someplace entirely new, right?

MS: Totally. It’s a nonstop highlight reel.

AB: Exactly. To stay curious in your home surroundings is really hard, and takes work,

MS: We're also going to have a kind of fear of strangers. The writer Mark Manson mentioned this in his newsletter - FOGO is the new FOMO - the fear of going out and meeting people. Instead of meeting a stranger and wanting to close the gap, it's like we want to maintain the gap now. So we're going to have to relearn how to be curious about people in a new way, physically curious, I mean, about people. I guess there's going to be a period of relearning old habits, and we're all gonna be a bit traumatised for a while.

AB: I think the trick would be to relearn old habits, but with a new perspective. Because I think clearly what we were doing before was not working for us, in terms of our emotional and physical wellbeing. So I think it'll be interesting how we transition out of this. Travel is a good example of that. The first place that I want to go to is where I have friends and family. Whereas probably before, I mean, I always like visiting friends and family but I think before I would have had maybe a stronger pull towards something new and different. But now it feels like the people are really the most important thing. And that I need time with them. So before, like, travelling for work, I would have been really tempted to, if I'm travelling through somewhere, say oh I'll stay an extra day and then I'll go have coffee with so and so for half an hour. And that doesn't sound as compelling now. I want three days with that person. I want deep conversation and connection. And I just hope that we prioritise that.

MS: So, as somebody who is Swedish American, and has a foot in at least two worlds...well, I noticed your books are about translating things from a Swedish perspective over to an American or British audience. Do you feel like this is a time for more of that, an opportunity for those audiences to learn some stuff the way Scandinavians are doing things, to borrow these ideas?

AB: I was just looking at some new book releases upcoming, and there was a new book about a Dutch art of doing nothing? I firmly believe in the ideas behind it. Hell yes. But also I was like, isn't it fascinating that we need...a repeat of what we know, but packaged in a new way, and that’s how it's so much easier for us to get excited and curious about it?

MS: The appeal of the “exotic”.

AB: So it's like - instead of taking a look at our lives and realising, “okay to live well, I'm going to need to, you know, eat whole grains and vegetables but sometimes indulge in wine and cake but not all the time and I'm going to need to move my body, and I'm going to need to go on walks” and this whole approach to life which is fairly unsexy I guess, but it's sexy when it's in the form of a foreign word?

MS: Yeah…

AB: So, you know, I have written books on that and would certainly like to advocate for incorporating some of those elements. But...I just cringe a little bit when I see that stuff because it's almost like - we just want a magic pill when it comes down to it. Oh, if only I was doing this one thing, then everything will be fine. Whereas, actually we have to be doing most of the good things most of the time and just finding a balance in the everyday. But that's not really a sellable book title.

MS: Getting rid of clutter versus the Marie Kondo method, and so on.

AB: I understand why we gravitate towards that stuff. We're always seeking something, whether that's a way to be healthier, or a way to be more creative, or a way to be more productive at work, and we're always just sort of navigating forwards like that. So it attracts our attention - oh, have I missed something,is somebody else doing something better than me and did I miss it and do I just need to incorporate that? Yeah.

MS: Always.

AB: I've thought about that with the concept of friluftsliv, which directly translates to "free air life" or "open air life." The word is used in Norwegian and Swedish, and speaks to a connection between humans and nature. While these countries certainly have a special approach to the outdoors, it's also not just a special Scandinavian thing. It is about going outside, connecting with nature, having the outdoors be a part of a regular routine, which is a natural human thing to do. Spend time outside, and when it's raining, well, put on a rain jacket, and go outside anyway. And I think it's so interesting that we constantly repackage stuff, instead of taking an actual deep look at our own lives and addressing what would make us feel better. It’s also very individually focused. It is very much about like what I can do to better myself, not what I can do to better serve my community, what we can do together to move forward - and that imbalance is to our detriment.

MS: Well, it's presented as self help, I guess. That's the industry it's fitting into, the mechanics it’s using. So a different focus...maybe there needs to be a new term for that. It's like social help or - community help?

AB: Yeah. I mean, I get it. The argument would be that we can't show up for other people if we are not ourselves doing well. And I think in the last year, people are struggling, mental health problems are skyrocketing and we are all suffering. Even when we are in a privileged situation, this has an impact. But I think to then only focus on our own individual wellness isn't doing anything to move us forward as a society.

MS: So what was the last thing you became, shall we say, worryingly obsessed with, like the point where you realise that you're so far down the rabbit hole of wow this is so cool that when you come up for daylight, people are looking at you in a strange way?

