How to stay sane

A Christmas message of hatred and anger

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

There's this pressure in the brain. I feel it just on the inside of the skull, pushing down on the membrane underneath - a throbbing vein, a weight on the temple. Sometimes it spreads down the neck and from there across the skin, until it’s everywhere.

Political anger is different from personal anger. It's more distant, but also more pervasive, regular, harder to escape, much harder to resolve. And it's been there, pressing down, in one form or another, for a long time now.

It wasn't always like this. If you're a political person - not just a news junkie, but someone emotionally involved in what's happening - then you're used to bitterness and frustration. I've always felt it, to some extent: New Labour's rhetoric towards asylum seekers, its attack on civil liberties, the primate idiocy of George Bush, the Iraq war, the coalition's austerity programme. But in each of these cases, there were positive developments to even out the pain. I could think fairly easily of at least one good thing the government was doing. And more than that, I didn't get the sense that politicians like Blair or even Cameron were always trying to pitch voters against each other. Their success ultimately relied on maintaining a disparate coalition of voters, rather than drilling down into one demographic and setting it against another.

That's not the case now. Since 2016, the government has functioned to a new methodology, owing primarily to Dominic Cummings, in which division functions as the core operating principle of its policy and communications strategy. So you have this deep sense of dread whenever they approach any subject - migration, trans issues, HS2, anything - simply on the basis that they have no intention of improving it, or ameliorating divisions, but instead with the precise opposite motivation.

It is inescapable. It’s what British politics is today. It's what it's been for seven years. 

But this week is different. We're about to experience one of the finest periods in the calendar. Not Christmas, and certainly not New Years, but that bit in between them - December 26th to 30th. 

Those days do not exist. They're a kind of rounding error. No-one expects anything to happen. And for this reason they are absolute bliss. 

There's a good lesson here for general life. It's a period that teaches you how to stay sane when mewling degenerates do their best to drive you mad. It teaches you how to insulate yourself from political anger, so it doesn't consume you. And most importantly, it teaches you how to prevent burn out.

I saw a lot of good people come politically online during Brexit. They were a nice tolerant generous lot, who had assumed, in a hazy uncritical way, that the world was travelling in their direction and were mortified to discover that it was not. Nearly every single one of them burned out. It was as if they hadn't learned how to handle a daily diet of political anger. The emotional toll of politics - or, more likely, of political loss - was too much for them. The exasperation and indignation was too suffocating. 

My solution to this problem is simple: There must be a bit of your life that politics doesn't touch. Ideally, there should be great big substantive parts of your life that politics doesn't touch. And that is not complacent or privileged. It is a precondition of being an effective political actor. It's the thing that allows you to endure as someone who cares about the world.

It goes without saying that this should include friends and family. But it should also include hobbies. Yes, hobbies. Like stamp collecting, or trainspotting, or bird watching. If there is a secret to life, it does not lie in finding yourself or the transcendence of the spirit. It lies in things like knitting.

The list of hobbies is much longer than we typically allow, it's just that we only apply it as a form of tacit disparagement. In reality, being a football supporter is clearly a hobby, and so is golf, or any form of cooking where you're doing research and mastering techniques, rather than just getting it done. We don't call them hobbies because they're socially acceptable. We reserve the word for things we sneer at. Painting a Warhammer model is a hobby. Sailing is a sport. It's absolute bollocks, but there we are.

It really doesn't matter what the hobby is. All that matters is that you have one.

The purpose of a hobby is two-fold.

First, it provides personal permission for relaxation. We live in a society where we're expected to accomplish things. For most of us, that process starts at a young age. For as long as you can remember, you will have been at least dimly aware of your level of success. In school, for instance, I remember that kids who could do joined-up handwriting were allowed to write in pen, while those who couldn't had to write in pencil. Just a little thing, but they made sure there was a mark of success and a mark of failure, with a little dab of social stigma for good measure, as is the British way. It's still a vivid memory to me now. As you get older, that becomes about your career, or your sex life, or how you parent, or the manner in which you've decorated your house. The darting eyes and clinking cutlery of Middle England.

