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A portly sulphur-crested cockatoo waddles past smugly, shrieking like a banshee. The crest it’s named for sits erect atop its little head, elaborate as a mohawk or a church hat, and all the dogs lose their shit. These birds can live eighty years in captivity and this wild one has its chest puffed out like one of those furious guys on steroids who always skip legs at the gym.

Out here on the outskirts of Canberra, where the animal shelter looks across impossibly vast snow-capped mountains, cockatoos loiter in murmuring eucalyptus trees, yelling insults and trying to fight everyone. I come here each week to clean the kennels. I hose them out and change the bedding and toys for fresh versions and I whisper compliments into the velvet ears of forgotten and unfortunate and broken-hearted dogs. It’s spectacularly sad and lovely work. It realigns all the stupid pettinesses that fester inside me. It makes me feel valuable and insignificant.

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“I’ll have all you fuckers”, the cockatoo roars at me and the row of kennels housing eight dogs as I drop a load of turds off my scoop into a bucket. Its beak juts out pugnaciously and it makes an objectively impolite level of eye contact for a stranger. I’d wonder what its problem is, but cockatoos are often like this and I have a lot of respect for it. If they had fists they’d punch you. They just go through life swinging.

One of the dogs, a chihuahua named Gooseberry, pipes back. I don’t speak chihuahua, but it sounds something like “Come get some, you prick. I’ll squash your fruity fucking centurian helmet into your skull.”

“Settle down, Gooseberry”, I mutter in a consoling tone. “He seems drunk”.

A Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Bubbles joins in to the tune of “I’ll kill your whole family you little shit.” Bubbles is all talk - she has a fondness for squeaky toys but sometimes chomps down on them too hard and does herself a spooking. If you scratch her flank in the right spot, she spins in circles. I go into her kennel and give her a hug — the drunk cockatoo has visibly upset her. She leans her weight against me and emits a gentle grumbling noise that sounds a bit like “arrogant bastard bird”.

“I know”, I say.

Chief, who is a mix of cane corso and something else, and who looks objectively frightening, has had an upset stomach in the night. He is full of constant yearning and his heavy body, which is glossy and black as a filled inkwell, betrays it. Always, he wants something but he doesn’t know what it is. I find this terrifying and relatable and contagious. Someone used Chief as a guard dog even though he could just as easily have been a different kind of dog. The best friend of a child of ten or the running buddy of some guy who likes tearing up and down hills — there are plenty such in Canberra.

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Instead, Chief was left by himself and never taught to dog, so now he is unmet need embodied. I tell him that he’s good and will be alright because that’s what you say to a sad dog. In reality, I worry that he might not be able to find a home because he has so many issues, none of which are his fault. While Chief is out for a walk, I’m hosing diarrhoea out of his kennel and trying not to retch. I swap out his soiled bedding for fresh blankets. The cockatoo watches from a nearby fence, laughing. It might be a psychopath.

Nothing about this environment looks anything like where I came from. I think the same each week as I stand alone, apart from all the dogs and screaming birds and local population of entirely soundless rabbits, in the grassy clearing by my usual row of kennels. The low, sodden sky over the west of Ireland, where I grew up, is like a trough of cold porridge or a pale slate ocean over your head on an April day — opaque and wrinkled. On this particular morning at the animal shelter in the Australian capital, the sky is impossibly far above, extending endlessly in all directions. It’s an infinite bolt of cobalt silk. There’s something incomprehensible about the breadth of it. The shade looks like it should be enrobing the plump alabaster body of some sumptuous sixteenth-century Venetian courtesan in a painting. It’s a colour Titian might have used. I’ve never seen anything like it, except in the sky here in Australia.

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I often wonder what this version of my life — the blue-skied one with shit on my jeans, trying to break up a heated verbal altercation between an enormous wild bird and a small toffee-coloured poodle named Derek (“I’ll break you, you flying vermin!”) — has in common with the ones that came before. Certainly, what my life looks like now is beyond anything that seemed possible while I was growing up.

I come to the animal shelter to volunteer in part because I’ve had the free time to do it — this is itself an immense luxury — and because I wanted to help, but also for selfish reasons. My life here has been so supremely comfortable — so unperturbed and safe and convenient — that I do it in part to ensure I don’t become weak. I grew up in chaos — I cannot permit myself to become someone who forgets that and confuses minor discomforts for serious ones.

Working with vulnerable creatures forces me to see the vulnerability in myself and everyone around me. It is a humbling reminder of the extent to which you cannot change what is ugly in the world but you can bear witness to it. You can tell yourself the truth, and accept it. You can do small things where you can. My time at the shelter is a reminder that too much comfort leads to a loss of perspective. What a privilege my life here has been, that I have had to seek out discomfort to maintain my self-respect.

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In this shimmering, solitary moment, the air smells like eucalyptus and diarrhoea. Neither entirely cancels out the other but unfortunately the eucalyptus isn’t winning. If you’ve been reading Peak Notions for a while, you’ll probably have noticed my fondness for Joan Didion’s opening section in The White Album — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live… We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

We choose the story, though we don’t necessarily choose every element of it, and at the centre of everyone’s story is themselves — the author. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre maintained, rather like Didion, that a human life is only comprehensible to us if it takes the form of a story. Your actions make sense in the context of the story so far. It explains why you are afraid of failure, or why you chose to end your marriage. It explains why you want to live in France or write a novel.

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He borrows from Aristotle in considering a human life as a unified entity — a series of interconnected events with you at the centre, like the author of a perpetually unfolding narrative. You have a conception of the good life and a set of values oriented around that. Your choices are explained, weighed and measured in the context of your aims and your commitments as they emerge from these values. The story is constantly being revised and reworked, and you are telling it to yourself and others every moment of your life. The way you interpret and tell the story of your past shapes and reshapes your present identity. Through action and belief, we make ourselves.

MacIntyre thought about all this in relation to virtue ethics — he believed that to live a good life, we must have a coherent story, and that aiming for consistently virtuous behaviour (like courage) creates that for us. It allows us to understand what our values are and who we are across time and space. This coherence allows us to understand that the self we are now bears something fundamental in common with the selves of before, no matter the distance that yawns out between them.

The cockatoo, who has swaggered onto a nearby fence, edges closer and emits a yell that could pull your lungs out of your chest. It scratches its puffy neck with its strange grabby little grey stippled feet, and calls me a “stupid bint” before exploding from the fence into the mellow air. From below, I can see that the feathers on the underside of its wings and tail are a spectacular pale saffron yellow. Custard and sliced pineapple. It’s like peering delicately down the trumpet of a daffodil — for an instant, the whole world is yellow. Behind me, a Jack Russell named Chip begins a loud, reedy lament of ‘awooo’. The cockatoo recedes into the great blue beyond, sparks of yellow flashing back at us.

