Oh, hello.

The other day I went to the woods at the edge of town here in western Scotland, around an hour away from home. It had been absolutely belting down with rain, but when I arrived the sky cleared a bit. Hooray, I thought, I’ve got lucky, and started recording the piece I’m going to read for you today.

But - I hadn’t got lucky. For some reason, maybe the nearby communication tower at the top of a hill, there was an awful ticking noise across the three recordings I made - you know, one recording, and then a couple of backup recordings in case there was any weird noise. I listened back to all of them today, and the ticking was on all of them.

So instead, I’m recording just outside the entrance to my apartment, as outside the remnants of Storm Dave rage outside as it finishes tearing through Scotland with a chaotic fury that I wouldn’t normally associate with the name “Dave”.

(No offence to any Daves out there.)

The woods I visited the other day were ancient - that term in Britain that designates woods that are at least multiple centuries old. In this case, there are archaeological sites going back to both the British Iron Age and Bronze Age, which means at least 3,000 years, and at another site a few dozen miles away there are flint artefacts dated to over 14,000 years old.

That’s a lot of archaeology in a small area, and the locations of sites usually have something to say about access to raw materials, so I bet these woods have been useful for a long time - and also the coast, which is only a few miles away.

From what I can gather, almost all the trees are three varieties: Elm, which is Ulmus minor; Ash is Fraxinus excelsior (what a great name that’d make for a spell), and Larch, which is Laris decidua.

Most of those trees are older than me, and some of them even look it - Ash and Elm can grow for 300 years, Larch for 600, so maybe a few of these trees could have been alive at the time of the Aztecs, or before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This is one of the great gifts to us humans from trees - their incredible age. Not to get all spiritual about this, but I bet you’ve experienced something like this around trees - that weird relief creeping into your bones, making you feel that yes, some of all this confusing, infuriating awfulness in the news will pass at some point to be replaced with hopefully something a bit better, and in the meantime, like trees, we can just look for a way to sink our roots a bit deeper so we can stand our ground to get through it. Trees can be very reassuring metaphors of that process.

But there’s also what trees become, if they’re given enough time.

The other day, I was leaving my apartment and I noticed some new shoots coming up in a couple of big plant-pots I’d left empty over the winter. I took a photo with my PictureThis app, and it told me they’re sycamores (acer pseudoplatanus).

It seems that late last year, a few of the helicopter-blade-like seeds from the big old sycamore tree in my garden whirled down here and then got to work, and now I’m growing 6 or 7 baby trees.

If I took them somewhere and planted them properly, they’ll get busy doing what they’re best at doing: becoming the tallest plants on the block. That’s partly what a tree is: it’s a perennial plant with one really neat trick - to be able to grow higher than all the other plants and hog the most sunshine so it can put all that energy to work in becoming the biggest plant it can be.

Well, actually - that’s what I used to think, but then I learned about Professor of Geography Donald Rusk Currey.

In 1964 he was a graduate student in Nevada, and he was taking core samples from trees in order to date them with dendrochronology, which most people know as “counting the rings”, although it’s a bit more complicated than that. One day, he took his expensive drill and began screwing it deep into one particular tree, a bristlecone pine growing in what is now Great Basin National Park. But for some reason, he was finding this really hard going - and then, according to one version of this story, *ting* - the drill bit broke off.

This was a disaster for Currey, this was a specialised bit of equipment called an increment borer, it cost him quite a bit of money and he only had one of them, so if possible he wanted to get it back. He asked the Forest Service for permission to cut the tree down, and they gave it, so Currey to work with a chain saw.

Now, there are conflicting reports about the facts of this story - we can’t ask Currey himself because he passed away in 2004, but he later said he already suspected the tree could be old - some of the other cores he’d taken from trees in the area, over a hundred of them, showed bristlecone pines could be well over a thousand years old. That was the purpose of his research.

When the tree came down, Currey chopped the trunk into thin slices to take home and study, and a week later, he had his answer. This tree, which is now nicknamed Prometheus, was over 4,900 years old when it was cut down, meaning it started growing before the stones went up at Stonehenge.

This is still the oldest single tree known to have existed on this planet - and you can imagine the uproar when this story broke. (Thank god social media didn’t exist back then, or, you know, the Daily Mail.)

But despite that, Currey was still hounded by reporters and people wanting to hear his story, and he was having none of it - he kept his head down, he published his findings, he went on to have a well-respected career as a researcher and professor, but he generally refused to talk about the whole thing publicly.

In the mid 1980s the area gained National Park status and bristlecone pines became a protected species, and it’s telling that Currey himself went to Congress to speak in support of the park’s creation.

As I’ve written about before, Prometheus certainly isn’t the oldest organism on Earth, and it’s not even the oldest tree - that honour seems to belong to a clonal forest of quaking aspens in Utah nicknamed Pando with a single massive root system that has created over 47,000 genetically identical trees, which is regarded by scientists as one organism covering 42 hectares. Absolutely wild.

But Prometheus was incredibly old - even though it wasn’t incredibly big. It wasn’t the size of a redwood - it was only about 5 metres high, what any of us would call a moderately-sized tree. Before I learned this, I figured there was a fairly straightforward relationship at work here: the bigger the tree has gotten, the older it is. I was mostly wrong - it turns out the species has a lot more to do with it, and possibly other facts, instead of just its age.

I hope there will be a lot of that in this new season of Everything Is Amazing - a lot of moments where I thought I knew a thing, and I absolutely didn’t. This time round, we’re looking at what now gets called ‘The Great Outdoors’…

…or perhaps we can call it Nature, you know, that term we’ve come up with to draw an entirely arbitrary and you might say foolish line between ourselves and the world we live in. And it’s about looking at the cutting-edge science about what being quote unquote outside, in places like the woods I visited yesterday, is doing to our mental and physical health.

But what I don’t want to do is assume there are easy answers. Answers like: “oh, it’s a small tree, so that automatically means it’s young.” That was wrong, and now I’m wondering what else I can be wrong about.

For example, here’s something I’ve seen in a lot of online conversations in recent years. Climate change is very worrying - especially to young people, who I couldn’t blame for being increasingly furious about it. The main driver of climate change right now is carbon dioxide. But wait - don’t we already have a great way to get CO2 out of the air? If we cut back on deforestation and plant a hell of a lot more trees, can’t we drag a lot of that carbon out of the air where it’s creating this greenhouse effect that’s heating the world to dangerous levels? Can’t we fix global warming by just going absolutely nuts with tree-planting?

The answer is - yes, but only sort of. It’s true, there seem to be very few downsides to planting vast numbers of trees and leaving a greater number of existing trees in the ground so they can hoard their carbon and help keep it out of the atmosphere.

But this is also the kind of easy answer that dodges the cause of the problem it’s there to fix, so tree planting could easily be turned into a very attractive PR campaign by, say, fossil fuel providers who want to maintain the profits they make from putting carbon dioxide into the air in the first place. Keep the oil flowing, just plant loads more trees to offset everything, and everyone is happy!

Unless, say, someone blockades the Strait of Hormuz for some reason, but that would never happen, would it?

Even this apparent solution of turning the world into a megaforest has a few drawbacks. A surprising one to me is that trees are often relatively darker against the landscape they grow upon, and dark surfaces have a different albedo - the amount of sunlight they reflect - so they absorb more heat. This means that towards the poles, trees could have more of a warming effect than they do in equatorial regions, so it’ll matter where you decide to plant these forests.

