Antidoters Podcast

Hey! It’s been a while. Sorry. I’ve been hustling, business-developing, Zoom-ing, moutain walking; web-designing, product-testing, conference-speaking, making 100s of packed-lunches; business-planning, ad-testing, trade-marking, veruca-treating; podcast-appearing, pitching, AI-training, picking up socks; you get the idea… As a result ScrollAware is gathering exciting momentum and appears to have hit a serious nerve, with *big* brands and 🤞some high profile ambassador conversations in play. But my own nerves are frazzled. So much for a slow Summer. I’ve felt like a priest at times, unwittingly eliciting countless confessions around bad habits and screen time fears. It can be depressing - horror stories abound - but it’s all validation that something’s gone seriously wrong and that we need more reminders to stop, pause and smell the roses. In moments of overwhelm, it can feel futile and like pushing water uphill. Am I staking my reputation and using up all my network’s goodwill on trying to push against the gravity of global-trends and cultural change? Is this a business, or is it a ‘movement’? Can it be both? There are certainly enough awesome antidote products, and services to support more intentional living - the returns from which could fuel the movement - but equally, I’m increasingly realising that much of this is simply a life philosophy to focus on how much of the good stuff in life is actually free. I feel like I’m trying to package and market an amalgam of personal philosophy (as revealed here) and old-world wisdom into something suitable for this age of overwhelm. To turn the clock back in many ways, but leveraging the modern tools of promotion that I find so icky: personal brand and the cult of celebrity, the primacy of social content and data optimisation, with the intensifying earthquake of AI-opportunity/ threat rumbling underfoot. The ‘More Soul Society’ has launched this week in response. It seeks to offer the simple reminders that I need in order to to practice what I preach, packaged into a short, weekly, free missive. A ‘slowletter’ if you will, rather than a newsletter. It’s the start of the audience-building side of the movement to create a home for all the More-Soulers whose confessions I’m privy to. Fancy it? Yes, it’s another substack… but a shorter, pithier one. Fewer elipses, semi-colons and rambling-Jess. And one that might trigger a mass ‘unsubscribe’ to so much other superfluous noise and out of which a movement could emerge to shift the pendulum back a little. It’s certainly a ‘could’ worth aiming for. More mature Antidoters may find some of the contents obvious or trite (Hi Mum), but trust me when I say that much of this stuff will be depressingly new to many under 30s and/or partially forgotten by the generation above them. The prospect of sitting on a bench for 5 minutes to people-watch, sending a physical postcard or going out of your way to give a stranger a compliment can be hugely novel, unnerving concepts. Idleness, reverie, pondering and boredom are close to extinct states of being. So I’m keeping this as short as I can(‘t!) as I’d rather you checked the below out than spent more valuable minutes reading this. (And Antidoters will continue in the same vein, as freewheeling as ever. As and when I have some spleen to vent). Please subscribe and share. PS- I was tempted to auto-subscribe you all as the sales-funnel gurus would advocate - but I figured that would be counter to the philosophy. This has to be opted-in to by those that feel this and find it a breath of fresh air in over-optimised lives. But bribery’s ok, right? I’ll send a handwritten postcard to anyone that gets 10 Soul Society sign-ups. A Smaart Pocket if you can get 50… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

I’m so excited. It’s been less ‘Eureka’ and more a fog slowly clearing through the end of a telescope but after months of reading, writing and processing, my thinking has crystallised into a next professional chapter I can’t wait to write. One that hones in on the problems I care most about and draws on all my experience to date. Let’s start with a thought experiment: a short utopia in an age of dystopia. It’s 2035, and the Analogue Renaissance is thriving. It all began in 2025, when a people-powered #LessScrollMoreSoul movement took hold. The message appeared everywhere as a reminder of what society was losing in our 3 hours+ of daily scroll and what we had to gain from reclaiming some of it back. GenZ led the ‘digital defiance’ charge as frustration grew around childhoods they realised they’d lost, but it quickly spread as all woke up to the fact that we are what we pay attention to and that our time was ours to optimise, not others’ to mine and sell. A craze kicked off to visibly carry and use phone sleeping bags to signify disconnection and presence to ourselves and those around - our kids, friends, colleagues. Phone cloakrooms are now common at social gatherings with ‘no-phone zone’ signage in most public spaces. It is now frowned upon for phones to be out in social settings. Selfies, once hailed as a form of self-expression are now viewed as narcissistic and deeply uncool. Amateur public filming stopped, accelerated from 2031 by the risk of prosecution for sharing images without consent. Posting children on social media stopped altogether by 2030 after a number of AI-image manipulation abuse cases captured the media’s attention. Public spaces began to be designed more thoughtfully to invite connection: benches facing each other, communal talk tables, free chess boards and community walls for public expression and local event promotion. Dating app use declined, ‘single zones’ and public connection walls replaced them. Eye contact came back into fashion and analogue is cool again - vinyl, paper-planners, alarm clocks, disposable cameras, game nights. Bookshops are “digital detox zones” with cafés, events and open-mic nights. The previously diminishing concept of local, in-person community has crept back. Corporate CSR budgets increasingly back local initiatives - grassroots sports, youth clubs, events and community facilities. ‘Digital Sabbaticals' for young adults became common-place with 3 to 6 months spent off-grid, and the unplugged travel sector now booms. As evidence for the efficacy of ‘free’ antidotes grew, ‘Disconnection prescriptions’ became mainstream in mental healthcare; ‘Helicopter’ parenting continues to give way to ‘cavalier parenting.’ Kids fall. They get back up. Chores are back in vogue along with teen jobs. Band-aid sales have gone up, inversely correlated with the decline of antidepressants. In education, whilst tech and AI remain critical subjects in this tech-enabled world, their use in other disciplines has decreased with schools reviving slow learning: books, pens, gardening and map-reading. ‘Life lessons’ include media-literacy, financial management, “how to hold a real conversation” and “how to manage conflict” . Offline competence matters again and the humanities have received a new emphasis and boost as the ‘soul’ subjects that distinguish us from AI. As global governments woke up to the shifting public sentiment, 35 countries (so far) have enforced age-restrictions on social media. The Advertiser Revolt of 2027 effectively forced the social business models away from outrage and insecurity-fuelling toward quality-first content. Paid tiers were introduced for those who wanted to reinstate friend-only feeds or editing-control over 3rd party content. The ‘Digital Balance’ sector is booming and IRL (in-real-life) is big business once again. Naive? Perhaps. But a huge cultural shift is coming… you feel it as so do most people. And many elements of this utopia, especially the shifts in social norms and perception, I now consider my professional mission… * a quest to reclaim technology as an enabler for our real lives as opposed to a destination where we spend most of them. And deeper than that: * To remind people in a dopamine-driven, hack-obsessed, over-consumption world that happiness and pleasure are not the same thing, indeed they conflict. * To promote the age-old wisdom that happiness comes from embracing people, place and perspective (or ‘soul’ time): time in nature, sport, community, the arts, creativity, skills-building and collaboration. The phone is not really the problem The smartphone is awesome. A truly magical wand in our pockets that can enable soul time: inspiration, logistics management, event-booking, education and community-building. It’s much more specifically infinite scroll and the attention (addiction) economy that is causing most of the problems. It’s the ‘free’ business model of doom-scrolling (along with its sophisticated algorithms that sate our worst human instincts) that is lobotomising society. An industry that’s literally mining us of 720 billion minutes per day (143 mins/ user/ day), 260 trillion minutes or 500 million years of collective human time annually (source). The average 18 year old is currently on course to spend 93% of their free time for the rest of their lives in scroll (source). And it’s not just the time-opportunity cost, but the damage done to our powers of concentration - especially pernicious to young brains still wiring-up - but a problem for all who now exist in a distracted state of multitasking overwhelm with the weight of global problems on our shoulders. ‘A model that’s literally mining us of 720 billion minutes per day (143 mins/ user/ day), 260 trillion minutes or 500 million years of collective human time annually’ Maybe you have more self-control - well done - but if you’re not worried about these stats for civilisation’s sake, read them again. And I’m not saying I don’t deeply care about specific ‘harms’: the proven links to child anxiety, extremism, polarisation or dis-information- entrenching insecurities and tribal instincts. But I see these as downstream from the issues of time and focus and shifting