“What an arsehole”, says Chip.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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In my hand sits a bashed-up iPhone. It’s so old that the Gen Z guy at the Apple store laughed at me when I tried, having just shattered the back of it cruelly against the tiled bathroom floor, to buy a post-hoc protective cover. “Naauurrrr”, he said, his languid Australian accent spiced with utter disdain. “Maybe troy Temu.” It was a decent burn and I left empty-handed. Mildly singed. Despite its advanced age and infirmity, and the cynicism of the disdainful Apple guy, my smashed phone gives me access to a breadth of human outputs and ideas unprecedented in the history of our species.

Recently, I gawked dumbly at my outdated portal-to-all-things, scrolling through Instagram (as we do) and was fed, along with mouthfuls of the pancakes I’d earlier Googled the recipe for, an uncanny and incoherent video of a female pilot in the Iranian air force. She was unfeasibly young and model attractive, espousing the merits of the present regime, which is of course famously egalitarian and just all about hot girls with uncovered hair piloting warplanes. The plane featured in the short video looked modern and impressive, while Iran’s fleet is famously antique.

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The video wasn’t real, obviously — it was AI — but I duly lost twenty-something minutes to confirming that this was the case and trying to understand precisely what manner of baffling dishonesty I was looking at. Like the rest of us, I’ve seen countless other spurious videos, tweets, claims and articles online just this week on all manner of subjects. It’s impossible to keep up in any responsible way with the deluge of personal social media content, news, obvious AI slop and concealed AI slop. We cannot interpret or parse the narratives coming at us ceaselessly from every possible direction. We cannot adapt quickly enough in a climate where information demands to be processed at a rate and volume far beyond the capacity of any human mind, however effortful, well intended or discerning.

Kyle Chayka wrote recently about the delusion of being informed in the New Yorker, suggesting that “We monitor the situation out of a deluded belief that we are more than just passive, confused bystanders to a spray of digital shrapnel.” Bearing witness to the wave gives us the illusion of agency, or perhaps of participation. We make two errors — one is treating having a device in our pocket with access to all possible knowledge (in theory) as somehow equivalent to knowing everything ourselves, or knowing enough. As though hiring a lawyer is the same as knowing the law. The second is in the presumption that access translates to either discernment or activity. The fact that we can theoretically know everything is presumed to mean we kind-of-already-do, and this possibility feels vaguely like doing something. It is the great illusion of our perpetual drive to ‘bear witness’ online.

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Passive information consumption is unavoidable in the overstimulation of modern life. You will be exposed to things you’d rather not merely by existing online. You’ll learn what it means to get Frame-Mogged. You’ll have your day ruined by discovering that one of the four remaining uncontentious and universally beloved celebrities just died. You’ll be catfished into making an inedible dinner by some AI slop recipe and be forced to swallow your own credulous naivety with every bite.

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Social media is choking beneath a thick algal bloom of AI content. This may strike you as a banal point, because well obviously, but it’s more pervasive than we think. AI is not just videos of cats playing the violin (RIP Sora) and dancing girls with unfeasible hip-waist ratios and filler articles from overstretched and low standard outlets — it’s in Instagram captions and brand copy. It’s in your friends’ Whatsapp messages to you and the dating app profile of the person you’re considering a drink with on Friday night. AI is authoring tweets on the Iran war and videos of impossible female pilots in non-existent planes; it’s shilling the hollow life lessons about attachment theory and ‘filling your cup’ that resonate with you on TikTok.

On average, we seem broadly aware that content we engage with online is increasingly unreliable, yet we react as though it isn’t. The distinctive written cadence and structure of ChatGPT in particular is ubiquitous in social media posts and captions. The sudden change in the written voices of people we actually know. The viral commentary on global conflict and the economic analysis that you think about when considering the interest rate on your mortgage. That explainer you toilet-scrolled on the Strait of Hormuz or the controversy around Lindy West’s latest book or rising unemployment numbers may not have been produced exclusively by a person, or at least not by a person whose goal is to inform you about reality in good faith.

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We pretend to know this, but continue to engage with online content reactively, to take things at face value, and to hand our emotional attention over to whatever hooks into our lizard brain and smashes the ‘anxious’, ‘terrified’ or ‘furious’ and ‘righteous’ buttons.

On social media, for example, AI writing is often used by people who seek engagement — anyone from small brands to TikTok Shop-schilling super-influencers. It’s used to automate participation, to manipulate, and to minimise potential blowback. It responds to comments to create the illusion of interpersonal interaction (‘comment GRIFT below and I’ll DM you the link/discount code!’). It’s used to simulate care or connection when a person is merely pursuing their self-interest. Much of what we encounter online is serving a function other than the one it claims to. Being able to contain this reality without throwing the concept of truth into the bin is crucial to protecting a shared reality, and one’s own sanity.

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Somewhere between naive trust (or gullibility) and disengaged cynicism is a benevolent presumption of insincerity — an openness to what you are looking at but without passivity. When something seems interesting, or prompts a reaction within us, we should take this as the first step in engagement — not the only one. The benevolent presumption of insincerity is the understanding that content we engage with online (not content in general but this thing I’m currently looking at or listening to right now) is likely to have been produced with some other motive than merely informing us accurately, and proceeding critically.

It doesn’t follow that we should assume everything is fake, or motivated explicitly to misinform, or borne of nihilism or a psy-op of whoever the current designated Big Bad is. It’s a non-paranoid, non-insane understanding that passive consumption online makes us individually and collectively dumber, more credulous and, on average, more emotionally reactive. How we behave online is as much who we are as our behaviour everywhere else.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Ireland makes me uncomfortable. It irritates me. I lose my patience with it constantly. I love it passionately. For a person who writes about identity as a key feature of our present global cultural friction, Irishness comes up a lot. Particularly because I still write in Irish media. Some of this focus on Irishness is a feature of moving around a lot and a constant awareness of how different cultures and beliefs cast reality at disparate angles.

Some of it is the outcome of an Irish Catholic education — one which conflated absorbing and regurgitating worn out and long unquestioned ideas with thought. Some of it is a consequence of my own culture’s extreme reliance on conformity. Forty years ago, the vast majority of people in the Republic of Ireland were observant Catholics and intolerant of other ways of being. Now, most of us reject the religion with similar devotion and frequently, similar intolerance. While I’m very far from Catholic now, and do not ascribe to any religion, for a long time I hated the Church. Hated is the correct word. It’s a common attitude in Ireland.