Or there’s the question of how the aerosols generated by forests affect incoming sunlight, you know, all those delicious earthy piney smells that make you feel so alive, they’re due to tree-emitted chemicals suspended in the air - and recent research suggests that the volatile gases above forests block direct sunlight but enhance diffused light, which can help the trees grow better - in other words, the trees are altering the atmosphere for their own benefit. How about that for a bit of sly geoengineering?

So there question is - how much could these affect things at a global scale? There’s currently work being done to model this - and, it seems, a lot of fruitful arguing.

All this is fiendishly complicated. Yet the signs so far are that reforestation is still an excellent strategy to lean into - as long as it’s not treated like the environmental processes of our planet are only here to clean up the messes we’ve made for our own ridiculously short-sighted reasons - for example, making even more money, which, let’s not forget, is a human invention, and one that probably deserves a rethink at some point soon.

What planting lots of trees could give us is time. Time to tackle the root cause (look, another tree metaphor, thank you, trees), and time to understand how these extremely complicated systems actually work by properly supporting and funding the sciences investigating them.

In the October edition of Scientific American last year, there was a profile of the work of forest ecologist Mark Harmon, who is working in Oregon’s western Cascade mountains. His work is studying what happens to trees after they die. For the last 40 years, he and his colleagues have been monitoring more than 500 rotting logs, looking at the plants and animals that make their homes there. This has become a model for other studies worldwide, and it’s important because it’s another piece of the puzzle of understanding the atmosphere - how quickly do trees decay and release their carbon?

What’s already clear is that different species of trees decay at wildly different rates - some in a few years, others in centuries. Because of that, this is a colossally long-term study. Two hundred years. Harmon won’t live to see the end of it and neither will anyone else alive today. Of course, that’s if its funding continues - it’s supported by the National Science Foundation, and right now, Donald Trump’s administration is proposing even more cuts to NSF funding in general. But as the article notes about the study:

“Its timescale might save it. The project requires little maintenance, and the logs will rot whether anyone is watching them or not. For now, someone is.”

Once again, trees teach us the value of patience, and of considering our frequent inability to look beyond the anxious hastiness of our own timescales, to see all the other ways of living and cooperating that exist on this planet. There is also something about the very deliberate way that trees grow, taking centuries to fulful their potential, that I find inspiring.

One of the things you hear about a lot of technology these days is that it’ll save you so much time. Particularly with all these large language model tools we call “AI”. You want to do a thing? Great! Just hop on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and you can do it in seconds.

But - firstly, you didn’t “do it”, the machine did it for you, based on the parameters you fed into it. You got to use the result, but you didn’t learn the skill - or rather, you learned the skill of using an LLM (which is a service that costs you money at some point), but without access to that tool in the future, you’d be rendered completely useless. This is what I wonder about all the students using AI tools in Universities who at some point will find themselves in an exam with nothing except a pen and paper and what’s actually in their heads at the time.

And secondly, you didn’t learn anything because you can’t do that in a few seconds. Learning takes time. Learning is immensely frustrating in this manner, filled with all sorts of false starts, and forgetting of the basics again and again until it’s properly drummed into you. To learn something, to fully internalise it and especially to turn it from knowledge into what we call instinct and also the kind of muscle-memory where it feels like you hardly have to think at all - that takes a lot of time.

I’m well aware that folk half my age are doing things with technology that I’m incapable of learning because of the generation of computer-users that I grew up in. Fine! Call me as outdated as a larch, and go do your thing with my blessing.

But please don’t fall into the trap of equating speed of production, aka, efficiency, with depth of understanding.

The writer Sam Adler-Bell was being interviewed recently, and he said this:

“AI is super helpful for transcription. I understand there must be other harmless things that writers use it for. But I am very hesitant to become reliant on it for anything. I don’t mind missing the boat. It’s okay. I am not good at what I do because I am very efficient or optimized. Inefficiency and friction is a big part of thinking, in my opinion.”

So maybe all that ‘time wasted’, in doing things the long, messy, hard way that seemingly takes forever, is also time well spent, because it burns into you the skill you will eventually need to not be replaced by a robot.

Maybe that’s something we all need to relearn, yet again, over and over, for as long as it takes to actually remember it.

And what I’m relearning right now…is that when bad weather is blowing through, the entrance to my flat acts like a cross between a wind-tunnel and a carwash, and I’m getting soaked - so it’s time to go in.

Thanks for listening, and go hug some trees with my blessing. I reckon they deserve it.

Photos: Mike Sowden

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TRANSCRIPT:

Oh hello.

You’ve caught me at the beach - this is my local beach here in Scotland - and as you can maybe hear, the wind’s a bit fierce and the sea’s a bit rough and it was hailing half an hour ago, and only an idiot would be outdoors right now, which is maybe why - I’m at the beach. Hello.

But look, to be fair to Scotland, I was at the beach the other day, and it was much nicer - the first scorcher of the year, where the temperature soared to the dizzying heights of…11 or 12 degrees Celsius? Proper tropical.

And this beach, which is currently being lashed with rain and spray and windblown sand, was packed with people.

You know, the kind of people determined to have a good time, in that way I’ve experienced in northern England - like when your parents get this mad glitter in their eyes and suddenly say “Oooh, it’s a lovely day, let’s spend it at the beach!” and you pile into the car and drive for 3 hours, with the rain pulsing up the windscreen and your dad yelling “It’s fine, it’ll pass, it’s just a squall,” and then at some point someone unveils some unpleasantly clammy sandwiches and because you’re so determined to survive all this you eat them, then try to blot the taste out with a single stick of KitKat…

And then after hours of this misery, you get there, and the wind is absolutely baltic and so fierce you can barely get the car door open, and feeling exactly, exactly like Ernest Shackleton (because you’ve read those sorts of books because those are the sorts of parents you have) you fight your way to the cliff edge to peer down at a quagmire of a beach half-obscured by curtains of rain, and then you fight your way back to the car because it seems the wind is now going in the other direction, and you clamber back in, and the windows instantly fog up - and your dad says, “Aren’t we glad we did this?” in a tone where it’s obviously not a question, and if you dare to treat it like a question you’ll be in real trouble.

But look. There’s no need to go over all that again. Leave it, Mike.

My point is: at any sign of sunshine, the Scots go to the beach. I’ve been here for 5 years, I’ve seen it happen every time, and it’s magnificent.

Good on them. Fine attitude. If I had kids I’d drive for hours just to get them to enjoy the same experience.

But look, this is a science newsletter, not a therapy session. And what fascinates me on days like the sunny day earlier this week is the people saying hello to each other.

You know - that thing that went away for about a year, starting in 2020, where you’re in close proximity to another human being and you’re feeling comfortable and curious enough to break the ice with them. That thing that’s somehow a little harder to do, in the wake of a global pandemic or seemingly endless cycles of intensely polarising politics. All that stuff.

I used to be a travel writer, so here’s a great trick you can use when you’re travelling.

What you do is: you carry a paper map.

If you’re under the age of 30: yes, maps used to exist on paper too, and you can still buy them, and no, the following trick is much harder to do on your phone and probably won’t work and also, paper maps are beautiful things, and they will do wonderful things to your brain if you use them - it’s something about the lack of the kind of border your screens have, something about filling your peripheral vision and really being able to feel the relationship between all the landmarks you’re looking at. Seriously. Paper maps, try it.