adult perceptions as the key to unlocking action. In recent years we’ve seen the total extinction of boredom. Children never experience it despite the evidence of its critical importance for creativity, agency and resilience-building. The average child now spends less time outdoors than a high security inmate (source). And how often do any of us adults sit with our thoughts, processing or making sense of our experiences, chewing on curiosity rather than tapping it into Google or ChatGPT? We don’t, not even on the can. ‘The average child now spends less time outdoors than a high security inmate’ For as long as our attention is manipulated, we are not in full control of our own lives. If we’re not careful, the next great social divide will be between those who know how to harness it and go ‘deep’ and those who don’t (likely, as with all disparities, to fall along socio-economic lines). The former will rule the latter (as China appreciates). But enough with the gloom. The tides are shifting. Introducing Scroll Aware… …with constructive optimism at its core. Scroll Aware is a new social enterprise to tackle tech addiction and a collective-action movement to reclaim time, attention and soul in a screen-saturated world. A national (international?) #LessScrollMoreSoul consumer ‘health’ campaign will kick it off soon with many high profile partnerships in place or in discussion. Whilst the zeitgeist is shifting (see the recent Deloitte survey where 53% of GenZ favour a ban on social media for U16s), many initiatives are discounted as doom-mongering (even if truth-telling) and/or luddite. As such, Scroll Aware has a fabulous opportunity to shape a positive conversation with measurable targets for behavioural change that invert the scroll:soul ratio. Scroll Aware is a non-partisan social enterprise. It’s a positive, antidote-based take on the challenge and less anti-tech or anti-phone as pro-people, pro-place, and pro-perspective. 'Less Scroll' is the push - shining light on the addiction economy incentives and imploring brakes and boundaries, with 'More Soul' the pull - reminding people to act on the age-old, life-affirming benefits of offline living and in-person time; re-emphasising the benefits of nature, sport, community, art and more. Scroll Aware is a coalition of businesses, influential ambassadors and not-for-profits united under a ‘Less Scroll, More Soul’ banner and committed to cross-pollinating the best of each others’ work. Together, we want to give people the inspiration and courage to log off, look up, and live more intentionally. What you can do: Professionally… * Please share this mission with any consumer brands, charities or organisations in your network who are in the business of ‘less scroll’ (digital balance) or ‘more soul’ ie. promoting sport, leisure, nature, hospitality, toys, events or community. Forward them this blog and/or our champions summary. * Get your own organisation involved (share with leadership, marketing, CSR and HR teams). * In September, we’re hosting a London Summit of ‘champions’ and partners who believe in this mission to shape and launch the collective action manifesto. Personally… * Share share share. Share this. Share the website. Please share your thoughts on your social channels and reach out to anyone in your network who might be able to help us amplify this message. * Pledge to more intentional living. It’s free. We’re building a waitlist right now to whom we'’ll be sharing updates and short nuggets of motivation, inspiration and recommendations for more intentional living. * Get a ‘Smaart Pocket’: The gift of time. A sleeping bag for your phone to visibly signal your intentionality, when with friends, children, colleagues or to yourself when you feel the need for focus or relaxation (with % of proceeds to Scroll Aware. UK delivery only for now). In fact, ask your organisation/ employer to buy them for all their staff or for client-gifting… * Try our free ‘smartphone habit audit’ for a personalised report on your habits, or download free phone screensavers for personal use or venue-signage for your workplace or hospitality venue. * Know anyone famous? Send them my way…. we’re actively seeking high profile patrons and ambassadors who want to be part of building a legacy project. * Join me. Both volunteers and future hires are so welcome to reach out. I’ll close with a huge ‘thank you’ to all those who have supported and advised me on this so far, given me their time and opened up their contact books. Heroes, the lot of you. And I’m delighted to welcome everyone else to the Less Scroll, More Soul people-powered movement. Join us. And let’s go. www.scrollaware.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Something in me is shifting. It struck me as I walked out of security last month at the departures terminal and into the walkway that snakes through duty free. Every sense was immediately assaulted. Glossy images of A-listers, neon lights, huge point-of-sale booze-deals and an overwhelming scent of perfume. Three children tugged me in the directions of giant M&Ms, tech accessories and overpriced body-sprays respectively, whilst my own eyes were involuntarily drawn to the rows of sunglasses and Swatch watches I don’t need, (but feel a nostalgic 80s love for). It took every ounce of willpower to stay in-lane, snaking my carry-on through whilst shaking my head sternly ‘absolutely not’. I felt a bit nauseous. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It struck me at that moment how gross and exploitative this omnipresent consumerism has become. Stuff, stuff and more stuff. Stuff to make us prettier, less-inhibited, more organised, more noticed, more… more. Happiness in the form of retail therapy and the dopamine of a shiny new thing. We’re all susceptible. Brands wouldn’t exist if we weren’t, but how happy does any of this really make us? My husband and I often play the Marie Kondo game. What ‘stuff’ do we own that actually ‘brings us joy’? The answers are odd and have zero correlation to price: his (ugly) gilet; my thermos coffee cup (to which i’m surgically attached prior to 11am); our ceiling-projecting bedside clock; my mud-boots for dog-walking; our dry robes for saturday-soccer; my thrice-yearly photo books; the Eastpak rucksack I picked up at the village-fete for 50p that is now my handbag; our crocs (oh, spare me your judgement)... and er..? It’s a pathetically small list when I think of all the money we spend on crap. Crap that ends up causing a huge amount of stress in a house of three children as it’s never bloody returned where it’s supposed to go. Another exercise: ask a kid what they got for past Christmases (even the last one!) and depressingly, they rarely remember. They recall what they did around that time, who visited, any festive outings and which games were played, but rarely the gifts themselves, despite the huge expense, time, worry (and midnight assembly hours) ‘Santa’ invested in them. The most played-with toys are *never* the ones you expect. I’ve spent the best part of my career in the world of brands: building tech to harness attention; selling loyalty schemes and honing marketing messaging. I enjoy brand-building and message-massaging around the behavioural science of what people need or think they need. And I’ve believed in the value delivered by the brands I’ve worked on. Through choosing them as consumers we make a statement about who we are. They can be aspirational and provide identity, status, comfort or convenience. Branding is the way to make our (uniquely brilliant, obviously) product stand out in a crowded marketplace. And it’s no coincidence that many of the biggest social movements of the last few decades… Pride, Extinction Rebellion, BLM, LiveAid etc have succeeded by harnessing the branding playbook… logos and merch included. Purchases do produce ‘highs’.. but they’re short-lived, so desire for them is now insatiable. These thoughts have intersected with the work I’m doing at the moment on antidotes to tech addiction. I have a few exciting product ideas of my own (on which, more to follow) and (with thanks to Jonathan Haidt’s team), have been chatting to a number of talented, energising entrepreneurs working on solutions. Given the growing demand for solutions, I suspect some of these products and services may end up being very lucrative indeed. But actually, the best solutions to this issue are free… education, willpower, socialising, reading, walks, nature, more pondering, community engagement etc. But therein lies the problem…. as if they’re free, it’s no one’s real incentive to market them well and make them seem ‘cool’ or aspirational. No VCs to back the social-media marketing campaign or SEO. Feeling sad or overwhelmed? Here’s a premium app subscription to master the act of mindfulness. Much cooler than 10 minutes of watching clouds drift across the sky or half an hour spent on an old puzzle from the back of the cupboard- despite them having a very similar effect. Maybe, where lifestyle brands are concerned, paying for something provides a placebo effect in itself though? Maybe if you pay, you’re more committed to change. This psychology certainly works for me where my gym membership is concerned. Anyway, the other event that prompted me to flirt further with my growing anti-capitalist inclination was opportunistically reaching out to the hero-author of a book I loved recently and landing a lunch with him. Tom Hodgkinson wrote ‘The Idle Parent’ and has, for the last 20 years been running ‘The Idler’- a wonderful counter-cultural publication dedicated to ‘slow living’ and our lunch was fabulous. It was like meeting another version of myself in a parallel world, someone who’s spent most of his professional life promoting free life-additives through a lens I feel like I'm only just rediscovering. As readers will know from my ‘what I can’t see I can’t overparent’ post, I was immediately inclined to his book from its title and it