Apart from its egregious intergenerational crimes in my country, I blamed it in large part for what I saw as Ireland’s philosophical shortcomings. For the ideological conformity that mars a complex, rich and beautiful culture. In reality, Catholicism was a symptom and not a cause. An identity formed under threat — as Irish national identity was — must value unity above all. You can’t get a crowbar under a colonising force and push them out with a soft, ideologically diverse approach. You can’t encourage individuals to decide for themselves when you are fighting for the survival of collective identity and culture.

You need unity, certainty, cohesion. You need conformity. This is the root of it. This is why it is generally so disapproved of in Ireland to be different, to dissent, or to challenge established or majority views. Why you can’t wear a trench coat without being called ‘inspector gadget’ for the ensuing twenty years (which yes, is hilarious). To dissent, stand out or step outside the Overton window is to undermine the Irish social and political project. It is seen as a threat to cultural cohesion. It is a threat.

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Most Irish people have encountered this powerful force in our culture at some point. Whether you’re wearing something too ‘notions’ (read: British), questioning the value of a particular tradition or suggesting an alternative view, chances are you’ve been tone policed, course corrected or shamed into silence or conformity. It may be done with levity but the underlying message is the same: ‘stay in line and meet expectations. You’re making people uncomfortable’.’

This is why many of Ireland’s most cherished thinkers (posthumously cherished, at least) have traditionally left the country, only to love it wildly and resent it and shake their fists at it from abroad. People like James Joyce never stopped thinking or writing about Ireland. He is known as arguably the greatest Irish writer in history, and we have a lot of great ones. We claim Joyce unequivocally and with immense pride. He is an example of many Irish writers we consider masters in what is, if you want to think of it like this, our second language. We like thinking of it that way — that the British forced their less lyrical language on us and yet we are disproportionately talented in using it. Yet Joyce called Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow”. The devouring matriarch. He clearly loved the country with a heart broken by it.

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Irish people have a rich appreciation of art and literature. They are deeply irreverent and bitingly funny. They have a robustness that is borne of historic resistance and a pragmatism that emerges from collective hardship. There are few peoples with such a powerful and enduring sense of community, even away from home. We have wandered halfway across the earth in huge numbers and yet most of us maintain that length of twine around our ribs which gnaws on our bones and tugs us homeward. The Irish emigrant’s love of home may sometimes feel unrequited but it is enduring.

Irishness is one aspect of my own identity over which I feel least uncertainty. I understand how lucky I am to have a place in which I feel a sense of ease and belonging. I am lucky to be ‘from’ somewhere, to feel represented by and reflected in the culture. I consider where I come from to be a place of unrivalled beauty — that mournful mossy-grey landscape, all lush verdancy and flinty, steely, briny cragginess. Its beauty is not tender and complacent but hard and knowing. I’m proud of my country’s history. Its gall and persistence. Its sheer neck. Its iron grip on its own identity in the face of attempted decimation of that identity. I feel Irish and carry this feeling wherever I go. I cherish it.

I also criticise Ireland. A lot. I think there is a lack of criticality in our politics and public intellectuals precisely because of the misguided certainty and uncritical fealty from which our modern identity emerged. I despair over my country’s total refusal to admit — let alone address — its deep and frightening antisemitism, as though the tiny, ever-shrinking Jewish community in Ireland somehow says nothing about the country’s attitude to Jewish people. Just a coincidence somehow.

I’m overwhelmingly sad that so many young Irish people are ending up here in Australia not necessarily because they want to (though Australia is a lovely place to live) but because there is not space for them at home, or willingness to create any. Ireland is turning into a country where the young cannot grow up, cannot achieve independence, and where generational gaps in wealth and resources are impossible not to notice. As of 2024, approximately two in three Irish 18-34 year olds were living with their parents. Trapped in stasis in the box room.

When I write about Ireland in Irish media, I get responses from Irish people telling me to stop complaining. Stop pointing out what’s wrong. Stop being negative about Ireland. Surely though, we are living in a time when it is easier than ever to recognise that loving your country does not mean endorsing every element of it. It does not mean being blind to its mistakes, its vices or the bad values and misaligned priorities of a leadership which fails to represent so many people.

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This inclination toward silence — this “say nothing” attitude — is deeply entrenched in Irish culture. It is worth resisting. Loving where you come from entails holding it to a high standard and pointing out where it’s falling short. Every Western country is experiencing an identity crisis at present. Ireland is not unique in this respect, nor more to blame than anywhere else in this insane moment for having to revisit basic questions like ‘Who are we?’; ‘Who do we want to be?’; ‘What conditions are acceptable to us?’. Our history of deferring to authority figures, not asking uncomfortable questions and shaming those who say the challenging thing has not served us well. It is at the root of the worst injustices we have experienced under our own auspices.

So… happy St. Patrick’s Day. If you’re Irish (or if you’re not), it’s worth remembering that our best inclinations push boundaries, make the justified complaint, risk being publicly embarrassed sometimes and laugh off the insults when what we seek is the truth. If you can’t laugh off the insults, just use the below Irish curse to befuddle your online critics:

“Ualach sé chapall de chré na húire ort.”

(Six horseloads of graveyard clay upon you.)

This is a column from the Peak Notions archive.

Some Other Peak Notions Columns on Irishness, Given the Day:

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One of the benefits of the fact that everyone is a public intellectual now is that we can watch people reason online in real time, and notice two things. First, that it is hard, and second, that a lot of people are not good at it. Something controversial happens. It might be a passing mayhem like footage of a (married, but not to one another) CEO and a HR executive embracing at a Coldplay concert. Arguably, video evidence of having attended a Coldplay concert at all is pretty damning. Still, these sorts of disproportionately ravenous moral lightning rod moments tend to destroy lives in the mere single or lower double digits, and we generally consider that a small price to pay for an afternoon’s distraction from the horrors, so we don’t mind much. We’re delighted to have somewhere unambiguous to direct our moral certainty.

The controversial event might also be within a specific, complex context, like a pandemic or Russia invading Ukraine or October 7th 2023. These require more information and time investment to formulate a view on, but that’s what Chat GPT is for. It feels good to know things, or approximate knowing them, which is quicker. It’s invigorating be agreed with, or have some faceless stranger to argue with. It feels natural to have a vent for all the outrage we can’t constructively direct. It’s affirming and low cost to hold forth. And so, depending on the news cycle, everyone is an expert on vaccine science, or Russian military history, or the conflict in Israel and Palestine, or some random guy’s marriage and personal obligations.