So - if you want to meet a few strangers, you pick a place with a lot of foot traffic, and you stand there with your map out and the most confused and ideally gormless expression on your face that you can muster, turning this way and map, obviously trying to fit what’s on the map with what you’re seeing…and failing completely.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Honestly. It works everywhere. A universal cry for help. And it won’t be long before someone will stop and offer to show you where you are.

You can even accelerate this process by visibly holding your map upside-down.

If all this doesn’t lead to you becoming a magnet for every pickpocket in a 5-mile radius, you’ll have the chance to meet some new people, and maybe to strike up a conversation with them.

You may be feeling intensely awkward at this point. If you’re English, you may be bordering on mania. Talking to strangers can be an intensely vulnerable-feeling thing. Oh god, these people don’t know what an idiot I am, how do I break it to them? And so on.

But here’s some science to help you with that. It’s courtesy of behavioural scientist Nicholas Epley, who is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He’s spent a lot of time looking into this and picking through countless studies, and via his article in Scientific American, I learned that all the studies he looked at point towards one game-changing revelation:

You have to overcome your natural tendency to underestimate how positively strangers will respond to your attempts to spark up a conversation with them.

Obviously this isn’t always true - sometimes people just want to be left alone. You can look for Nature’s warning signs: their headphones, or an avoidance of eye contact, or a blood-spattered broadsword, that sort of thing. But generally, they’ll be more willing to say hello than you expect. That’s the trend, it seems. It’s a misplaced psychological barrier that afflicts us all.

One study was of people commuting on public transport. They were randomly assigned either solitude or a conversation. But here’s the weird thing: the commuters who were randomly assigned conversations all reported a more positive-feeling commute than the ones left to themselves. This included the grumpier ones, who would much prefer to be left alone in peace because chatty randos on your daily commute are just the worst. Those people also recorded feeling better about their journey.

They thought what they needed was a quiet moment to catch up on their doomscrolling and make a list of all the things they’re feeling behind with, but what they actually needed was to collide with the endlessly fascinating, endlessly challenging universe of another person’s mind.

I see the wisdom in this, and I’m an introvert. I’m who Susan Cain is talking about when she says some people’s social battery is running down when they’re in a crowd, and when it runs out, so do they, as fast as possible. I am that person. But I was also a travel writer, and that’s all about learning how other people live and think. It was quite the learning curve. I’m still fighting my way up it.

But talking to strangers is nowhere near as dreadful as we think - partly because we’re nowhere near as dreadful to them as we think we are.

One final thing that Professor Epley noted. In a study where participants were asked to reconnect with an old friend, either by voice-calling them, or by sending them an email. Which is easier? The email, obviously - far less awkward, they don’t get to answer right away so you can just say your piece and feel good about yourself and deal with the fallout later when they reply in a way that suggests they don’t feel quite as approving of your heroic efforts as you do, and so on. Manageable, that’s what email is. And the study reflected that. A majority of people initially preferred to use email for the same reason.

But those participants in the study who were actually told to get over their feelings of awkwardness and use a voice-call (god, I hope they were paid to do this study, it sounds horrible), they reported that they enjoyed the experience much more than the aloof e-mailers did AND they didn’t feel any more awkward afterwards. They expected they would, but they actually didn’t.

There is just so much that happens to us, and that happens between us, when we actually talk to each other, using our cake-eating equipment. What we say matters a great deal, of course - and I’m not ever going to claim we should or even can do away with things like email, because - well, I’d be out of a job.

But in so many ways, we are all here to make odd noises at each other and to benefit from the broad emotional bandwidth advantages of doing so, especially with the tricky stuff, including those critical first few words we’ll ever exchange with them.

Okay, that clearly isn’t happening here today. There’s a bloke with his dog, and the dog…looks furious with him. Good god. I mean, dogs always want to go for a walk, right? Well, not this one, and that should tell you something about the weather. So I’m going to wrap this up and go home.

I hope you’re doing well - and please, never be afraid of saying hi. You’d be amazed at how many people want you to do that.

Cheers!

Mike.

Images: Mike Sowden; Frames For Your Heart.

This particular newsletter - a continuation of this series - is going to be unusually ridiculous (and not just because I’m narrating it: see audio, above). Not at all what I originally intended.

I mean - you know how it usually works by now, right? Some well-meaning plonker - that would be me - sets himself the task of investigating the latest science into a thing in the hope of discovering something quietly astonishingly, the kind of thing that has you mumbling “wow!” when you read it in a news headline on the way to work. All delivered with a level of amiable knowing amateurism, but backed up with links to people in science doing the actual work here.

That’s been my hope, in looking into the reasons why I can’t get a good night’s sleep these days, and what I can do about it. I’d stumble over some weird new thing that actually seems to work according to a number of credibly sceptical studies, and then I try it upon myself, and it works, and I get to write about it in my own excitable way.

This time I’d even hoped for a bit more, actually. Maybe I could even invent something - you know, that thing I never get to do, because I’m not a scientist and don’t have my own lab or team, and, well, I don’t know anything.

But what if I could do it this time? Not something unsafe of course, just something tap-dancing on that fine line between clever and stupid.

Say: take a 300 microgram pill of melatonin, shove it inside a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (those things always make me sleepy), add a sprinkle of creatine and a couple of drops of Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo, and then knock the whole thing back with a mug of malted Horlicks.

Result: you get the best night’s sleep of your life, and then you tell everyone about Sowden’s Miracle Insomnia Cure™, and then I can finally occupy that apparently extremely profitable place between popular broadcasting and selling poorly studied health supplements, like a modern day John R. Brinkley, who famously made a fortune by claiming to cure men of a number of ailments by implanting them with goat testicles. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. Anyway, my point is: a man can dream.

But alas - no. You will notice that this particular post in the series is not paywalled.

That’s because what I have ‘discovered’ - I’ll explain those inverted commas in a second - cannot in any way be patented, intellectual-copyrighted or presented to you with the merest shred of ownership stamped over it.

This miracle cure I’ve alluded to in the title of this newsletter is not sleeping in the great outdoors. At least, not yet. I’m going to keep experimenting with that one because I haven’t yet had a comfortable enough night out, thanks to various camping equipment insufficiencies/disasters which have now all been fixed. Hopefully the next night out is the charm here.

I should also add that it’s the middle of the Scottish winter and we’ve just had the first proper winter storm blow through - Storm Bram - and if I can get an unusually good night’s sleep when it’s blowing a proper hoolie outside my tent, there must be something in it. And I love this kind of wild camping - completely unnecessary, only an idiot would try it at this time of year, where do I sign up, and so on.

I’ve also had some fascinating suggestions from friends and readers by email. I’m spoiling none of them yet, but I will say, thank you to David, John, Clarissa and Jane, and for the gentleman that confidently asserted that I should try ingesting baked beans and gunpowder, I’ll be assuming you’re not a professional chemist and I’ll giving that one a miss purely based on what my imagination tells me would happen next, no offence to you, sir.

So I’m still hoping for something weird and clever, something you wouldn’t normally try, except for a bet.

Instead, I suspect I’ve already found what will work best for ridding me of chronic insomnia, and it’s been staring me in the face for years.