did not disappoint. In turn, laugh-out-loud funny and ridiculously annoying, as I wished I’d written it. In essence, a tract on why parenting less is good for both parent and child. Why a slower, less ‘proactive’ family life is a more fulfilling, richer life. Why possessions - especially plastic ones - are less important than experiences. Why you should never take your child to a theme park and how the best family days are the ones where parents drink together in a tent on one side of a field and the kids run feral on the other. I’m in. I highly recommend that everyone sign up to his newsletter for the opportunity to receive a free download of ‘The Idler’s Manual’ - a quick-read charter for life that is a funny, poignant reminder of so many of the ‘boring’, unmarketed things that make life worth living: messing around on water; wondering a city aimlessly, riding a bike for fun, staring at walls, afternoon naps, playing old games and lolling by a fire - to name just a few examples. The Idler mag itself is gorgeous escapism, full of brief journeys into the fascinating worlds of philophers, historians, art and ukelele playing… worlds that few on the ‘productivity’ treadmill ever make time for. It’s annoying when people articulate your thoughts better than you can, but herewith, the Idler Manifesto: The religion of industry has turned human beings into robots. The imposition of work-discipline on free-wheeling dreamers enslaves us all. Joy and wisdom has been replaced by work and worry. We must defend our right to be lazy. It is in our idleness that we become who we are. It is when lazy that we achieve self-mastery. Jobs rob our time. Productivity and progress have led to anxiety and unease. Technology imprisons as it promises to liberate. Careers are phatasms. Money is mind forg’d. We can create our own paradise. Nothing must be done. With freedom comes responsibility. Stay in bed. Be good to yourself. Inaction is the wellspring of creation. Art, people, life. Bread, bacon, beer. Live first, work later. Time is not money. Stop spending. Quit your job. Study the art of living. Live slow, die old. Embrace nothing. Know nothing. Do nothing. Be idle. What a breath of fresh air. Am I in danger of dying my hair blue? Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Today, I’m delighted to be sharing my first guest post from a great friend of mine, Adam Nicoll. Adam is truly an ‘old soul’, and someone I hugely enjoy for his irreverent sense of humour and salty language. He pulls no punches, debatewise, has a penchant for spraying robust opinions on radio phone-ins and along with our better halves, we frequently put the world to rights over drinks. Indeed the name of our 4-way whatsapp group remains ‘Nelson’ after our gammon fury some years back at the changing of a school house name from ‘Nelson’ to ‘Attenborough’ (ick). The subject of community-decline has been a recurrent theme in our conversations but whilst lots of people talk the talk, few walk that talk. Adam does… and for miles, as his post outlines. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Whilst a high-achieving C-level/ board player in global corporations, he is also a fierce family and community man with solid priorities. If I have any criticism of what follows it’s that he greatly understates the gargantuan task he undertook in rescuing his local village pub. He was a man on a mission to which he gave everything, including calls to breweries from mountain-tops during a shared family holiday. The stunning value of what he created and continues to sustain as an intensive passion-project is evident to any visitor. He is my antidoter of the week. The world needs more Adams. “Only Connect” EM Forster, Howards End. Over the last 25 years or so I can recall at least half a dozen occasions when leaders in the businesses I’ve operated in, have toyed with the notion of cancelling work socials, parties or culled the work canteen – ‘but people can walk to Greggs easily enough...’. Some have acted accordingly. When they’ve done so in the spirit of saving money or driving profit, they have ignored one fundamental truth. People like people. More than that, people need people to be happy. People only work because of people. Removing that social interaction and expecting a business to continue to operate at the same optimal rate, is like expecting an orgasm at a funeral. It’s possible but unlikely and a social car crash. And it’s not just businesses which make such glaring mistakes. We’re all quite good at it for ourselves. We often don’t know what’s good for us. It never ceases to amaze me how people draw conclusions about their lot in life and then prescribe themselves the very medicine which is most contradictory to the diagnosis. Since COVID, this trend has found a fifth and sixth gear. Dare I say, it’s the younger generations who seem more susceptible to this pitfall and perhaps experience counts for something after all? Here’s how a thought process may roll around the topic of remote working. “People in the office are getting more opportunities than me. I didn’t get to go on that Parisian jolly but I’ve always wanted to see the Paris office. Maybe I wasn’t around when it was mooted around the water cooler? Jade got it. She would have been at the water cooler. She’s always in the office, sucking up to the bosses. Cow!” It’s cold and the cost of living is ridiculous right now, especially heating bills. Now I’m WFH it costs at least £20 to heat this place for the day...but I suppose that’s cheaper than commuting…. even if the WiFi is terrible I want to WFH to have more freedom and control over my destiny and workload. It saves me on commuting costs too and I’m in when Amazon parcels arrive. I got a couple of great books today. One to tackle my loneliness and one about anxiety. Great. I wish I had a job where I felt I belonged to something bigger. There’s no sense of identity and community at this place. Why am I so unhappy? What’s this survey from HR in my inbox? Oh, it’s asking me if I still want to work remotely or come back into the office 2 days a week!! WTF. I don’t like the tone of these questions. It’s like they’re FORCING me to come in or else. I’m ticking that box, ‘I prefer to work remotely 5 days a week’. That’ll teach ‘em for victimising me. HR arseholes.”... Just as people have gained more freedom regarding when and where they work, their mental health has collapsed at an alarming rate. Up to 80% of workers report that remote working impacted their mental health negatively. Why? Well, it’s clear to many of us that it’s about connection. Isolate a rat in a lab from its pals for a few days and it shows signs of stress. We’re just the same. As EM Forster writes in his opening line of Howards End ‘Only Connect’. Over the last several years the social glue of society has been dosed in a solvent, robbing us all of a cohesion which used to make us smile more, and love more. In 1990, one in five people in the UK met their spouse at work. Today’s figure can’t even be surveyed for fear that people would get sacked for completing the survey honestly...’work relationships!!!’...Ewwww, HR AND COMPUTER SAYS NO, CANCEL AND DETONATE ON SITE! So that, finally, brings me to pubs, why they matter more now than ever, and why I’ve been asked to guest blog today. Well, you know where this is going. Pubs are connection. They are community. They are not just where culture flows, they are that culture. It may be too antiquated a cliche to say that pubs are a part of the fabric of society; and perhaps too exclusive and rural-biased to reference that the holy trinity of a village community was once a village shop, a Church and a thriving village pub. Those days have long gone, but I can’t help but quote Hilaire Belloc “Change your hearts or you lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” I’m sure some readers won’t dare to relate to this, think it jingoistic, have vomited and already started playing Fortnite with a repeat offender in Wisconsin who they’ll never actually meet, like, love or loathe. But, whatever your religious viewpoint or ideology, pubs matter. They matter to towns and villages and to all countries where they comprise a significant cultural impact. And now, more than ever. Places to connect in person are disappearing at an alarming rate. If they were a pink footed goose, there would be a Chris Packham-led appeal on BBC9 at 8pm every weekday asking people to dig deeper. Community centres are in short supply and underfunded, church attendance has been on the wane for decades, working men’s clubs have vanished, newsagents going, village shops vanishing, even bookmakers have disappeared and youth clubs have gone the way of the dodo. And yes, people will argue that coffee shops have plugged the gap and society has just moved in a different direction from the boozer. Well I’d say walk into a coffee shop and count how many people are alone, working on a laptop or scrolling on a mobile. How many people are actually connecting in the way that they might in a pub... All this, and in a world where 9 million people in the UK alone describe themselves as ‘lonely’ or ‘very lonely’. Is it any wonder, when you can’t even guarantee speaking to someone in a shop at the bloody till. It drives me mental when I see an elderly person struggling with self-checkout. Well done, Lord Saintrose, you’ve saved a bob or two with your miserly automation but made everyone’s lives more stressful. You’ve outsourced a chunk of your ‘service’ to the people actually paying for your product - those who are most vulnerable in society and who may only get out once or twice a week to speak to someone in real life (since their other half died and their kids moved away). You’ve cast them into a digital oblivion of covid-infecting screen swiping.... Arrrghghhghgh. Shame on you. We know the loneliness diagnosis, and yet we prescribe solutions which bring more of the same misery. Madness. Back to pubs. There