In this social setting, it's quite easy to fall into a thought-trap. The thought-trap is that you are wasting time. 

Anything which is not accomplishing something for your future success - be it in parenting, or work, or social status - is wasting time. Some part of your brain can often be found evaluating your current activity and assessing it in a hierarchy of time wastage. So you will see perfectly well rounded people play a video game, or go for a walk, or read a book, or watch a movie in the afternoon, and then turn to you and say that they feel they've wasted time. Christ alive, you think. It's all a waste of time. None of this has any meaning really. We're all a random clump of carbon in an uncaring universe. How is this any more of a waste of time than doing your receipts? And yet there's that protestant bit in us, fucking us up: what are you accomplishing right now? What have you achieved?  

Hobbies are the best way to murder a protestant. Having a hobby is a way of saying to yourself, and those around you: this is the thing I really care about. This is the leisure activity I prioritise. This is the thing I make time for. It gives it purpose. It gives it authorisation. It tricks the brain into thinking something has been achieved. It creates space for nothingness.

What you happen to do in that time really doesn't matter: cooking, playing records, working on your glutes. Utterly irrelevant. All that matters is that you gave yourself the time.

Second, hobbies allow you access to the higher realms of pleasure. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, like many before them, used to have this idea of higher and lower pleasures - basically sensual stuff for the morons and cerebral stuff for the civilised. That's plainly nonsense. Give most people the choice between sex and philosophy and they will rightly choose the former. 

But there is a distinction in pleasure. There's passive pleasure and there's active pleasure. There's the pleasure of having something wash over you - media, say, or food - without you really thinking about what's going on. And there's the pleasure of thinking about it and understanding it. There's the pleasure you get from expertise. That's what a hobby is. 

Let me give an example. My hobby is comics, and to a lesser extent film, and then maybe after that drinking, which I have a personal aptitude for. Also I generally find that if I call drinking a hobby it discourages the otherwise compelling view that I am a human disaster zone. 

One of my favourite comic artists is called INJ Culbard. If you're not into comics, which most people aren't, other artists will strike you as immediately more impressive. Alex Ross, say, or JH Williams III - people who produce incredible visual masterpieces. Culbard's work is much less arresting. But what he has, more than any other artist I know, is economy. He can create the maximum amount of character and storytelling with the minimum number of lines. 

Look at the image below. Check out each of the characters in turn. You learn a lot about them, just from that image. One of them is sad and dignified. One of them is a rascal. One is innocent. One is doddering. One is inquisitive. And that has been communicated to you effortlessly, with supreme economy of the linework. Just a tiny little panel, with a few swipes of a pencil. It's the work of a master.

For some reason, economy often seems to be one of those things people appreciate when they really get to know something. I often hear football people talking in a similar way about a uniquely impressive player. It's probably at the root of the idea that someone 'makes it look easy'. But regardless - all that matters is that you get a particular kind of joy from working at the things that give you pleasure, from learning about them, thinking about them, caring about them. It's similar to the pleasure you get from improving your professional skills, except that it has no purpose. It has no point. It's not for money or success. It's only value is that which you imbue it with. And that, ultimately, is what makes it truly meaningful: Work in the pursuit of pleasure. And pleasure for its own sake. 

That, for me at least, is how you stay sane. It's how you maintain your stamina, without being overcome by outrage or despair. Good, old fashioned hobbies. If you're in politics for the long haul, it's a damn good way of making sure you'll still be there at the end.

Make the most of next week. Not the Christmas bit, or any of that jingly bollocks. But the real period of celebration, which comes the day after. It holds the key to a life well lived.

Odds and sods

We hit it. I sent out a slightly begging email to free subscribers yesterday, basically calling them cunts and telling them to send me money if they could afford it. And this morning I woke up to find that I'd hit the income level I needed to make this newsletter viable.

Striking 13 is now formally here to stay. And if that's not a good way for me to ring in the new year, I don't know what is.

See you next week. And the week after that, and the one after that, forever. Look what you've done.