A few months ago, I started going to the gym. Gyms are fascinatingly weird places filled with people very earnestly doing very odd-looking things. Here’s an example:

And week later, this happened:

But since standing around gawping at people in lycra is a sure-fire way to get yourself ejected from a gym, I’ve been using the machines as well.

This hasn’t been easy. What I’ve always been is a walker. I will happily walk all day, not necessarily very fast, but in a relentless or perhaps you could say wholly unimaginative way that usually eats through about 15 or 20 miles a week on average.

Walking is great - but it’s also a low-intensity form of exercise, unless you decide to push yourself, which I don’t because, why spoil a good semi-lazy meander? And pushing yourself too hard can be a distraction from your own thoughts or from the audiobook or podcast you’re listening to, which is another reason I love walking.

At the gym, I wobble my way through all sorts of gently tortuous movements while balancing large pieces of metal on the ends of various limbs. And it’s working! I feel stronger, I can walk further, my so-called brain seems much sharper.

Also? I’m sleeping better. Much better, some nights. And all of those nights correlate with going to the gym.

Dammit.

So - my insomnia is mostly because I’ve been lazy?

Ah, look how quickly this stuff turns to self-judgement. The same would apply if I tried to present it to you as wellness advice, which is absolutely not what I’m doing here. I am not going to yell “YOU SLEEPLESS PEOPLE ARE JUST BONE-IDLE” and try to sell you a gym membership, just use the code “THEIDIOTSENTME” to get 25% off your first month.

No. The most I could say is that if you’re struggling with insomnia, if it’s possible you could try a bit more physical exercise of whatever kind is most practical to you, with no guarantee that will help in your case.

But of course everyone knows this. Deeper sleep is one of the best-known benefits of getting more active, so maybe I’m a fool for assuming I needed something else, and it was probably my reluctance to try going to the gym - ugh, all that effort - that got in the way of me trying it out.

But this is a science newsletter, not a vibes, regret and self-disgust newsletter, so what does the science say?

As luck would have it, the BMJ (the British Medical Journal) recently published a systematic review of the findings from 22 studies involving over 1,300 adults with sleep disorders, looking at the role of 13 different interventions, 7 of which were exercise-based. Their conclusion:

“Exercise is an effective treatment for improving sleep in patients with insomnia.”

Hooray! But what is surprising is that gentler exercises seem to work better, with yoga the best of all - it increased people’s sleep time by almost two hours on average, compared to the control group. Nearly as effective were Tai Chi and walking or sedate jogging.

Here’s what Grace Wade at New Scientist has to say about this:

“What is it about gentler workouts that makes them so good for catching z’s? It may have to do with the emphasis on controlled breathing and body awareness. Research shows that mindfulness-based workouts, such as yoga and tai chi, decrease activity in the sympathetic nervous system, which governs our body’s fight-or-flight response. As a result, blood pressure and heart rate drop and levels of the stress hormone cortisol decline. This, in turn, alleviates the depressive and anxiety symptoms that so often hinder sleep.”

This might be unwelcome news to the kind of gym-goer that, say, enjoys publicly showing off their muscles in pointless displays of strength, as was the fairly ludicrous sight this week at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport. Perhaps US Secretary Of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. would be better swapping out his manly pull ups for a few Sun Salutations and a Downward-Facing Dog, but I can’t really see him trying that for the cameras.

But look - what the study suggests is that any exercise is usually good for improving your sleep!

Upping your physical activity is usually a good bet - except maybe at airports, which for most folk are some of the strangest-feeling and most grindingly stressful spaces in modern social life and what you really want is for everything to work perfectly first time so your already jittery nervous system doesn’t explode & you can leave said airport as quickly as possible. That’s probably what needs investing in, rather than ellipticals and battle ropes. Be kind, guys.

Anyway. In my case, I’m now getting more exercise than ever before. My former gym was a ten minute walk away, and it just closed for refurbishment that will take at least a year, so I’ve had to switch to its sister gym which is all the way across town, a 45 minute walk each way.

This is a further improvement to my gym routine - I’m getting that all-important low-intensity part of my workout, I’ve got an extra 90 minutes a day I can spend listening to stuff on top of that time at the gym, and I’m sure the result is I’ll be sleeping better than ever before.

But there’s some part of me that wishes this wasn’t so obvious. Maybe this is a problem with the way we think about this life-improvement stuff: it only grabs our attention if it’s outlandish-looking enough - for example, goat testicles - while what actually works seems so ‘boring’ that we hardly ever begin with it. (This seems to me like a huge problem, and I’m glad so many smart people are starting to write about it right now.)

Why are we like this? What can be done?

No idea - but I know the perfect place to think about it.

Images: Samuel Girven; William Navarro; Kate Stone Matheson.

And this week, it’s a speaking newsletter, using Substack’s audio tools combined with the dubious acoustical merits of my own face.

Click above to listen, or read on for the transcript.

TRANSCRIPT

When I was at secondary school (which I gather non-Brits call high school) in Yorkshire in the North of England in the 1980s, I had a teacher called Mr South. That’s not his real name because I’m about to say some fairly rude things about him, but I know that some friends from school get this newsletter, so - yes, THAT’S who I’m talking about.

Mr South was a severe-looking man with a pinched, ruddy face, who clearly had missed a glorious career as a character actor playing the villain in children’s adventure stories - you know, The Evil Gamekeeper Who Tries To Steal Their Boat, or The Evil Landowner Who Tries To Steal The Treasure And Get All The Credit After Our Heroes Discover It, or The Evil Lawyer Who…well, did lawyer things.

But Mr South was a teacher. A teacher of Rural Science - which to me, right now, sounds kind of exciting! The science of the earth, of trees, of flowers, of the land under our feet that invisibly shapes our behaviour, and all that. But - no. Rural Science, at least to Mr South, meant two things: gardening, and tyrannical fear. 

The very first hour-long lesson we had with Mr South was dedicated to one task: covering our brand new green exercise books with brown wrapping paper covers. We’d all been issued with books that looked more or less the same as everyone else’s, but clearly this wasn’t enough for Mr South: they all had to be rendered identical. And so, he showed us, fold by fold, strip of tape by strip of tape, how to wrap our books in brown paper. 

This was important, we were told. If our books didn’t have brown paper on them, he wouldn’t mark our homework, and we’d get the kind of grades we actually deserved. This information was delivered with all the force of a fanatic who wanted his entirely arbitrary and meaningless rules to leave a dent upon the world. Perhaps this was a replacement for leaving an actual dent upon us - I am sure that if caning was still legal, he would have just lined us up and thrashed us for much the same reasons. 

I later discovered Mr South’s brown-paper fetish was legendary, and every student who took a class with him was confronted with it. It was like the ultimate example of learning by rote: even at the age of 14, we could all see there was absolutely no point whatsoever in doing this, or - spending an hour learning the best way to do it. But we had to do it anyway. You can imagine this is the kind of thing the Spartans were faced with at an early age, or Imperial Stormtroopers before they were allowed to clamber into their white ceramic vaguely toilet-like armour and entirely fail to shoot anyone. The point is to blindly obey while knowing it’s utter bollocks. 

As it turned out, this was a good introduction to Mr South’s teaching style, which was dictatorial. I don’t just mean he dictated and we listened, I also mean he attempted to oppress us. Unfortunately for him, he was somewhat restrained by the educational charter of the school and by the common laws of the United Kingdom, but that didn’t stop him trying. 