aren’t many left. Under 39,000 actually. In 1990, there were 63,500. My village pub was under threat a couple of years ago and I decided to stand up for it. I stood on a pub table a few times in actual real life, and then did more of the same virtually on Facebook to generate noise to save the thing; eventually got some funding from a generous chap who ‘got it’; and shamed the conglomerate who owned the pub on radio enough to convince them it was easier to sell it to a community inspired bid. Almost a year down the line and the pub is open, refurbished, viable and thriving. But it’s in the conversations I hear in the pub where the real victory lies. People discussing break-ups, their latest diagnosis or prognosis, their children’s victories and challenges. People moaning about their boss in a safe place, airing their woes about the world and occasionally their politics. People decompressing from a day at work with a pint on the way home or a game of darts. Without a pub, many of these conversations would have no natural home. They wouldn’t happen at all. They’d be inner talk at best. Inner chat which may eat away at us, pushing happiness further and further away, isolating us from others. Emotions bottled up with no release. Worse still, we may put these thoughts on social media instead, to be misinterpreted, driving anger northwards, and polarising society ever more. So, a pub isn’t about alcohol, it’s about much more than that. It’s our collective happiness that’s in the balance. They’re as important as that. You’d think Governments would appreciate that and recognise the psychological value to those who use them, the hole in society they fill and suture. Without wishing to get political - as all parties have a poor record in this regard - sadly the recent budget is likely to see our pub count drop another 5,000 during this term; still fewer places to meet, love and laugh. A continued erosion of what is natural for people to do. Only connect. Belloc’s words bear repeating: “...when you have lost your Inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” Mine’s a pint. Adam Nicoll Fractional CMO in hospitality | People and Culture leader | Non-Executive Director of The Plough at Kings Walden, Hertfordshire | Pub-lover The pint’s on me, Adam. Cheers to you. (And if you liked this, you might also enjoy my ‘In Defence of Rebels and Booze’ post) Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Hello Strangers! Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve spent a lovely last month taking my own advice and prioritising family, plus reading to restock my mind-pantry. Because the truth is, I’d run out of spleen-venting material and feared I was repeating myself. (Perhaps it might help all our content-overwhelm if people stopped posting for the sake of it. Two ears, one mouth etc). And what a last month it’s been with so many explosive global news events in all my fields of fascination/ concern: a poisonous feast of political polarisation; a prospective (likely abortive) TikTok ban in the US; tribal battle lines drawn over whether it’s possible to accidentally extend one’s right arm; identity-politics playing out in responses to two huge UK news stories- grooming gangs and the tragic Southport murders; and much more. I’m following as much of it as my stress levels can take, and yes, I have opinions (indeed, I was sat on a zoom with Sky News at 7.30pm last friday, thirty seconds from interview go-live to discuss the TikTok ban I wholeheartedly support before being bumped by the demise of a much-loved footballer). Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Global politics is viewed as either deeply concerning or a welcome course-correction as pendulums of ascendant opinions swing around wildly, but our obsession with the global comes at what cost to the local? Indeed, how much of what is (or isn’t) happening at the local community level is responsible for it? Arguably, all of it… The decline of community is one of the repetitive themes of Antidoters and last week I was hugely struck by a brilliant long article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson that articulated and evidenced this phenomenon much more beautifully than I ever could: ‘The Antisocial Century’. (If you have the time, stop reading this and read that - you have my permission. If not, some highlights as follows). Whilst it’s US focussed, I believe it to be just as relevant to the UK. The article details how, from the very social early part of the 20th century (thriving churches, growth of local group participation plus the rapid spread of libraries, theatres, music venues and parks), various trends over the last few decades have seen communities go into terminal decline. It started with the rise of car-culture and the impact on urban-planning… then shifting political priorities… then TV’s appearing in every home… (“From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half” (Robert D Putnam “Bowling Alone”).. All this well before the turbo-charging of these trends by recent technology shifts, Covid, on-demand entertainment and the explosion of food-delivery services: “If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens… By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life…. The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality…. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely… to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all…. Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd… Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime. Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers…. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.” And one lovely framing theory that I’ve since plagiarised in conversation is the following: Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town.. We used to know them well; now we don’t” I would personally add ‘the narcissistic obsession of self’ to the inner ring - and global political obsession to the outer, tribal ring. But yes, the middle ring we neglect at our peril. Thompson goes on to explain how the “the middle ring is key to social cohesion… Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance”. Bumping regularly into those with whom we might disagree on ideology or politics but share so many other experiences, family-dynamics or local concerns allows us to truly see each other and find common-ground. Different experiences and life-perspectives are given greater consideration. Accommodation and peaceful co-existence becomes both possible and necessary. And so, in an attempt to take my own medicine, my antidote-quest has driven me to middle-ring proactivity. I’ve volunteered with a local hospice initiative to be a ‘compassionate neighbour’ for an hour a week to a local elderly person who is lonely or socially excluded. I hesitate to share this, as I feel there’s too much ‘look what a nice person I am’ virtue signalling in the world, so I’ll be honest and admit that my motivation here is only part altruistic and part selfish/ for research-purposes. Who are the people that do this and what is their motivation? What difference do/ can they make? How might one scale this? On a personal level, who might I get to know and how differently might they see the world based on their much longer experience of it? I’d love to hear personal stories of bygone-times and to broaden my narrow ‘people-like-me’ social circle. (But yes, I will commit to it and not quit once I’ve extracted some Antidoters value!) So far, without yet having even been matched to a new socially-excluded friend, my research curiosity has already been piqued as follows: Why was it so hard to volunteer for this? Why did I need to be DBS-checked, impose on two friends for references and attend a whole-day training event to give an hour of my time each week to have coffee with another consenting adult? But of course I know the answer: the precautionary principle. If I murder Doris or steal all her money, someone will need to be held responsible (albeit possibly Amazon for selling me the knife… ‘do something! anything!’ *facepalm*). Whilst potentially there from the best of intentions, how far are all these barriers putting many off from getting involved in local initiatives? How many more football coaches, youth workers, scout-leaders or citizen-advice volunteers might we benefit from without them? We’ll never know. (In related research, I talked to the British Nightclub Association last week about the potential of putting on alcohol-free ‘lite club’ evenings in their venues for teenagers but yet again, the precautionary principle is a key blocker. One negative news story involving drugs, a fight or a spiking would see the whole initiative would go up in flames of negative publicity, so it’s easier not to try. Let’s leave the kids to hang out in dingy, underfunded parks. (Or not… watch this space… or take that idea for yourself and run with it)) Why were all the 15 volunteers in my training session (bar one) female and with an average age of c. 68? Again no surprise perhaps given how similar percentages play out across the care sector (only 18% of the people working in adult social care identify as men – and even fewer among care workers (16%), senior care workers (15%), nurses (13%) and occupational therapists (11%) source). Is this due to stereotyping and nurture? Or nature, with the female brain more attuned to community and caring roles? (My friend David Goodhart’s recent book ‘The Care Dilemma’ provides a fantastic analysis of this subject for those interested). No doubt, I’ll share more on my experiences compassionate-neighbouring in due course, but to close for now, a small selection of some recent reading/ listening: * The Telepathy Tapes podcast… has literally blown my mind. I’ve been trying to comunicate telapathically with our dog for the last week. Updates to follow. (Whatsapp passive aggression seems to work well enough on my co-parent). * TikTok - Weapon of Mass Distraction by Gurwinder Bhogal * I Can’t Believe That Free Speech, Color Blindness, and Meritocracy Became Right-Wing Issues by Jeff Maurer * Two of my favourite men talking about how to save the Western world and why the UK is going to sh1t (all podcast providers/ and YouTube) More soon (albeit, I won’t be a slave to weekly). Thanks so much for reading and do please share if you find any of this of interest. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