The dark corridor of the 2010s provided many such delicious opportunities for holding forth. It was a time when interpersonal compassion died from neglect; when social media became a tool through which you could keep up to date with your friend in Australia, but also band together with the equally outraged to ruin the life of someone you decided on a whim was the worst person on earth. The least charitable interpretation of anything said or written became the truest. To create a world that is safe and inclusive for all, we categorised people by immutable characteristics and determined the validity of their ideas and actions based on the same. Dissent was steamrolled over, silence was declared complicity, and guilt was presupposed. A real ideological utopia.

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Since then, things have changed both profoundly and not at all. Take this week’s controversy. An activist with Tourette Syndrome who has devoted his career to educating people on that nightmarishly difficult condition was invited to the BAFTAs. He was there to celebrate the film inspired by his experience of living with Tourette’s, which includes coprolalia (vocal tics which involve swearing). I Swear was evidently considered such an important and accomplished film that it won multiple awards on the night. The activist in question — John Davidson — experienced tics during the ceremony, shouting a racial slur while two black actors — Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo — were presenting an award.

This is extremely unfortunate. The audience had been warned in advance about Davidson’s Tourettes. If they hadn’t, it would have been catastrophic rather than merely deeply uncomfortable and confronting. Sympathy for Jordan and Lindo, who were on camera at the time, is entirely appropriate. A warning was delivered. Everyone present — including Davidson— was duly very embarrassed by what happened. Keenly aware of the impact his involuntary behaviour caused, Davidson elected to leave and watch the remainder of the ceremony elsewhere. The BBC aired the incident, featuring the slur, after the fact, which is a bad decision and one which should have been the focus of the criticism and upset that followed.

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Because everyone is a public intellectual now, a lot of sudden experts on Tourette’s are holding forth this week. Apparently Tourette’s is a neurological disability, but it also can’t make you yell the worst possible thing at the worst possible time (despite this unfortunate behaviour being very much what it apparently can do. When we frame a problem, we can only use the tools we are already equipped with. We view a situation through whatever lens we were looking through when we got here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s article on this is worth your time

Days later, Anti-Racists and Anti-Ableists are still scrapping it out on X and Bluesky to determine which collective group’s status is more vulnerable, and therefore what individual members of those groups necessarily owe to the other; relishing this week’s return to the cosmically detached talking points of the late 2010s. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the tug-of-war of our cultural moment — we’ve grown weary of the limitations of identity theory so flat and dehumanising that it cannot account for the variation and nuance of individual human lives. Yet not all of us have, and when you’ve got one lens and no other, everything you see can only be refracted through it.

While the present moment has its own issues, and we are witnessing many on the right perpetrate the very idiocies they spent the prior decade denigrating the left for, shallow identity-based arguments are not capturing the monoculture in the way they would have five years ago. Of course it probably helps that there isn’t any longer really a monoculture to speak of. What makes the story of Davidson at the BAFTAs both relevant and attention-grabbing is its unsatisfying complexity. There is an intolerable friction in the fact that attempts to meaningfully include him were ultimately a complete failure, and that even with forewarning of the very difficult reality of his disability, so many people in the room with Davidson were still unable to manage the profound and legitimate discomfort of witnessing that reality. It is a discomfort so profound that many have since sought to parse it by quibbling with or denying the nature of his disability, which is something we often see in relation to conversations on mental illness.

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We are full of compassion in theory, but when a schizophrenic commits a violent crime or Kanye West does a Kanye West, we’re met with protests that ‘mental illness doesn’t do that’. We’d feel better if we could ignore the context so that we might vilify and blame without leaving any space for all that terrible, impossible complexity. When it is not rational to straightforwardly blame or punish a person engaging in a terrible behaviour, we’d rather tell a story that simply allows us to pretend otherwise. As Kat Rosenfield put it “the evil of Tourette’s is not only that it inflicts so much suffering on the person who has it; it’s that it brings out the worst in everyone else.”

What Davidson said was just awful. It was in fact the most awful thing he could have said in the most uncomfortable possible context, which seems to be at the heart of a disability most of us probably lack the fortitude to live with as he has. He did not say it voluntarily and is therefore not responsible for having said it even though the word is legitimately hurtful and unacceptable, and clearly prompted a variety of reactions from discomfort to distress.

Demands for an apology here entail a confusion about what an apology is. It necessitates taking accountability for an action and responsibility for the consequences. We can easily recognise how crucial both elements are in apologies that fall short. An insincere or instrumental apology (that cheating partner or dreadful relative) who utilises “I’m sorry” to generate an outcome that would make their own life easier without doing the hard bit. An apology has to take unmitigated responsibility for an action. It must acknowledge the harm caused, and it entails expressing a sincere intention not to repeat the harmful behaviour. It rests on the idea of ownership. Being culpable — deserving of blame. Mea culpa.

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Where responsibility is mitigated, an apology is tokenistic — taking responsibility at best for the emotional reactions of other people. Davidson can acknowledge people’s feelings, but given the specificity and challenge of his disability, he cannot be expected to own the emotional reactions of everyone he meets and involuntarily says something unacceptable to. Can there be special cases where he suddenly becomes responsible because the thing he did not choose to say and says he does not believe is a special category of awful? Well, no.

This is not a comfortable conclusion. It does not mitigate any emotional impact of what he said on the people affected by it. Still, it is the right conclusion. To apologise is to claim responsibility for what you’ve done, to admit fault, and to be changed by both.

Even though he cannot do these things given his disability, Davidson has in fact apologised, but his apology was qualified by the context. This has not satisfied some people. What would satisfy them is impossible, because he cannot be made culpable. He must be treated as an individual whose behaviour can only be understood within a discrete context, and not like an interchangable member of any group. I’m sure he’s spent his life apologising as someone who routinely causes offence and hurt without consenting to do so, and whose company cannot as a result feel positive for most people he encounters. He was not able to get through one evening celebrating a film depicting the reality of his disability without being faced with demands that he apologise for having the disability.

We have so little capacity to accommodate two non-optimal truths at the same time, or to accept that we simply have an obligation to integrate them despite the inevitable trade-offs. Despite the deep dissatisfaction and discomfort this creates. To avoid this, it seems we’ll do almost anything, including sacrificing living, breathing individuals to protect the lens through which we need to see them.

My book, Some Of Our Parts, an identity culture memoir, is out in paperback now.

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If this kind of post is not your thing, there will be a regular Peak Notions column later in the week!