If you forgot your exercise book, or didn’t do the homework, you were given lines - something like “I must endeavor to adhere to the divine commands of my lord and master Mr South for I am so utterly worthless I am not even worth wrapping in brown paper”, which you had to copy out a couple of hundred times. Or, as a special punishment, you had to reproduce by hand a page from a newspaper, by writing and drawing it. This led to the memorable day when a member of my class copied out page 3 of The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper best-known for publishing lies and also a daily picture of a topless glamour model, always on page 3.  

You can imagine how this was received by Mr South. It’s still stuck in my memory too, because - my classmate had never displayed any artistic talent, and that was most evident in this drawing, which was nightmare-fuel of the highest order. I do remember it was the only time, in a full year of that weekly class, that any of us laughed.

I don’t remember anything else about Rural Science, and I doubt that any of my classmates do either. Mr South was a terrible teacher, and perhaps a terrible human being - certainly if he was a saint, he was hiding it amazingly well. But - this is also a tragedy, because he was there to teach. To put useful knowledge in the heads of young people.

And instead, perhaps the only thing we learned is that it’s stupid as hell to wrap a school execise book (which already has a cardboard cover) in brown wrapping paper, but you have to do it anyway.

You probably remember your favourite teachers at school. I had a string of really great English Language & Literature teachers through school and college, and that’s probably why I’m now a professional writer. And see Adele’s reaction to meeting the teacher that most encouraged her when she was young. Great teachers, overflowing with enthusiasm and kindness, are a blessing in our lives.

And you could also say that bad teachers - are the opposite! But maybe that’s not true, because they’re showing you the effect of a lack of enthusiasm and kindness. And maybe that’s a good thing to be able to recognise.

When I first stumbled my way into charging money for my writing, sometime around 2008 or 2009, I correctly assumed I knew absolutely nothing about how to run a business, so I went and read lots of stuff - all the things everyone with big audiences were sharing. Firstly, I discovered the language was kinda obnoxious - all crush and kill and destroy and things like that. So, okay. And a lot of the advice itself was of the kind that suggested that for someone to do well, someone else had to be beaten, a zero-sum, scarcity-driven thing. In other words, the old, aggressively competitive & feudal way of doing business.

So I tried some of that for a while, and it got me nowhere. I assumed I wasn’t being aggressively competitive enough, I wasn’t hustling enough, or I just wasn’t…enough. But I stuck around, and got to know people who were doing really well - and they didn’t seem to be following the whole Highlander “there can only be one” ethos. They were enormously generous with their time and their wisdom, in a carefully ringfenced kind of way, and it got them work, and that work made them more and more money. 

This, I’ve come to learn, is the other way of doing business online. By being thoughtful, considerate, helpful, kind, and nice. 

These are all words that the crush kill destroy people seemed to hate, because they looked like weakness. And I also noticed that the people being thoughtful, considerate, helpful, kind and nice weren’t usually selling something, and if they were, it didn’t cost thousands of dollars and only have 2 places left with the doors closing at midnight. They weren’t doing that stuff - they were actually just helping people - and they seemed to be very busy, and they seemed to be very happy.

So I figured I’d rather aspire in that direction, and the kill and destroy people could fight it out, as they seemed to enjoy doing. If this was the slow lane for a creative life, at least it got you somewhere in the end which might not be, you know, “penniless in the gutter”. Far from it, in many cases.

But kindness in business still has a bad rap. You’re not being kind - you’re being weak. It’s a soft, limp kind of thing, like a lettuce that’s been in the fridge too long. Kindness was a bit like public speaking for introverts: a strong whiff of “look, you’re just not cut out for this, so either learn to act like an extrovert, or just give up.”

But then Susan Cain laid out a winning argument for introvertism being a huge asset for public speakers in her book Quiet - and she found that a lot of the prejudice against it goes back to Dale Carnegie, who wrote How To Make Friends And Influence People, which is partly a book that teaches you how to successfully fake interest in other people so you can get what you want from them - the very worst kind of salesmanship. Nothing kind there at all. 

But what about learning to actually be interested, and to listen better, and to help? In other words - empathy?

I’m interested in this because empathy is the key to the third branch of curiosity. You may remember from season 1 of Everything Is Amazing that there’s diversive curiosity, ie. Shiny New Thing, the urge that makes us click and click until we’re racing sideways across the surface of the Internet, never pausing to look deeper. And there’s epistemic curiosity, the academic version, where you stop and look deeper and deeper and deeper at this single thing, uncovering all the hidden layers of knowledge buried beneath it.

And the third type is empathic curiosity, where you get curious about the lived experiences of other people. There’s a relevant word to use here, invented by writer John Koenig for his website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is now a book, and I’ll quote the whole definition because it’s gorgeous:

“Sonder — noun. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.” 

It’s funny to think that Sonder is only about a decade old, considering how enthusiastically it’s been adopted (or stolen) by so many brands. But that’s where it’s from, and you can see why so many folk fell in love with it. Because it’s saying, Maybe this isn’t just about you. And it’s thoughtful, considerate, helpful, kind and nice.   

But OK, this kind of thinking feels great. But does it get results? Like, does it help you become a success in whatever you’re doing, or is it just a consolation prize for being last, that place that we’re so often told that nice people end up in?

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant has looked at this, and he wrote a book about it, called Give And Take. And he found that - both these things are correct! In business, generous, kind, thoughtful people are often in last place - but also, they’re often in first place as well (not the exact same people, that would be weird). The generous folk, which Grant calls Givers, are the biggest successes, and also the biggest failures. 

But the folk he calls Takers - who are only really concerned with themselves and what they can get out of every relationship for their own benefit - they tended to get mediocre results. They were kinda average: hanging in there, but nothing special. And alongside them, hugging the middle of the distribution, were the third category, which Grant calls Matchers, the ones who only ever think transactionally, ie. if I help you and you make a thousand dollars, I need to make a thousand dollars too, or some equivalent, or this whole deal is a waste of time.

Grant found this pattern repeated again and again in the workplace studies he looked at. The Givers were storming ahead - but they were also the ones left furthest behind. What gives here?

Grant believes the difference is down to the ability to be “otherish,” which is at the other end of the scale from selfishness. It’s where you can really put yourself in someone else’s shoes and consider their needs from their perspective. To me, this sounds a lot like empathic curiosity being put into action. 

But he also spotted that generous Givers who were selfless - ie. ignoring their own needs - quickly burned themselves out. These are the ones that get left behind, and it makes sense: without healthy boundaries, helpfulness is a way to get taken to the cleaners by every Taker in the world. If you can’t empathize with yourself, then how is that treating yourself (and your time, and your energy) with the same respect you’re giving others? It’s not. What a message about yourself to broadcast to the rest of the world. 

And maybe this approach applies to empathic curiosity too, and your attention, and where you choose to put it every day. Maybe it's essential to give your attention in ways you find enjoyable, and to focus on the people whose wellbeing actually matters to you. Not to fake it for success in a Dale Carnegie way, but to choose to focus on the good people doing good things - while also considering yourself as one of those good people, and making sure you’re feeling good and doing things you’re proud of. 

Because of negativity bias, this is probably harder than focusing on the total jerks doing awful things, of which of course there are plenty, and social media is usually a frenzy of yelling about those people.

(Awful people have learnt that the best way they can get us to do their viral marketing for them is for them to say something utterly awful which will get amplified and shared. Awful people 1, everyone else, zero.)