I sat in a group team event last week, listening to a presentation about the trajectory of one of the most exciting technology companies in the world. Twenty minutes…. that was all it took before the fidgeting started, before hands (including my own), reached instinctively to check a device and you could feel the attention in the room wavering. This was not an indictment on the content or delivery - which were both brilliant - but on a modern culture where brains have been reprogrammed to multi-task; one where we struggle to stay in the moment and where we are slaves to the allure of devices. My mother’s generation isn’t so afflicted, but mine certainly is and as I scan the room - a brilliant team who work remotely all over the world and come together in person only once every 18 months - I notice that it’s worse the younger people are. We may worry about how this is rewiring our children’s brains, but we also need to take greater responsibility for our own and the example we set. A chant starts up in my head ‘Con-cen-tra-tion… Concentration now begin… Keep in rhythm’ - a kid’s game but apparently now ripe for adult team-building. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. As I write, I have 102 tabs open on three browsers which I scroll between for different projects. Amongst them: 3 separate inboxes; a 40-channel Slack; 12 half-read articles; 5 half-listened-to YouTubes; 4 pdf reports waiting to reviewed; some half-baked product research; GoDaddy (because any idea that pops into my head can result in a rash url purchase); two conferences I’d like to attend; Trello, for tracking Christmas gifts and family-admin; 5 separate Linkedin tabs with posts I may or may not ‘like’; and (no-joke), the lyrics to a partridge in a pear tree. Let’s not even talk about my phone and the number of Whatsapps awaiting processing. WTF am I doing? And how uniquely chaotic is my desktop? Why, mid-sentence here, do I feel a compulsion to quickly check if anything interesting has popped into one of my inboxes in the last 15 minutes? Quick scroll left, sign a birthday-party waiver, delete a marketing spam, add a football game to the calendar… and I’m back. The reason I record an audio version of this blog is so that it don’t sit in another tab to-read-later or fall down below the inbox fold. Perhaps my dulcet tones can be enjoyed at greater leisure, next time you’re in a car, walking the dog or doing a shop. Your time is precious. I don’t take it lightly. Given that volume of content, how can we possibly give any of it proper consideration or find time to stop and process any meaningful conclusions? My tabs of potential knowledge-gems sit there contributing to mental overload in the same way that the physical detritus of our family life on every available surface stresses me out. It’s the content snorkelling habit analogy I’ve used before and I know it’s making me stupid and unproductive. Distraction is an illness and we’re all now afflicted. In a moment of down time with my husband recently I had pause to reflect on my gallbladder… as you do. What even is it? Where is it? What does it do? It struck me that I recall *nothing* from school biology and haven’t ever given it a single thought. On musing this out loud, my husband and I both reached for devices. 7 minutes later, we know the answer - thank god - but at the cost of 14 cumulative minutes of our precious together time… x20 other such examples in any given week (where do I know that actress from? How do you stop your puppy eating s**t? Synonyms for ‘pondering’?) Christ. Cogitate on the cumulative nature of that and how much of it is utterly, utterly pointless. Answers to anything and everything that pops into our heads are a tap away and this instant accessibility has dramatically altered how we think about and retain facts. Are the ones we yield on a quick search even true? (Pineapple in dog-food? Really?). As an unwelcome byproduct, we seem to have utterly lost the art of pondering. Even modern toilet roll holders are conspiring against pondering-time with their phone-rest shelves. Maybe it needs a rebrand? To ‘broogle’ is one term I recently heard.. (brain-google - although admittedly it would have yielded little on the gallbladder). And yet, to ponder is a critical life skill. To do so silently is to process the noise of modern life and come to our own conclusions (as opposed to someone else’s); and to ponder out-loud fosters deep connection through shared curiosity - remarkably effective given the rarity of volunteered-ignorance in an age of cast-iron opinions. For children, it’s even more important. As Monica C. Parker writes in Time magazine (with thanks to Hannah Oertel for sharing this quote in her own fabulous blog), “Rather than demonizing daydreaming, we should protect it, nurture it, honor it—if not for the raft of physiological and psychological benefits, then for the potential societal benefits. People who daydream are more reflective, have a deeper sense of compassion, and show more moral decision-making. And ultimately, children who are more reflective, compassionate, and moral grow up to be the adults who build a more just society.” We ignore this habit at our peril. And there are worrying trends everywhere conspiring to exacerbate the problem: the disappearance of free play and boredom for children despite its proven power to build resilience and relationship-building skills; the decline of long-form hand-writing, despite its superiority to typing on brain-connectivity, recall and comprehension; the decline of challenging, longer-form reading in education; and with ChatGPT and AI, turbo-charging these habits still further. Most depressingly, ‘Brain Rot’ has just been revealed as the Oxford University Press’s word of the year (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. Yet still, the Antidoters persist. A founder community I’m a part of ran ‘Ponder Wanders’ for a while. A wonderful idea where loosely-connected strangers would meet to take a stroll and discuss a selection of random topics at leisure. A friend has implemented something similar locally to alleviate loneliness and connect people in Hertfordshire. The Men’s Shed movement started in response to a recognition that men only really talk to each other when ‘doing something’ side-by-side: fixing, tinkering, playing golf etc. And the ‘unplugged’ movement is rapidly gathering momentum, with many phone-free events now popping up around the globe. I believe that hope lies is something akin to an analogue renaissance. The buds are here and being cultivated by many of the innovators that have flooded my inbox since my After Babel blog with Jonathan Haidt (for which you can blame my blog inconsistency of late). I believe it to be some of the most important work happening in the world today. Attention and focus is the new gold. I’d go so far as to say that it could become the next great soceital divide. Those kids with the ability to mine it and deep-dive will become our next leaders, leaving all others snorkelling subjects of the world they create. And if we ourselves, still hope to make a dent, or at least calm our frazzled brains?… Con-cen-tra-tion…. Concentration now begin…. Keep in rhythm… Me. You. Ponder on. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

A reading of my recent blog post on 'After Babel' - Jonathn Haidt's team's publication sharing resaerch and data around his book 'The Anxious Generation'. Entitled: A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood When entrepreneurs hear about problems, they see opportunities. This is what I love about the entrepreneurial sectors I’ve spent my career in—the optimism, energy, problem-solving, and value-creation that abound. At the other end of the business spectrum, corporations are increasingly recognizing their societal responsibilities (CSR) and embracing sustainability and social purpose (albeit with ideological tripwires everywhere).  Given the huge challenges described in The Anxious Generation—the multi-national youth mental health crisis, a generation of kids deprived of real-world independence, and an oversaturation of screens and personal devices—we need both this creative optimism and corporate conscience channeled towards solutions.   My goal in this essay is to encourage entrepreneurs—both social and for-profit—to see this challenge as a meaningful market opportunity. Millions of parents around the world are mobilizing and clamoring for solutions as their concerns for their children grow. They’re increasingly recognizing the emptiness and negativity of their own digital habits, too. There is a nostalgic hunger in the air for less frenetic, polarized, and superficial times, which means that there's a market for in-real-life (‘IRL’) memory-making and businesses to be built around it.  The two biggest entrepreneurial gaps are in developing IRL solutions to tackle norm #4 from The Anxious Generation––more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world––and in creating safer technology tools for young people.  In other words, we need more places for young people to practice and enjoy independence, and we need better  technology that will let young people use their devices as tools (like a Swiss army knife), without getting exploited through those devices by companies that are trying to control and addict them.  Let’s zoom in on some of the opportunities:  Opportunity 1: IRL Solutions To remind kids that the physical world is more meaningful and thrilling than the virtual one, we need to create more compelling spaces and opportunities that encourage independence.  