Something to read:

Image Credit: Cartoons Hate Her

THE BEAUTY STANDARD IS IMPOSSIBLY SKINNY-CURVY, NOT CHILDLIKE

CHH is a Substack institution, and worth a subscription for her prolific output, snort-inducing humour and general capacity to find a nuanced position on contentious issues and defend it without getting too weird or angry. These are underrated qualities on this unholy internet. When Jameela Jamil recently wrote an article titled ‘Ah shit! We let pedophiles decide our beauty standards’, I guessed that an interesting take from Cartoons Hate Her would be incoming. It was:

“Ultimately, the reason I disagree with this “beauty standards are pedophilia” discourse is that it frames women without “curves” as overgrown children, whom only pedophiles would find attractive. Not to get all “let men be masculine” on you, but this is really just another form of body-shaming, even if it’s not intended that way. Non-curvy women exist in multitudes (as I said before, most women aren’t actually that curvy) and yet a movement designed to shed light on “what women really look like” completely leaves them in the dust because they don’t look like they could have been painted on a cave wall.”

The beauty standards conversation is pitched about and refracted through so many lenses — gender, race, status, socioeconomics, age, technology, politics, history. Generally, it’s flattened and squashed to fit through one or two of these but the conversation isn’t a simple one. Straightforward or monocausal narratives about what we consider beautiful — what we value — and why will never be satisfactory. We’re all in the weeds. Reading broadly different perspectives helps.

Something to listen to:

EPICTETUS DISCOURSES AND OTHER WRITINGS AUDIOBOOK, narrated by Robert Dobbin

This one is cheating a bit since we’re reading it for Peak Notions Book Club but I’ve had an Audible membership for years now. I listened to well over a hundred books last year. When I’m reading non-fiction, I always go for a print version, but when a book merits a second pass I’ll often immediately follow reading it with a listen to the audio edition. I do this (where possible) with titles we read for the book club.

In preparation for the March 12th book club session, I’m currently listening to Epictetus’ Discourses. Audio philosophy titles can be hit and miss, often because philosophy writing is more careful than it is compelling and many were recorded before audiobooks were considered respectable or lucrative. The narrator of this one makes it really enjoyable. Dobbin’s Epictetus is funny, quite contemptuous, and wry. The fact that the translation prioritises comprehensibility for a modern reader makes it an easy, pleasant listen.

Something to subscribe to:

LONDON CENTRIC on Substack

You don’t need to be based in London to value what Jim Waterson has done with London Centric. His project to revive and reinvigorate local news in London is proving incredibly successful, consistently focusing on the sorts of stories that make a material difference.

London Centric does a lot of investigative work, and this week broke the story of an impending mass eviction of tenants in advance of renters gaining new rights in May. The resulting political pressure has halted the evictions for now. Before London Centric’s investigation, affected tenants across different properties had no idea of the scale of what was happening.

This is the power of great local journalism.

London Centric

Billionaire halts mass eviction after London Centric investigation

Hundreds of Londoners will be allowed to remain in their homes after London Centric uncovered a plan to carry out “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history” by a company controlled by billionaire landlord Asif Aziz…

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a month ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

Something to not listen to:

CHEAP FOAM EAR PLUGS

Ear plugs are not just for those with chronic snorer spouses, and they won’t be ideal if you’re caring for small children or someone vulnerable who may need you in the night. But if you want to sleep through with only your bladder to disturb you, total silence is surprisingly helpful. My husband uses Loop Ear Plugs and finds them effective but I don’t believe everything has to be chic or ergonomic to work, and even Loops warp, fall out and lose effectiveness with prolonged use. I prefer crappy old fashioned, bell-shaped, foam earplugs. They don’t last forever, sure, and they’re less environmentally considerate than reusing one pair for a year, but here is a list of things that are bad for the environment: having children, industrial farming, all beauty products, driving a car, taking a flight, using glass containers and not using glass containers. So bugger off. A box of these will last a very long time. Birds in Australia shriek like pterodactyls at five am. When I use these, I hear nothing!

Below the paywall you’ll find a pair of jeans that fits perfectly, feels comfortable and doesn’t leave any waist gap. A lot of women will know what a big deal that is, especially when so many of us would opt to walk face-first into a wall before we’d go shopping for jeans. I’ve shared a couple of pictures to give you a realistic sense of what they actually look like on a human person with my body shape, and those will live below the paywall for my dignity and sanity.

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We are encouraged to believe that our body is infinitely fixable, in theory. If you have a big nose, you can have it broken and shaved down so it will heal into a more visually pleasing shape. You can inject filler along the bridge to conceal its wayward bump or deviation. You can force it into alignment with the correct amalgamation of willpower, money and information, or manipulate light and the human eye by using makeup to contour it. With the correct resources, your body can be brought closer to the standard of what is considered beautiful, healthy or good. These concepts are inseparably interconnected.

You can erase lines with botox and retexture skin with lasers and skincare. You can squat for bigger glutes and do pilates for muscle tone. You can take GLP-1s for weight loss. However your body may fall short, a solution can be found to bring it into line. I spent over a decade as a beauty editor, so I know that this is true. And as a philosopher and a person with two working eyes in my head, I also know that it isn’t, and where it isn’t, this false assumption of control results in suffering.

I went to the tailor’s this morning. I go regularly, so they know me in there. Every time I’ve bought trousers since I was thirteen and drenched in self-conscious, self-important self-loathing, in I have schlepped to pay someone with skills I don’t have to alter my trousers to fit. If it goes on the bottom half of my body, it will have to be altered. Jeans. Workwear. Whatever. It will never, ever just fit. Why? Because I have lipedema.

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I didn’t know the name for it until I learned about this condition on social media about eight years ago. I saw women with bodies that look conspicuously similar to mine and fell into a deep online vortex of lipedema information acquisition; mostly in the hope of discovering some information which might confirm that I don’t have it.

A chronic disorder that affects fatty and connective tissue, almost always in women, lipedema is on nobody’s wishlist. Most commonly, it impacts the legs, hips and buttocks, but it can also affect the arms and abdomen in some people. It’s triggered by hormones and causes abnormal fat buildup in the affected areas. The result is swelling, and pain. As a disorder which thankfully doesn’t impact your life expectancy but can affect your quality of life, lipedema is many women’s worst nightmare — an incurable condition that causes you to have a high body fat percentage no matter what you do, and in most cases makes you less conventionally attractive.