But if we redirect our attention towards people who are worth our attention, because we respect our own attention properly and we know it’s valuable so we want to put it in the right places so maybe it could do some good in the world - how would that change everything?

It is true that the internet is optimized for negativity. But that doesn’t mean that you have to be optimized for negativity. 

Now, I’m not talking about showing empathy towards people who don’t deserve it, which is the common criticism of niceness. Why do Bad people deserve our empathy? They probably don’t! So why are we giving them so much of our attention, above and beyond the minimum we need to give them to keep a careful eye on them to keep everyone safe? Why can’t we not do that, and direct more of our curiosity towards worthier places and worthier people that could really benefit from it?

These are big questions. I have not really even begun to get my head around all this stuff, and I’m currently buried under a number of books on the topic. I was going to start writing about it seriously this season, but then the Zanclean Megaflood viral Twitter thing happened in February, and most of my brain hasn’t been seen since. So, it’ll be next season of Everything Is Amazing that I’ll starting writing more about the science of empathic curiosity and the power of kindness, so I’m not going to pretend I have anything more meaningful to say on it right now.

But I will say that if someone’s more concerned with brown wrapping paper than human beings, that’s probably not a good sign.

See you next time!

Images: Michael Kucharski; Tim Mossholder.

And here’s an excellent reminder of a very important scientific principle:

Today I thought I’d try out Substack’s embedded audio feature - starting with one of the most financially terrifying moments of my adult life.

Transcript

It’s 2009, and I’m attempting to bankrupt myself with a book. 

It’s not a rare book. It’s not even an expensive book - about £25, if you buy it in hardcover, or about 20 quid if you get the paperback. The book is “Europe” by Norman Davies, and it’s an absolute bloody whopper - 2,300 pages. It’s also weighty - not just in the sense it weighs a ton (which it does), but because I can get through maybe one or two pages at a time before my head is so stuffed with interesting questions that I have to go spend the rest of the day on Wikipedia. 

This incredibly slow speed of reading is the source of my problems. That and the fact that it isn’t my book. I mean god if it was my book, that would be so great, the perfect timeline. 

But no: this is the dark mirror universe where I did the wrong thing, which was - I got it from a library. On a two-week loan. And that was…ten years ago.

Look, in my defence - okay, I don’t really have a defence, but my explanation is that I borrowed it, and then shortly after I went to university to study Archaeology. This was in the city of York, about 2-3 hours away by bus. And the few times that I had the chance to go back home for a few days, it was only for the weekend, when I’d think “oh no, it’s Friday night, the library doesn’t open on a Saturday and I’m going back to York on Sunday night, I’ll just have to return that bloody thing another time.”

And so, in the way that they do, the years passed.    

Now it’s 2009, I’m living in York now, but I’m back in my hometown for the summer - and I’ve decided, at long last, to do the right thing. The furiously passive-aggressive letters from the town council stopped after about the second year, and I haven’t entered the library (or indeed any library in East Yorkshire, just in case) for eight years, and I’m sick of it.

I’ve sick of always hurrying past it with my head down.

I’m sick of making excuses to my mum when she asks me if I could hand in her own library books - “Look mum, I’m really really busy so, so I’d have to throw them, through the door, can you put them in a bag?” 

And I’m sick of feeling like the very worst kind of criminal - a criminal who steals from public libraries, where basically everything is already free but that’s just not good enough for someone like me, is it, I have to go steal the free book so nobody else can have it.

After ten years of this, I’m verging on hysteria. This thing has become like the ring of Sauron - I don’t care if I have to throw it and myself into a lake of lava, as long as it’s just gone. So I’m going to enter the library, and tell my story, and accept my punishment.

I’ve already worked out what my punishment is, by the way. At the standard 30p a day fine for overdue books, I owe East Riding Libraries around £1,100. This would be fine if I had £1,100, but I don’t. I work at the University of York in a print shop and get paid just enough money to keep my bank balance at the limit of its maximum overdraft, only alleviated by my income from the freelance writing work I’m squeezing into my spare time - of which I have none.

It’s a situation that gives me no hope of ever raising £1,100 and I’m presuming that if they ask, I’ll just have to go to prison. Fine. (At least I won’t have to eat any more of my own cooking.)  

So I walk in.

Or I try to, because the doors have changed, and I just kinda fight the wrong one for a while until someone uses it to exit the library and I sneak through before it closes again.

By now everyone’s looking at me, so I’m guessing there won’t be any problems describing my face to the police.

I go up to the main desk and start to mumble out a confession.

“What was the title again?” said the library’s desk clerk.

“Europe, by Norman Davies” I spit out with self-loathing. “You can’t miss it. You’d have had a gap in one of your shelves. Or maybe an empty shelf.”

“There’s no record, I’m afraid. No record of you neither, Mr Cowdung.” (I don’t correct him, just in case he pulls up my correct name and it’s marked “SHOOT ON SIGHT”) “but that’s not surprising after the upgrade.”

“Upgrade?”

“Oh yes, marvellous it is. All the East Yorkshire libraries are now organised around a centralised computer network called the East Coast Computerised Logistical Electronic Systematic Collection And Keepership Edifice - or ECCLESCAKE - which keeps everything running smoothly. We don’t need to issue fines nowadays – no, the computer identifies likely suspects or “Pre-Finers”, and the police drop in to check how far through the book they are. It’s elegant and it’s progressive. And according to ECCLESCAKE you don’t actually exist – and neither does that book you’re holding. Isn’t that grand? That said, we do have a collection box for the East Riding Home For Disadvantaged Sheep, so if you’d like to leave a donation…”

But I’ve gone by this point - first unsuccessfully, using the wrong door, and then finally out into the open again. Into freedom, with the rest of my life ahead of me.

At this point, I really fell in love with public libraries. Certainly my time at University helped - not only were we using the University of York’s massive, endless JB Morrell library and various academic archives dotted around the city, we also used York’s main library, which has archives of all sorts of stuff on microfilm that go back centuries.

But being allowed back into the library where I grew up, even though I wasn’t technically not allowed, was a major tipping-point. 

Libraries are extraordinary places, if you think about it. Anyone is allowed in, as long as they’re quiet enough, which should be a rule basically everywhere if you ask me. They’re not trying to sell you anything except maybe library membership, which is either free or laughably cheap - and it’s not really socially weird to spend all day in them. You can even do other things there if you’re quiet, and as long those things are themselves socially acceptable.

Libraries aren’t just great for writers - they are, for most people, amazing places to just go and think.

They’re also enduringly popular. In the UK, around a third of the population visits a library at least once a year. In the US in 2019, there were 174 million registered library card holders - just over half of everyone.

At the same time, working in a library is really hard - you only have to read Anne Helen Petersen’s recent newsletter “The Librarians Are Not OK” to understand the situation in the States, and I’m sure it’s no different over here too…although I don’t think Britain currently has a problem with people trying to ban books - that thing that rarely goes according to the plan of the people doing the banning. 

(Tip for book marketers: if you want your work to be read for at least the next half-century and probably a lot longer, get it banned. You’ll thank me later.)  

So, libraries are awesome. And I’m British, and we don’t ever use the word awesome. But libraries are. And one great thing they can do for you is to help you do research.

Now, this is a really interesting word. The dictionary says it’s “the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.”