Only with greater access to these spaces will cultural norms shift, prompting parents to give their children more independence. Teens these days are sadly ‘non-grata’ in many public spaces. With downtown shopping areas and malls in decline across many Western nations, ‘teenism’ (my term) has emerged as a phenomenon. Teens are often unwelcome, barred from entering stores or shopping areas in groups, and left to mill around in dingy parks or communal street areas. Interestingly, McDonald’s has capitalized on this trend with a clever ad campaign in the UK that shows how it has become the teen meeting place of choice. But surely fast-food joints can’t be the only safe public spaces for teens? It certainly doesn’t bode well for their health if so. Video. McDonald’s ‘Make it Yours’ teenager ad campaign. There’s a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to create and expand spaces and organized opportunities for IRL hangouts, entertainment, skills-building, and memory-making.   There are ambitious commercial entrants to this market, such as ‘The Den’— a membership-based, phone-free youth club brand launching in the UK that aims to scale nationally and then internationally, given the right medium- to long-term investors. These beautifully designed venues for 13- to 18-year-olds feature event calendars, open spaces, DJ decks, cafe-areas, games, shuffleboards, and critically… limited supervision.  Video. Enjoy The Den’s fabulous vision. Fabrik, though targeted at adults, is another simple example in the U.S. of creating IRL community hangout spaces. Grassroots sports, drama, and hobby clubs provide fantastic opportunities for IRL play, socializing, and skills-building. There’s no happier sight for me than standing on the sidelines of my 8-year-old daughters’ Saturday morning football match, while another 10 fiercely competitive games rage noisily on the surrounding pitches, with girls aged 6 to 18 cheering each other on and erupting in delight at every goal. (Interestingly, it’s usually the parents who bring the tone down).  Unfortunately, many of these organized clubs are struggling. They lack funding, the ability to professionalize, and the resources to scale. They often scrape by on local sponsorship and volunteer support. The Scout and Girl Guide movements—which provide a strong antidote to phone-based childhood—have also seen declining membership over recent decades. Boy Scout membership in the U.S., for instance, has dropped from 4 million in the 1980s to around 1 million today. More needs to be done to reinvigorate these movements and promote their huge, increasing value in modern society. Their resurgence and greater availability will help parents to slacken their reins on children, restore trust, and renormalize unsupervised neighborhood play.    The lack of provision for community spaces and association rests also with government cuts to community spending (at least in the UK). For example, youth club funding in the UK has been cut by £1 billion (70%) over the last 10 years. However, the investment world is also culpable. Longer-term, slower-growth bricks-and-mortar investments don’t attract the same scale of funding as shiny, tech solutions that promise 100x returns and attract angel and venture capital. While the decline of the high street (or main street) isn’t entirely due to investor short-termism or greed (Amazon and China share much of the blame), it’s certainly a factor. Brands that sink millions into social media advertising are also exacerbating the problem, contributing to the addictiveness and resulting anxiety these platforms fuel while filling the social media companies’ coffers Corporations and global consumer brands could step in here, offering both employee volunteers and branded sponsorship to fuel successful community initiatives. Burberry, Lego and UBS have done this with the growing chain of Onside Youth Zones in the UK—a sophisticated charity model that harnesses local, public and private sector partnerships to provide valuable youth spaces in underserved communities. With corporate investment and support to professionalize operations, these success stories could be scaled significantly. We don’t necessarily need to wait for governments to dip into overstretched tax revenues. These initiatives would also directly alleviate many of the social inequalities that DEI initiatives have sought (with limited success) to address.  With so many retail units currently vacant and community facilities—from churches to community centers—underutilized, not to mention the school grounds that lie vacant after hours, are there franchising or ‘pop-up’ opportunities to be exploited? Spaces for dances, musical performances, art collaborations, comedy, theater, or debates? Opportunities for young people to ‘do’—to get together, play, and learn during their free time—rather than wasting hours watching what online strangers ‘do’.  Perhaps partnerships could be established between property owners and companies, local associations or parent groups to repurpose such spaces for youth initiatives?  An ‘IRL Pledge’ from corporations to better support the in-real-life lives of employees and their communities could combine financial sponsorship for local projects with employee volunteer commitments. This would drive the replication and expansion of successful programs. ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters’ is yet another example, providing not only strong role models for disadvantaged children, but also fostering valuable social mixing across our ever-widening societal divides.  But as we improve our real world solutions, we also need to innovate around technology and online solutions.   Leave a comment Opportunity 2: Healthier Tech Tools for the Young Successful solutions will require a combination of hardware, software, product design, branding, and business-building expertise. Critically, these experts must not have a vested interest in recruiting young people into the ‘attention economy’ — a challenge in itself when Big Tech offers such deep incentives (free lunches and bean-bag filled offices) to attract the best of the best.  The ‘opposition’ is powerful, with billions of dollars of attention economy revenue at risk from restricting social media access to the 95% of teens (40 million the U.S. alone) who currently have smartphones and spend an average of seven hours a day on social media platforms. The main stakeholders in the attention economy are some of the largest, most influential companies in the world, and they are investing millions in lobbying efforts to protect this revenue and their customer acquisition funnel. But the plucky innovators persist. A growing selection of mobile technologies exists at the other end of the spectrum from the supercomputer ‘phones’—such as simple, non-internet-enabled phones (e.g. Nokia/ HMD), smartwatch trackers, and app blockers—but there are still too few options between these two. Restricting first phones to simple text/call devices, which are unfortunately labeled as ‘dumb’, risks being perceived as punishment to any tween or teen looking enviously at the smartphones in their peers’ hands. While the U.S. has seen the most innovation along the spectrum (with the welcome entry of companies like Light Phone, Gabb, Unpluq and Bark), much more is needed. (I maintain a list of  recommendations here) Just as children develop rapidly with each year, we need a wider range of tech solutions that can adapt and evolve in healthy ways alongside them. These devices should gradually introduce useful “Swiss Army knife” functionalities—such as maps, payments, calendar-management, Wikipedia access and administrative support apps—while continuing to restrict open-access to the web, social-media, and fast-dopamine distractions for as long as possible, as young brains are maturing and wiring up. While many big tech companies remain locked into ‘a race to the bottom of the brainstem,’ (as Tristan Harris points out,  in Chapter 10 of The Anxious Generation), some good work is being done. For example, Tristan Harris’s work with ‘The Center for Humane Technology’, the ‘Age Appropriate Design Code’ enacted in the UK in 2020, and increasing attention to raising the age of internet adulthood to 14 or 16, and then enforcing it (as several governments in Australia are now discussing).  It’s all easier said than done. A phone with internet and data access—required for much of the ‘good’ Swiss-Army knife functionalities—is typically also a device with a browser, enabling access to infinite scroll applications, and there is little agreement as to where to draw the line. Maps? Yes. Payments? Yes. WhatsApp? Not sure. Even the addition of a front camera can be controversial in parenting discussion groups: disliked for the narcissistic ‘selfie’ culture it encourages, but valued for FaceTiming family members. Parental control functionalities would need to expand to include internet-wide age checks embedded within operating systems, applied across the entire web, not just to specific websites. (More modest device based verification methods are possible too.) Arguably, we should build ‘up’ from the simple text/call phones, allowing parents to opt into additional functionality carefully, rather than building ‘down’ from a smart device and requiring opt-outs from specific sites or services, which can feel like a game of whack-a-mole for even the most vigilant parents.  I know of many exciting initiatives under development and would love to connect with all such innovators to bring together the best options as they come to market.  Share Calling All Corporations, Entrepreneurs, Philanthropists and Investors While some of these ideas might fall more under philanthropy than ‘investment,’ their impact could be both swift and significant. Yes, some stakeholders might see dollar signs (or reputational advantage), but so what if their ideas and initiatives provide healthier alternatives or make our lives easier, less stressful, or more delightful? If entrepreneurs are prepared to put in the work and take the risks inherent in new ventures, or if corporations are willing to invest their CSR budgets and manpower in local initiatives, then they deserve to reap the rewards.  Let’s create new community-focused models for entrepreneurship and find new, thoughtful entrepreneurs for the young to look up to.  Role models who inspire the young to invent and create, and build a better future.  Come on, business community. Come on, innovators. Let’s get to work. Entrepreneurship is the starter motor of economic growth, and corporate scale is the engine that drives new behavioral habits and norms. Those new habits and norms can be pernicious, or they can be helpful. It’s up to us. Our failing communities—and our young people—need us.  Please reach out if you have scaleable ideas or solutions you’d like to share or for the potential to connect with like-minded problem-solvers and backers. I am hoping to  create a network of innovators and capital to further the fortunes of the most promising innovations. hello@irlpledge.com  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

