Unreliable narrators in SFF
There's a thrill in realising you've been lied to by the person telling you the story. When it clicked that the voice you trusted was pulling a fast one on…
Posts tagged: mind
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Wear the silly shirt
Robert Rankin — the wonderfully strange author of *The Antipope* and *The Brentford Triangle* — once gave me a piece of advice that sounded like a joke but…
What comes after you stop chasing?
Over the past few days, I've been writing about mimetic desire — the way we absorb what to want from others, often without realising it. If you've been…
The envy map
Envy is uncomfortable. Most of us try to push it away, deny it, or rationalise it into something more acceptable. But envy is also information. Specifically,…
Why achieving your goals won't always make you happy
You've probably had this experience: You worked hard for something. A promotion, a milestone, a purchase, a relationship status. You achieved it. And then...…
How to spot a borrowed desire
Not all of your desires are borrowed. Some are genuinely yours — things you'd want regardless of what anyone else was doing. The trick is telling them apart.…
Why scrolling makes you miserable (and it's not what you think)
You already know social media can make you feel bad. That's not news. But the usual explanations — it's addictive, it's a time sink, the content is toxic —…
The uncomfortable truth about what you want
You're chasing something right now that you don't actually want. I don't know what it is. The promotion. The lifestyle. The relationship status. The home in…
Even in Ultradia
I'm a big fan of Paul McKenna. It was reading and listening to his Instant Confidence and Change your Life in Seven Days books that gave me the tools to beat…
Making it up as we go along
One juicy bit of advice, that came to me relatively late, was to never compare your inside with someone else's outside. You're comparing your messy, uncertain…