I just thought I had unfortunate Irish legs like my low-to-the-ground, potato-picking ancestors (lipedema tends to run in families). Women often tend to internalise aesthetically displeasing features as a genetic curse or personal failing, and to apologise to the world by shrinking away. Sure, I have many good things going for me — my eyelashes are decent and Nigella Lawson once sent a signed copy of one of her cookbooks to my actual house and I did my doctorate on one of the most famously complex and challenging philosophers in the history of ideas — but I don’t look cute in shorts. I don’t ever wear them. I don’t want to think about my legs or look at other people looking at them.

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I managed to get a diagnosis about a year and a half ago here in Australia after finding a receptive, curious GP who’d never heard of lipedema but was interested. She found a colleague who specialised in it, and now I have a management strategy in place. I’d broached my suspicions with several less curious GPs when I lived in the UK. “People always want an answer that means their weight isn’t their fault”, one said, looking through me with a bored expression. “You just need to lose weight”.

By then, I had been on a self-imposed, highly restrictive ketogenic diet for two years (it’s one of the recommended management strategies for lipedema but really quite sad if you like bread, and I do). The fact that I had lost so much weight everywhere except my legs didn’t seem to strike this GP as relevant. “Just lose more”, she told me. I left her office feeling soiled, and slightly like putting my fist through a wall. This is how it has always been — my body is two bodies. A composite of upper and lower that jars. The lower is understood to be an advertisement of some sort of failure. A failure of discipline, aesthetics or moral quality. Something it is my responsibility to fix. Force into line.

There it is again, that assumption that the body is infinitely fixable, manipulable, manageable. It’s basic arithmetic or a spreadsheet. A simple matter of calories in and calories out, lifting heavier or more often. Just optimise. Inject this, correct that. Develop better habits. If you face resistance from your intransigent body, push harder, escalate your willpower. Eat less, run more. You are not trying hard enough.

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This idea sells, and in its iron-hard implacability, it comforts us. Though it makes us feel inadequate, it gives us something to strive for. It’s easier to live with than the idea that some things can’t be fixed; that our will and our work won’t force the change we long for. How frightening it is to think that we get the body we get, and it is our duty to care for it as responsibly as we can within the limitations of our particular circumstances. How confronting it is to consider that it can betray us. Time will degrade it. Bones will get more brittle. Muscle will dissipate. Teeth will yellow, gums recede and skin dull and sag. If we’re privileged to live long enough, our bodies will eventually fail us. That is the best case scenario any of us can hope for. It terrifies us.

Plus this sentiment doesn’t sell shampoo or make people feel nice. It isn’t what we want to hear. Few of us aspire toward what we can reasonably expect. It’s impossible to optimise on a trajectory of unavoidable decline. Decline is what is supposed to happen to us, and our role is not to moralise over it or deny it or lean so far in that we accelerate or celebrate it. Our role is to move through it knowingly and with a view to living well.

So I take my stupid legs to the gym four times a week and I hurt them constructively, along with the rest of my body, to make the very most of what I have. For days after leg sessions, the pain can be unpleasant. It makes me feel sorry for myself; it stokes adolescent anger at my noncompliant body despite the fact that it looks more ‘normal’ now I know what to do to minimise swelling, maintain muscle mass and eat appropriately. I wear compression garments often, though not always, and do boring, necessary lymphatic drainage massage to help with swelling. I take medication to manage inflammation. I watch my calorie intake as though my quality of life depends on it, because it does.

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I exert this high level of control over my body and in return, its response is no response. I am mostly irrelevant, and so is my will. I am King Knut while the tide sucks obscenely at my toes. Since getting a diagnosis, I’ve made radical changes over time, and you can see these on the outside. The disparity between my upper and lower body has narrowed. I’ve lost fat and gained a kilo of muscle. I’m stronger. My legs are smaller now. But they are not small. They don’t proportionately reflect my effort and behaviours and they will not do so as long as I live. Lipedema does not yield to willpower. I can manage it. I can improve it. I cannot fix it. Someday I’ll die, and I’ll be doing it with ugly legs.

There is a lack of curiosity and awareness of the condition. This is especially surprising given that estimates suggest around ten per cent of women have lipedema. This is an astronomical proportion for a condition most people have never heard of, including the doctors who should be diagnosing and treating it.

Many women with lipedema develop eating disorders in their attempt to control a body that is objectively resistant to weight loss in the affected areas. Many consider their bodies a curse or a character failure. They are encouraged to believe this. It’s easier than changing how we think about our own responsibilities and limitations. It explodes the infantile myth that if we just work hard enough, we can be, get and have, exactly what we want. Sometimes the body will not submit to discipline. It will not yield to force. In a culture of discipline and optimisation, this reality is intolerable.

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“Settle on the type of person you want to be and stick to it, whether alone or in company.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion

While a quick constitutional through social media and YouTube might convince you that Stoicism is in fact a brand of testicular deodorising spray popularised by Andrew Tate, it is actually a school of philosophy, and has been for some time. Epictetus, whose Discourses we are reading for our next book club session taking place on March 12th, and which are lecture notes transcribed by his student, Arrian, around 1,900 (ish) years ago, was not the first Stoic by any means. Zeno is considered the founder of Stoicism, and he was knocking about around 300BCE. So you’ll comprehend what I mean when I write that the whole ‘Make bank investing in crypto by being STOIC!!!!’ thing is a smidge more recent. Stoicism is actually far older and more intellectually vast than the comment sections under posts about using the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius to trick girls into touching your privates.

Despite the unsettling popularity of this thing which calls itself Stoicism but is in fact rather closer to clinical sociopathy, it is but an exceptionally depressing and very factually incorrect understanding and use of Stoicism. In fact, I’d imagine you can only really emerge from reading someone like Epictetus with that sort of interpretation if you drink two bottles of drowsy cough syrup beforehand and pick up the book with live charges clamped to your nipples.

For that particular corner of the internet, being ‘Stoic’ appears to mean being self-interested, emotionally repressed (except for silent anger and seething resentment, which are manly or something), and as buff as possible. Provided of course you’re taking the right AI social media influencer’s supplements, which cost $200 a month and are (I’m guessing) largely comprised of vacuum cleaner dust and donkey testosterone.

So look, if all that is what you think of when you think about Stoicism, I don’t blame you. Those chaps are loud, ubiquitous and a bit lost, but you’re under a misapprehension. Stoicism is a rich and valuable holistic philosophy which ambitiously tries (and fails, as they all must) to give us a theory of everything. Epictetus’ Encheiridion (or Enchiridion)— the manual that best showcases his wisdom and irascible wit — is filled with sparkling insights and brutally constructive truths about living an honest, decent life in a world which tends to reward anything but. These insights and ideas have value for anyone who is interested in them, regardless of the time you live in, the culture you come from, or how much protein you can ingest before you involuntarily soil yourself and your liver falls out.