I’ve been chewing on the word ‘quiet’ recently… a simple, unassuming word. Somewhat onomatopoeic and almost apologetic.  It’s like a full stop.  Even when uttering it, it slips gently from the sides of the mouth and silence follows (a sullen one if used as a directive).  It’s certainly not a sexy word, indeed, it seems used more as a negative these days.  Is it shutting down dissension? Perhaps describing something unambitious or boring?  And yet quiet is one of the most powerful things in the world.  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It’s in the quiet that magic happens.  Deep thoughts, processing, creativity and invention. ‘Solitude is a catalyst of innovation’ (Susan Cain).  Quiet people are the ones to watch: the listeners and processors. Because ‘quiet is turning down the volume knob on life (Khaled Hosseini)’.  Less is more.  Silence is golden. Ignorance is bliss.  There’s a reason these idioms are so pervasive.   And a friend with whom you can enjoy quiet and silence is typically one of the best.   Words can dramatically shift their emphasis and meaning across time and culture. Take ‘awful’, a word that used to mean ‘full of awe’ (by which definition, ‘awesome’ must have meant just a bit good) ‘decimate’, which meant reduce by only 1 in 10; ‘naughty’, which once just meant you had naught or nothing or ‘egregious’ which used to be a good thing-  eminent or distinguished.  But of course words morph… because language and words are powerful and critical to our understanding of the world.  Indeed, their changing meanings can alter our perception of the world.  Words are weaponised to disparage and shut down debate (typically any word ending in ‘ist’); and there is much recent commentary about how the rapidly growing overuse of medicalised therapy language is, in itself exacerbating mental health     New words are appearing every year. Some recent Mirriam-Webster additions include ‘padawan’, ‘rewild’, ‘GOAT’, ‘tabata’ and ‘doomscroll’ (although my spell-check hasn’t caught up)...  all fascinating insights into a world of rapid cultural change  (and god knows what the kids are doing at the moment with words like ‘rizz’ and ‘skibidi’ but i know enough not to use them myself).   There are also some wonderful words that exist in other cultures that encapsulate everyday feelings beautifully, but aren’t available to us in English. A few now sit in a rotating box in our bathroom thanks to a brilliant gift:  ‘Qurencia’ (Spanish): Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration.  In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge’ ‘L’Espirit de L’Escalier’ (French):  The witty or cutting retort that we should have delivered to a frenemy but that comes to mind only after we’ve left the gathering and are on our way down the stairs.  Captures our maddening inability to know how to answer humiliation in real time.   ‘Duende’ (Spanish):  A heightened state of emotion created by a moving piece of art.  ‘Dustsceawung’ (Old Engligh):  Contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things - the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree:  dust is always the ultimate destination.  Such contemplation may loosen the drip of our worldly desires.  ‘Huzun’ (Turkish):  The gloomy feeling that things are in decline and that the situation - often political in nature - will probably get gradually worse.  Despite the darkness, there’s a joy in having the word to hand, sparing us from a personal sense of persecution and reminding us that our misfortunes are largely collective in nature’   And it’s antidote:  ‘Yunen’ (Japanese):  Gives a name to a mood in which one feels that the universe as a whole possesses a mysterious, elusive, but real, beauty.  Moonlight, snow on distant mountains, birds flying very high in the evening sky, and watching the sun rise over the ocean all feed this sensibility.   So I put it to you all, how can we make ‘quiet’ sexy again?  How can we reclaim it as a positive?  As entrepreneurs we can sell to negatives or we can sell to positives.  And I suspect we’re all yearning for a little more quiet.  Less anger, distraction and endless information in this increasingly noisy world.  The devices in our pocket have removed even the quiet moments we might have experienced behind a locked toilet door or those in the moments before we drift off to sleep.  But that contented sigh as the door closes to the last guest at a noisy party and the house falls silent is potentially possible for our brains every time we disconnect.  And so, this Friday morning, please take a quiet moment to enjoy my favourite poem:  Leisure by William Henry Davies What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows.No time to see, when woods we pass,Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.No time to see, in broad daylight,Streams full of stars, like skies at night.No time to turn at Beauty's glance,And watch her feet, how they can dance.No time to wait till her mouth canEnrich that smile her eyes began.A poor life this if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Kirstie Allsopp - apparently the worst mother in Britain right now (for allowing her 15 year old to go interrailing), has come out swinging.  And good for her. I’m team-Allsopp.  As readers will know, I’ve long been convinced that giving kids independence as early as possible is the key to building resilience, responsibility and creativity.  Yes, there are risks - but, in my opinion (and increasing numbers of others’), many more to over-parenting and childhoods spent more online than off.   Having said that, it’s all been a little academic to my own parenting of 3 under 5s, 6. 7, 8… until now, with the eldest just short of 11.  Yes, we’ve embraced chores as early as we can, but living in a small, commuter rat-run village with few neighbourhood playmates, it’s been hard to practise the ‘free range parenting’ that Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy (his partner on the ‘Let Grow’ movement) advocate for.  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Recently, we’ve started letting the kids sleep out in a shed in the garden, to wander off on solo errands during trips to our small market town and take the puppy out by themselves but none of these allow for much mischief-making for three siblings whose boredom and/or irritation with each other I can hear from 100 yards away.  Outside these small tendrils of freedom from our family bounds, I’m struggling to find many other parents willing to loosen the reins to the big-wide-world with me.  Instead there are nervous texts in whatsapp checking whether a child will know anyone at an upcoming summer camp; fretful concerns over first sleepovers away from home; chaperones for hang-outs and packed-agenda playdates full of allergy-warnings and online waivers.   Holidays provide the perfect opportunity.  A change of scene and routine to create more colourful memories - sunny, wet, sandy, dirty, exhausting memories.  And the Netherlands, it turns out, is the perfect place to practise free-range parenting.  I write this (very briefly) from a holiday there with three other families and it’s the most perfect trip I could ever have imagined for one at our stage. We’re all camped separately within a huge site of static mobile-homes, safari tents and open-camping fields that wrap around a cheesy water park and a refreshingly relaxed theme park. It’s without a doubt, the last kind of holiday the well-travelled, young professional me would ever have thought I would enjoy.  Staffing is minimal and unobtrusive.  Gates and doors are left open.  Bikes piled up in corners, unlocked.  Queues are almost non-existent and there’s not a health and safety Nazi to be found (unlike in the UK). It’s all so refreshing and our eight cumulative kids, aged 6-12 are living their best free-range lives, disappearing for hours on end until their stomachs send them back to raid one of our various fridges.  There have been endless hours burying each other in sand, on table-tennis tables, noisy games of Uno, beach volleyball (to a blaring Top Gun soundtrack), an impromptu gymnastic display cheered on by strangers; bike races weaving through chilled-out pedestrians and a competition to see who can ride the biggest roller coaster the most times (my 9 year old victorious on 22). There’s also been a twisted ankle, some nasty scrapes and bruises, a lot of exposure to swear words and apparently the offer of a cigarette from a 14 year old loitering around the sandpit plus a few ramifications from slagging off Dutch football players (that we know about).  