AB: I don't actually think I have that type of a personality. I am always kind of a generalist, so I pretty rarely do full deep dives. I wouldn't consider myself a detail oriented person. I like I'm much more of a bigger-ideas, gonna-do-things-quickly approach. My husband and I always joked that things are TBTC: too big, too complicated. 

MS: I love books in this way, for deep diving. I’d argue most of everyone was able to focus on reading a book quite easily before the internet and it wasn't a big thing, but now books are this attention-focusing tool for us all and it's like, oh my god you sat through a whole book. So I love how they introduce you to an ecosystem of ideas and you slow down and stay in it for a while.

AB: And I think we could all benefit from that too, because - we sort of have this cultural expectation that we're going to do all of the things, and be good at all of them. But to do things well, or to be interested in them, requires identifying some things that you're not going to spend your time doing, because you can't do everything. It is physically impossible to read all the books, it is physically impossible to have all of the hobbies... 

MS: Lalala I’m not listening. 

AB: *laughs* I know you're putting your fingers in your ears because you want to do everything. We all want to do everything. But we just can't. I think about this a lot with art. And the internet and Instagram in particular has fueled this idea that you can just be constantly churning out stuff and making things, and then it's easy to feel like, oh I haven't created anything in a week and what am I doing, I'm worthless. And maybe we follow certain people who seem to be making stuff all the time. I've had people say that to me, and I don't feel like I'm that way, but maybe that's how people view the things that I put into the world. But that just causes a very unrealistic expectation, where all that stuff is very outcome-driven. So in terms of curiosity, 75% of that whole creative process is in the non-production: being curious about something, asking the questions, seeking out the answers, researching, talking to people, reading stuff, whatever. And then at the end, there is making the connection between the ideas and coming up with something new and then maybe writing or creating artwork. But all we see is that end part. 

MS: And social media, too. You're encouraged to photograph the thing, or write about the thing, and get it up there as quick as possible. Whereas, what you could be doing as a curious person who connects things together is - taking it and processing it properly. Sitting with the question, as my friend Jonny Miller says. 

AB: Yes.

MS: So, loaded question: who inspires you? Who gets you itching to try something new?

AB: I mean, I have a friend that I met at a film festival a couple years ago. She lives in Germany, her name is Paula. She has this creative brain that I just am so inspired by, and we also have a lot of very similar interests and end up down the rabbit-hole on similar things. Yeah, I love the stuff that she does, and the way that she makes me think, so that's kind of a personal connection. 

MS: I remember you enjoyed Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing?

AB: Yes. And I really like Twyla Tharp’s book. What was it called? *pulls book down from shelf* The Creative Habit...

MS: Just admiring your bookcase there. It’s the worst thing about living out of a backpack right now, I really miss physical books. 

AB: I love them. But the more that I read this kind of stuff, the more I find...the answers are actually quite simple, but putting them into practice is difficult, because it requires regular routine work. 

MS: Absolutely. 

AB: I've never found something that is a truly revolutionary new and different thing. Sometimes it's somebody asking a question that challenges you to rethink something in a different way, but ultimately the ideas at their core are the same. But we need to continue to learn these lessons, which is why this stuff still works. We keep coming back to them because they're so hard to put into practice. 

MS: If curiosity does drive us to such an enormous extent, I guess we need a certain amount of novelty even in the things we're doing every day. If you're doing the same thing every day and in the same way every day...

AB: Right - and that’s the difference between routine and ritual and rut.  They all have similar aspects to them, but then they're all quite different. Routine is something you do regularly, like every time you eat breakfast. But - a ritual is something that you do routinely, but with an extra level of intention to it, like lighting a candle before you do a yoga practice - so there's that ritual, using the candle to tell your body, okay like I'm now in yoga practice and my mind and my body are just going to connect this way. And then a rut is like the routine that you continually do over and over again, but don’t want to, and can’t break out of.

MS: Right.

AB: And those things are interesting because they're all really the same thing. It's just doing something over and over again - but it’s really about how you look at that thing. That changes whether or not it feels like a rut and is holding you back, or if you're able to do that routine thing with a curious mindset that allows you to like explore the boundaries of it.

MS: So it's the same thing, but you can change the way that you interpret it and how you react to it and the meaning you're attached to it. That’s a timely reminder, yes. 

AB: It really is.

MS: Thanks for this chat, it’s been great. I'll do some light edits to the transcript if that’s ok: for example, you know, when you said, “Hi Mike, it’s Anna here” I might change that to “please subscribe to Mike's awesome newsletter.” Stuff like that.

AB: I’m hanging up now, Mike.

MS: Thanks, Anna!

I firmly recommend you sign up to Anna’s monthly Creative Fuel newsletter here - and you can get more of her brilliance by signing up to her Patreon.

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