It’s no surprise that Stoicism, and Epictetus in particular, have been so influential in modern therapeutic methodologies and techniques. His psychology is inward-facing, focused on what we can control, and living according to our values even when the pressure not to, and the consequences for doing so, are great. It is a rigorous, challenging, serious philosophy.

The Discourses cover ethics, theology and metaphysics to articulate a beautifully self-contained and self-regulating universe, of which we are all a part. It’s where you’ll find the skeleton of Epictetus’ belief system. The Encheiridion is a shorter, more practically oriented, read. It’s less focused on the ideas that make up Epictetus’ Stoicism, and more concerned with what living according to those ideas looks like in action. You’ll find the Encheiridion at the back of most copies of the Discourses (including the one I recommend reading for this book club session below).

I hope you’ll come along in March 12th and join us for a discussion about what Stoicism has looked like through its evolution, the competing versions that are so popular and prolific right now, what it is about this philosophy that makes it both so compelling and so ripe for exploitation and douchebaggery, and why it has such enduring mass appeal. Perhaps your life has been improved by Stoicism, or you don’t get why so many people won’t shut up about it, or someone you know has suddenly started quoting Epictetus at you (and trying to sell you donkey testosterone supplements). We’ll get into all of it together. I hope to see you there!

You don’t need any background in philosophy to come along to this session or to find value in the book. If you do have a philosophy background, the discussion will still be interesting for you!

The book club is my way of thanking paid subscribers who keep Peak Notions afloat, and of building community here. It takes research, work, and admin (which is not my forte oh my goodness!) so for that reason it’s open to paid subscribers only. There are 15 spots available for this Peak Notions Book Club session, which takes place on Zoom at 8pm UK/Irish time on Thursday March 12th. If we get significantly more signups, I may run a second session.

PLEASE NOTE: The book club sessions will no longer be recorded. I’ve made this decision to maximise the freedom of those who attend to share their views without the pressure of feeling observed after the fact. I started Peak Notions to give myself the freedom to write and speak as I wish to. I want Peak Notions to be a space that gives others that freedom as well, so after the session, I will share a written post with paid subscribers discussing the highlights and the ideas shared, and any thoughts it prompted for me on the book. I don’t want anyone to miss out if they’d like to attend though, so I’ll see how signups go and will arrange a second session if there’s demand for it.

You can get all the details (including the confusing time zone stuff!) and put your name on the list via the sign-up sheet linked below:

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Recommendations is a series that allows me to share things that I think are worth your time. Often, they’re what I’m currently finding interesting, beautiful or useful. Sometimes they’re old favourites that I don’t have cause to share in the weekly Peak Notions column.

This week, there’s an essay to read on starting again in your forties which will also hold immense intrigue for media wonks, a must-read novel if you’re currently wading through the glorious, soul-destroying morass that is writing a novel yourself (or if you just love great story really) and the activity that changed my life and self-image after I challenged my grinding terror to properly commit to it in 2025.

Below the paywall, there’s the portable murder mystery card game that’s ideal for an evening or weekend away with friends and the delicious sugar-free version of Haribo for all (like me) who enjoy sweets meant for kids but have a weary adult metabolism.

Something to do:

LIFT WEIGHTS

(Stop that. You can. Yes — you can. No it isn’t for other people. It isn’t. It’s for you, you feeble b*tch)

(this is a note from me to me, but maybe also you)

It’s really only in the last couple of decades that my people (Irish ones) are venturing out into the drizzle to move their stiff bodies without some lifelong sedentary elderly relative, who topples over in any light breeze and has glass bones, shrieking that lifting weights will stunt your growth and make your womb fall out onto the road.

I’ve spent much of my adult life living in a body that would fail me when I asked it to do something. Hold up its own weight. Use my core to elevate my legs. Lift a suitcase into the overhead locker. Break my own fall properly when I slipped during ice skating that time (embarrassing). Run for the bus and away from someone I went to school with twenty years ago and do not now wish to talk to.

I wrote about when I first lost a significant amount of weight back in 2022 and the unexpected challenges and thoughts that came with that. The last two years have been devoted to becoming stronger despite my dumb genetic legacy of a couple of annoying physical issues and a deep and passionate devotion to potatoes in all forms.

Like many, I’ve struggled to negotiate the frustration and self-recrimination that came with facing the limited capacity of my body. In order to change it, I had to repeatedly encounter and challenge this inability to do things, and manage the (horrible and sometimes overwhelming) emotions that came with it — shame, rage, debilitating self-consciousness and lack of self-belief. That part was far harder and more embarrassing than learning any physical skill. To try to do something you can’t do over and over again feels absolutely terrible. Until, one day, you can, and reality itself is remade.

Scared? Don’t know how to start? AI has faults but is great for this. Tell it your age, weight plus any physical, time or other limitations you have and ask it to put together a beginner’s warmup and free weights workout (because machines are scary at first) tailored to you, your goals, and all the rest. Crucially, when you do this, ask (eg Chat GPT) if there are any questions it needs to ask you in order to fully respond to your prompt. This helps minimise errors or oversights. Then, look up the exercises it has given you on Youtube or Instagram to check how to do them with proper form. If any feel too embarrassing or unreasonably difficult, ask it for a replacement until you have a routine you can tolerate. Do this until it feels easier, then go back and ask for a new routine with the challenge elevated.

Just don’t skip the warmup, especially if you’re thirty-plus - it will ensure you’re less sore after working out (you will be sore to begin with), and help prevent injuries. Take music or an audiobook that you love, and when you meet frustration and shame face to face, don’t converse with it. Do this enough times, and the voices will quiet as you prove them wrong. You’ll be opening pickle jars for envious friends.

Something to listen to:

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, by Amor Towles

I’m cheating slightly here, in that this is of course also something to read if you want to, but it’s a pleasing listen if you like an audiobook. A Gentleman in Moscow was published a decade ago and was adapted for the screen last year in a series starring Ewan McGregor. Towles’ career as a novelist started comparatively late, when he published his first novel in his mid-forties.

This book, his second, is set in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and follows Count Alexander Rostov, who is spared execution and banished to Moscow’s Metropol Hotel for life on the understanding that if he ever leaves, he will be shot. As some of the most dramatic events in Russian history unfold outside Rostov’s gilded prison in the ensuing decades, we experience the changing world at a remove along with him.