Since the start of the pandemic, a new definition has come into popular use: some idiot on his or her phone watching endless insane, conspiracy-theory-riddled YouTube videos while they’re sat on the toilet. I’m sure you’ve seen all the memes on this, I don’t need to elaborate.

Obviously some of this ridicule is justified. When you see someone on Twitter who has tweeted 150,000 times since 2010 and who has 16 followers and they’re yelling pseudoscientific facts in a really aggressive way at a scientist who has worked at the forefront of that scientific field in question for the last 50 years, some eyerolling is understandable. 

Or even better, some complete and utter ignoring. Last week in his newsletter, science writer Phil Plait talked about LMGTFY questions - meaning Let Me Google That For You. Stuff that can easily be answered by typing it into Google - or stuff that can easily be thoroughly debunked by an equally simple Google search query.

***UPDATE*** My thanks to Mikki Halpin for making this excellent point on Twitter:

The thread under that tweet has links to stories at Gizmodo & The Guardian about this problem - and all this made me think about what “search for Google results” means in practice. Does it mean, to trust the answers Google itself is increasingly putting at the top of search results in a super-authoritative manner? Or does it mean “scroll through all the web results that appear and look for the most credible sources?” The issue Mikki is referring to is a serious problem in both cases, but maybe less so in the latter instance? But either way, it’s really dangerous when those results can be maliciously gamed - as this story illustrates all too well.

You have to ask yourself - if this yelling person hasn’t done that - why? Sometimes it’s because someone just wants to make a human connection with one of their heroes, but if they’re loud and angry, the usual answer is: they don’t care what’s right or wrong, they just want the meaningless, pointless thrill of enticing you into a fight on social media.

But then - all this got turned into a kind of shame about using the word ‘research’. Oh RLY, you’ve been doing your ‘research’, have you??? - with the implication that you’ve copied & pasted your thinking from some dodgy wellness influencer on Instagram. 

But this can feel really unfair, because it includes anyone who is doing any level of reading on something that they haven’t made a professional career around. Which includes almost all of us. It certainly includes enthusiasts like me, writing newsletters like this, trying to convey the fun of this stuff in a hopefully credible way without mangling the facts too much in the service of a good story.

So I was really grateful to hear the journalist Ed Yong, who talked about all this in a big Twitter Spaces discussion late last year. Ed has been writing about the human cost of the pandemic at The Atlantic, where he’s a staff writer, and last year his…incredible work won him the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Richly deserved. It’s some of the best science writing you could ever read - except for, well, other work by Ed Yong. What a hero.

In the discussion, which was about the impact of Long COVID, another journalist was curling their lip at the idea of members of the public doing their own research - and Ed pushed back. He noted that many of the people who had contacted him with questions had done not only the right kind of reading, but also arguably more reading than many currently overworked doctors, when it came to the most recent scientific papers coming out about this new and debilitating condition.

Most of those members of the public were sufferers of Long COVID, who were at home, trying to recover, and having a lot of free time on their hands. So they were ploughing that time into doing research of a credible kind - sifting through the latest data, trying to understand it, and trying to come up with better questions that might help them when they approached medical professionals for further help - or, when they sent those questions to people like Ed Yong.

This kind of citizen research is, in its non-twisted form, a really good thing, and it really shouldn’t be looked down upon.

You can also spot it because it frequently displays two commendable traits: it’s self-questioning - like “I don’t know if this is right or not” or even just “I don’t know,” which - how often do we hear that online? - and also, it’s self-correcting: when the person discovers they’re probably or definitely wrong, they step up and admit it, and they correct themselves publicly, explaining why and how they were wrong.

(That stuff really is gold when you see it. Bravo.) 

So now that libraries are opening up again - well, firstly, go use them! They’re fantastic.

And secondly: if you’re in there, curiously nerding out over something that interests you and making your own notes and building your own understanding of it - yes, you’re doing research. There is no shame in trying to understand something better, even if you start by knowing nothing about that thing (which is a very fun place to start, quite frankly - I’ve made my entire newsletter out of it). 

It doesn’t mean you’re Ed Yong, or that you deserve a teaching position at a University, or deserve anything really - and you’re going to have to work really hard to do some original research. But you are engaged in research - and if you’re sharing your findings in the right way, for the right reasons (primarily, to get other people excited about them) with the right kind of respectful, open-to-correction attitude, and an awareness of the limitations of your understanding, how is that bad?

It isn’t. Bring it on.

And with that in mind, I need to go do a bit more reading for the second part of my Mid-Atlantic Trench writeup, so I can have lunch and then throw myself in the sea. (It’s finally getting warm enough to go swimming here in Scotland.)

Hope you have a grand weekend.

Cheers!

- Mike

Images: Syd Wachs; Gabriel Sollmann.

Hello again! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity that occasionally speaks, like this! I’m testing out Substack’s embedded audio function here - although I’ll do a transcript below for anyone, like me, who might get bored of my voice over the next ten minutes. 

I’d like to start by saying thank you - this feels like I’m in person, somehow, so, thank you for reading this thing I’m making, and for your replies and recommendations of it to other people.

I honestly had no idea how all of this was going to land. It’s not really travel writing, which is what I was doing before, it’s not really science writing, it’s not exactly self-help, but it is borrowing from all those things, and I’m trying to Frankenstein together something that feels a bit different - although, like Frankenstein’s monster, it’s really a bunch of sewn-up stuff that worked great elsewhere and who knows what’ll happen next!

(I should probably end this analogy now because…that story didn’t end well.)

Also, this is the stripped down, throttle-locked version of this newsletter. My plans for it were all about being out in the world, talking to interesting people and doing fairly ridiculous things in the name of applied curiosity. So it says a lot about my timing that I launched in the middle of a pandemic, with all the disruption that entails.

(For example: I had something lined up this week, for the middle of the week, and because of lockdown-related reasons it couldn’t happen - so that’s why I’m recording this instead.) 

All this locked-downness will have to go on for a little while yet. I’m here on the west coast of Scotland, I can still only talk to people virtually, and I still can’t really go anywhere right now. So if you’ve enjoyed what this newsletter has been about so far, I promise it’s only going to get better.

(And if you’ve hated it - uh, I promise it’s only going to get better.)

Thank you also to those of you who have signed up for my “Everyone Is Amazing” calls. I’ve started the first few calls today and they’re just as fun as I remember from last year.

So here’s what I want to talk about today.

“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.” - Isaac Newton

I reckon getting more curious about the world is about doing a lot of quite simple things.

You might have seen in my weekly challenges, none of them are terribly demanding in terms of time and energy spent. Some of them may be hard in other ways - like, if you did the one where you’re replying to your most dreaded email.

But also, that is essentially a simple thing that has become unnecessarily complicated. The many times I’ve found myself in that situation, most of the difficulty was self-disgust - like, why the hell did I leave it this long, what kind of person does that, how drunk do I need to make myself to reply to this, and so on.

But answering it was easy. Done in 5 minutes, bang. In terms of effort spent for results achieved, it’s like an emotional lottery-win.

So...why does so much stuff like this get so complicated? Because it’s the complicatedness that is stopping us, right?

Take another example: Saying “no”. Saying no to things is a necessary part of saying yes to the right things. If you did the Say Yes To Everything weeklong challenge, you will have ended up saying yes to a lot of really stupid crap, as well as maybe a few things that turned out to be unexpectedly great. But that challenge is really about appreciating the power of a good No. 

But Nos are actually really hard.