Any fiction writer will know the daunting task of constructing a breathing, compelling world on the page and there are few more daunting genres than historical fiction. I first read A Gentleman in Moscow in 2022 after listening to an interview with Towles on the Econ Talk podcast with Russ Roberts. In it, the writer talked about setting the novel almost entirely inside a hotel in part as a way of making the historical research necessary to the story more feasible for a non-historian. C.J. Sansom did the same in his widely loved Shardlake historical mystery series, by setting the first novel literally inside the walls of in a snowed-in monastery during a storm.

Something to Read:

THE SECOND BEGINNING, by Farrah Storr

This article was especially fascinating to me because when veteran magazine editor Farrah Storr left a prestigious twenty-two-year career to head up UK partnerships for Substack back in 2021, it was a signal that the coming reckoning for those of us in media had arrived.

Storr was at the top of the industry I too then worked in, and her choice to leave for this ‘alternative’ media site many of my colleagues either had not heard of or overtly dismissed was enough for me to move my independent work from Patreon to Substack. I guessed that Storr’s presence here meant Substack would become mainstream in the UK, and that she would start recruiting increasingly big names until being a UK writer or journalist who wasn’t on Substack would read as complacent or out of touch.

This essay, which comes four years after Storr’s jump, is an inside view on what that move felt like to make, and one person’s experience of navigating rapid change in two industries as the world shifts. What looked to me at the time like someone with nous and confidence making a smart strategic move that others would eventually realise the value of is discussed in this essay with vulnerability, humanity and doubt.

It’s a candid look at big, frightening personal change from the inside — the risk, the uncertainty, and the determination that’s required both to leave what you know (especially when it comes with status and luxury) and to start again in your forties, when the prospect of falling on your face entails a longer drop, greater injury and less sympathy or respect than it might in your twenties.

Something to Play At the Table With Friends:

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Recommendations is a series that allows me to share things that I think are worth your time. Often, they’re what I’m currently finding interesting, beautiful or useful. Sometimes they’re old favourites that I don’t have cause to share in the weekly Peak Notions column.

This week, there’s a quick-to-learn and to play card game that may help you stay sane through Christmas with your family, a lecture from 1992 that will humanise Marcus Aurelius for you but also reignite the glowing feeling that listening to a charismatic teacher brings. There’s also an essay that got right in under my ribs this week and twisted.

Below the paywall, you’ll find a quick game review if you (or someone you know) think about the Roman Empire as much as we’ve been led to believe people do. There’s also a unisex shoulder bag that I have delightedly managed to fit an obscene number of things into. I listed them for you below. It’s a touch embarrassing.

Something to Play With Friends and Family:

COUP

Games are an enjoyable, low energy Christmas activity when you have a full belly and are back from a walk, settling in for a cosy evening, but there are limitations. They need to be something you can learn on the fly (most people cannot sit through an explanation of rules of play without wanting to die). They need to be something multiple generations can take part in (this one is good for everyone from teens to elders. If you want a game you can play with small children, try Hungry Hungry Hippos). They need to be quickly adoptable by people who do not play games often, or who don’t spend their weekends playing Dungeons & Dragons or Space Hulk with their weird game enthusiast friends. People who play a lot of board games develop great pattern recognition and adaptability to different formats. Your Auntie Maud, who once played scrabble in ‘86 and got sixteen points for ‘crapulent’, will have more fun with a game that doesn’t come scaffolded in lore and complex rules.

Here’s the blurb for Coup:

You are head of a family in an Italian city-state, a city run by a weak and corrupt court. You need to manipulate, bluff and bribe your way to power. Your object is to destroy the influence of all the other families, forcing them into exile. Only one family will survive…

Coup takes something you’re doing anyway at Christmas — lying to your family — and makes it constructive and necessary rather than merely a festive survival mechanism. You can have two to six players and each game lasts only around fifteen minutes — barely enough time for a disagreement to escalate into a fist fight with your uncle. Trick the other players to gain dominance, and find out which family members are disconcertingly good liars!

(Honourable mention here also for Exploding Kittens, which is really well known now, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a goofy, high octane card game whose absurdity will have everyone in good humour. It’s similarly easy to just pick up and play, and fun for all, suiting ages seven and up, and there’s a version for adults with bums and swearing if that’s more your thing.)

Something to Watch:

LECTURE ON MARCUS AURELIUS AND THE STOIC IDEAL, BY MICHAEL SUGRUE

Are we successful if we have a meaningful impact but no real status? After his death last year, I read this New York Times article on lecturer Michael Sugrue — someone who achieved a form of success that we rarely value. He was an academic nobody had heard of five years ago. He published no books — this is considered a professional failure, and were Sugrue at even mid-career level now, it would make him unemployable at most respectable universities.

Yet he is a robust example of another kind of success. As a university lecturer, he clearly made an enormous impact on many students who valued him greatly, and his wonderfully clear and charismatic lecture style is incredibly inviting. During the pandemic, Sugrue’s daughter Genevieve uploaded a series of thirty-year-old lectures her father delivered to Youtube, and they became an unlikely hit.

There’s been a lot of talk of stoicism on Peak Notions these last two weeks, after I wrote an article on internet stoicism that garnered both interest and criticism. This lecture on Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic ideal is wonderful, despite the fact that it now looks dated and was clearly made on a budget. It was commissioned as part of a series of talks originally sold as VHS and audio tapes designed for commuters to listen to in their cars. This one, on Marcus Aurelius, has been viewed 2.4 million times for a reason. It’s just under forty-three minutes long. You won’t feel them passing.

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Something to Read:

BYE, MOM, by Aella

“I am accidentally making decisions about her life. I say “I think maybe we should wait for my other sister to get here, and then we’ll take her off the next morning?” and nobody has any better idea, so I start telling other people the plan as though it’s real.”

Illness, grief and death are very difficult to write about. Not just because writing about them is personally challenging for the writer but because these topics come with a preloaded arsenal of clichés, schlock terminology and trite, flaccid phrasing. Battles and journeys and dark pits and ‘passing away’. We think in clichés about death and illness. We speak in them too, so it’s incredibly difficult to write something true in a way that actually lands as true with the reader. It’s difficult to genuinely connect, and easy to cheaply manipulate a reader’s emotions on a topic that everyone carries a wound from.

Aella has written beautifully and meaningfully on something unspeakably sad — the death of her mother — and done so in a way that is interesting, honest and valuable. This is very much worth your time.

Something to Do in Glorious Solitude:

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“Lead thou me on, O Zeus, and Destiny,

To that goal lon…

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