Let’s say it’s the weekend tomorrow, and it’s looking like a really, really fine day out there, and the mountains are calling to you, or the beach. And it’s been an exhausting week and your head is just full, you know, not of anything you can particularly point to, but - full. So you just want to go off by yourself and just not think anything, just drink in the world for a few hours, and just be so aware of everything around you that you forget yourself. I mean, I’m an introvert, that’s how I feel sometimes - well, pretty often really. If you’re more of an extrovert, you may feel differently.

But let’s say you just want to go off by yourself, not because you’re sad or because there’s nothing wrong but because you’d enjoy it.

And you mention you’re doing it, and a friend says HEY what a great idea, I’ll come with you! Maybe we could have lunch at that awesome ski lodge that’s just opening up again, bring a few beers, make a proper day of it. What do you say? And what you want to say is No, but that’s suddenly hard. You can say No, but it’s not just a No, is it? It’s a “I don’t want to hang out with you”, or maybe a “I need to go by myself for reasons that are far more serious than our friendship” which leads to them saying “Okay, what’s up? You can tell me. Come on.”

And in that situation, you can’t say “there’s nothing up, I just want to enjoy the solitude for a while,” because they’re not going to believe you or they’re going to feel insulted - they’re going to conclude that you’re saying that their company is even less desirable than no company at all. 

At this point you may be so pig-sick of all this that you decide to burn your friendship to the ground just to keep it simple:

“You don’t want to go with me? What is it about me?”   

“Well, EVERYTHING really.”

It’s become pretty hard to say you want a bit of alone-time for a few hours. And it’s become hard to accept someone else saying it to you. You find yourself thinking, whaaat? There has to be a deeper reason, surely. That can’t be all there is to it.

Simple motivations and explanations aren’t terribly fashionable. The word “sophisticated” means “something that shows a high degree of complexity” - but we use it as a judgement as well. Being sophisticated is a good thing and being unsophisticated, ie. simple, means you’re an artless, shuffling peabrain chewing on a piece of straw with the fashion sense of Gollum. That’s what it means.

One of my favourite fictional characters of all time is from the late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which are kind of satires of the fantasy genre of fiction, although they’re a lot more than that and he says some pretty amazing things about the world in those books, usually in the form of a really good joke. But the character I like is called Carrot. Corporal Carrot, of the city of Ankh Morpork’s police force, the City Watch.

He has a suitably absurd backstory - he’s 6 foot tall human who was brought up by dwarves and never realised he wasn’t one - when he first came to the city he found lodgings in a brothel and didn’t realise what it was, just assuming it was a place with a strange amount of ladies doing extremely loud DIY in their rooms late at night, and so on. All nicely ridiculous.

But Carrot’s most endearing feature is that he is simple.

Not the deeply unpleasant, judgmental real-world meaning of that word. No - he’s just uncomplicated. He is extremely smart, he is build like a brick toilet, and it becomes clear at one point that he is actually heir to the throne of the land. He’s basically the hero of the whole story, the chosen one, that great big annoying fantasy macho individualist cliche…

But he’s also wise enough to choose simplicity. He refuses to get dragged into pointlessly murky politics and powerplaying - he actually makes a decision to ignore his lineage and decides to stay a copper because he enjoys it. He has a simple, decent moral code. He treats people fairly and he always speaks the truth - and when people know you’re always being straight with them, holy hell that uncomplicates things.

So basically Corporal Carrot is unsophisticated, by the dictionary definition of it. And yet he is also really wise and really effective at what he does. He’s the one that gets things done, comes up with all the plans that actually work, and the one that changes people’s behaviour for the better - he’s an influencer, I suppose you could say.

He does all these things because he keeps things simple. He can handle extremely complicated things because the tools he’s using - chiefly his brain, also the rules of his job and so on - are kept very uncomplicated. 

I can’t tell you how much I love this. 

But there’s a real-world example of this, actually. It lives inside your skull and you’re using it to listen to me right now.

You’d think the human brain was an insanely complex machine, considering all the insanely complex things it can do.

In fact, it’s not. It’s built mainly from three types of neurons, which are cells that generate and pass along electrical and chemical signals. There are sensory neurons, motor neurons and interneurons. There are many other different types of cells, of course, including glia which administer to neurons and so on - but basically, your brain runs with a very simple architecture.

These neurons are madly adaptable, and can do a staggeringly different amount of things, including change the way they do those things. Within your lifetime, using your own behaviour, you can change the way your brain works. (Hopefully for the better, but hey, that’s up to you.)

In essence, your brain is filled with 100 billion Corporal Carrots, all working together to more or less keep the peace.

(Perhaps if your brain was filled with 100 billion super-sophisticated modern humans who couldn’t stop making things more complicated than they need to be, it’d probably spend all its time arguing over the best way to think, and you’d just sit there, doing nothing.) 

What does all this have to do with curiosity and the subject of this newsletter? Glad you asked because I am not Corporal Carrot, so let’s make this simpler.

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 used in the social and medical sciences, 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 - those gaps in our understanding that irritate us enough to want to close that gap by learning new things. 

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. (That’s pretty exciting news for people like me.) 

But NFC also requires expending effort, so you get tired. If you have a higher daily NFC, you’re still going to run out of energy at some point, a bit like the way sports players are all equally knackered at the end of the day - you completely use up what you’ve got.

So this is where simplicity comes in - and our modern obsession with fancypants complicated ways of doing things. If you spend the bulk of your time learning *how* to do a thing, it stands to reason that you will run out of time and energy to do the thing itself. If you don’t have a simple approach to doing something, you will not be able to achieve complicated results with it over time - because all you’ll ever be doing is learning how to use the toolkit. 

And you know what that reminds me of?

Apps.

Social media.

The next big thing.

Obsessive insider-baseball style arguments over the best way to do something, the most optimal method to do this and that. The constant churn of new services trying to get you to do the same old things on them.

I probably sound a luddite - I mean, I love tech, this newsletter is tech. I’m not saying we should go back to the good old days where people like me stood in the street and rang a bell and shouted at you as you went past. But the sheer amount of reinventing what already works is very much a modern thing. 

When I was a travel blogger, I got press releases in this fashion all the time: “it’s an app that lets you collect your experiences together in the form of words and photos, and then share them, and allow others to give you approval in the form of a Like”. Oh, if only there was something like that that existed already, eh?

And when I was chatting to Anna Brones a few weeks back, we were talking about the constant reinvention of basic principles that have been around for thousands of years by sticking a new label on them that makes them marketable. 

All this isn’t going to stop just because some newsletter writer whinged about it. There’s good money to be made! From all of us! But if we say no, and we just find a simple approach that works, and then do it, a lot, then we can take a Corporal Carrot approach to life and just get on with it in a refreshingly straightfoward way.

And you know when you’re getting it right, because there’s a kind of joy in simplicity. I get this from a full rucksack when I go hiking: an entire portable home in a bag, every single item with a role to play. Everything you need, so you can just get on with the more important job of paying attention to everything except your stuff.    

So if there’s anything you get from this newsletter, I hope it’s a willingness to look a bit dumb in the way you do things, a bit unsophisticated and laughably obvious, because you’ve chosen to pare your methods down and keep them simple. It’s the fastest way to enjoy everything that curiosity has to offer you.

Thanks for listening.

Images: Julien Lavallée; ESA; Jeremy Thomas; Steven Saunders