But when our paths cross (whilst the adults channel their inner-kid, running fully clothed through play fountains, beer in hand), the kids are filthy, dripping wet and hungry, but their shining eyes hold stories they’ll share excitedly, and secrets they won’t.   And… I’ve realised, I don’t want their secrets.  They’re their bonds of friendship. My new mantra… ‘What I can’t see, I can’t over-parent’.   No one has asked for a device since we got here.   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Ok, clickbait title aside, not *that* type of child labour…  (although outrage-fuelling journos do your worst, it’ll all help with readers, just as it did with my TedX views).  I recently came across the Harvard Grant Study findings, running since 1938, the longest longitudinal study in history.   Among such fun discoveries as the fact that ‘ageing liberals have more sex’ with ‘conservative men ceasing sexual activity around the age of 68’, the most interesting finding was that it identified two key things that enable adults to be happy and successful: 1) Love and 2) work ethic.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The main thing that correlated with self esteem was whether or not they worked as a child, with those who had some form of consistent responsibility demonstrating considerably higher self esteem than those who did not.  And yet - kids don’t seem to work much anymore. If at all under the age of 16 or 17. And as we know, most of their ‘spare time’ is spent on devices.   This Ted talk which references the research describes how there are two extremes within parenting:  underparenting (aka ‘neglect’) and over-parenting, but whereas the negative impact of the former is self-evident, much less attention is paid to the latter despite it being as potentially damaging.  Julie Lythcott-Haines talks about the ‘checklisted childhood’ as akin to dog-training with no time for free play or chores where everything has to be ‘enriching’ and ‘A’ grades are valued above all with the result that kids end up feeling brittle and burnt out.  She goes on:  But if you look at what we've done, if you have the courage to really look at it, you'll see that not only do our kids think their worth comes from grades and scores, but that when we live right up inside their precious developing minds all the time, like our very own version of the movie "Being John Malkovich," we send our children the message: "Hey kid, I don't think you can actually achieve any of this without me." And so with our overhelp, our over-protection and over-direction and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one's own actions lead to outcomes, not one's parents' actions on one's behalf, but when one's own actions lead to outcomes. So simply put, if our children are to develop self-efficacy, and they must, then they have to do a whole lot more of the thinking, planning, deciding, doing, hoping, coping, trial and error, dreaming and experiencing of life for themselves. The good news is that there are some easy fixes here…  CHORES..  Cooking, cleaning, tidying, gardening - many possible from even pre-school years..  Because, as Lythcott-Haims told Tech Insider: "By making them do chores -- taking out the garbage, doing their own laundry -- they realize I have to do the work of life in order to be part of life. It's not just about me and what I need in this moment." Whilst far from model parents, my husband and I are embracing this.  My 10 year old has started mowing the lawns, the 7 year old empties the dishwasher, bins are taken out and laundry baskets are starting to be decanted down to the machines.  OK, so the lawn looks like it’s got alopecia, none of our wine glasses now match and I’m washing far too many clean clothes that were easier to sling in a basket than fold into a cupboard…  but… it’s a start.  And it also helps us as two busy working parents to stay on top of the household.  My eldest has got to the age where he tunes into my stress levels and volunteers to do something…  I nearly wept the first time.   And then, as they get old enough, encourage them to get out and earn their own money.  As a teenager, I stopped getting pocket money at the age of 12 or 13 and to this day, I thank my parents for that (who could have afforded it but who both came from working-class backgrounds and knew the life-skills value of graft).   I babysat, had a (brief) paper-round, worked in cafes, a shoe shop, collected glasses, pulled pints and spent a good few years stocking shelves and then behind the till at my local petrol station.  Along side the life skills (how to pour a good pint or estimate foot size by looking), I came quickly to understand the value of money and how many hours each purchase equated to.  At the age of 17, I recall watching macaws flying towards the sunset over the Amazon River on a youth expedition I’d paid for purely by my pay-check and feeling more pride in myself than I’d ever thought imaginable.   I also worked alongside so many people that had little ambition (or qualifications) to do much more than those sort of jobs and discovered them to be some of the wittiest, most interesting people I’d met.  So, yes, another potential antidote to polarisation - as this opportunity to get to know those from so many different walks of life was truly a gift that I believe has made me much more empathetic and understanding of socio-economic difference… in attitudes, perceptions, politics, entitlement and more.   These days, we see so few teenagers in shops or cafes - indeed, the minimum wage hasn’t actually helped them as it’s priced many of them out - despite the fact that having a part time job in the teen years can be so vital to feelings of competency and to developing responsibility.   My heart always soars when I’m driving and see a couple of kids walking door to door with buckets and sponges to offer car-washes or if a hand-written flyer arrives asking if lawns need mowing.  (We’ve had two 15 years olds do ours in recent years whilst waiting for the eldest to grow some muscles).   Getting children volunteering is another option…  a charity shop perhaps where they can learn customer-service or merchandising;  scouts or kids clubs where they can feel the power than comes from being an older, responsible ‘leader’; old people’s homes; food banks etc.    Not only are we fuelling their self-esteem, but we’re promoting an alternative to the 5-6 hours daily spent on phones.  Win-win!   We need many more structures, incentives and organisations to help enable such opportunities.   Last word to Julie:   I've got two kids, Sawyer and Avery. They're teenagers. And once upon a time, I think I was treating my Sawyer and Avery like little bonsai trees that I was going to carefully clip and prune and shape into some perfect form of a human that might just be perfect enough to warrant them admission to one of the most highly selective colleges. But I've come to realize, after working with thousands of other people's kids and raising two kids of my own, my kids aren't bonsai trees. They're wildflowers of an unknown genus and species and it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love…  and the college, the major, the career, that's up to them. My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves. Gotta go now - to restack the dishwasher, go through the bins to separate the recycling from the rubbish and double-check where my husband’s current political leanings lie.   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

It’s been a bad week to be English after we came so near, yet so bloody far… again… in yet another major football tournament.   Whilst a fair-weather fan, I felt the depths of disappointment around me amidst a 1000-strong sea of red and white at a family festival as faces dropped and the tears flowed amongst the under 10s.  Football apparently wasn’t, and isn’t anytime soon ‘coming home’.   England supporters get a bad press and often rightly so when seen barrelling out of pubs, chucking lager and starting fights on the continent...  but when faded popstrel-turned-podcaster Lily Allen waded in on them this week, sharing the image below, she was derided as classist, snobby… and ignorant (flag-wise).  One particularly biting repost ‘I guess working class accents are more useful than working class people’... Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Because yes, pride in English identity does seem to have become a working-class thing or at least restricted to the ‘somewheres’.   And football now seems to be the only time the St George’s flag is allowed to display anything akin to national pride (unless you’re a black cab driver - the Palestine flag is apparently fine, the St George not so much - although the one-sided press coverage of Sadiq Khan’s ‘woke’ ban also shows the class divide here).   Whilst the UK (London especially) turns green for St Patrick’s Day, April 23rd is merely another date in the calendar, one that many English wouldn’t even know is St George’s.   Want to celebrate being English?  Just shush.   You must be ‘far right’ or will at least be accused of it… gammon, Brexiteer, nationalist etc.  Where exactly is Englishness amidst Britishness now that all the other Brits have dropped it in preference for their Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities?  (Even the Cornish seem more inclined to their local identity than Englishness these days).  As a result, the two are now frequently conflated, with the English the only nation to wave the Union Jack - and pretty much only during royal occasions, Wimbledon or at the Last Night of the Proms.  It often gives me pause for thought as my husband is Scottish and proud - kilted and sporranned-up for every formal occassion - and now I have ‘dual-identity’ children.  This makes the occasional football or rugby match difficult, but really little else besides.  And for all the Scottish-English rivalry (which let’s be honest, only goes in one direction),  I love that my children have Scottish heritage.  Indeed, their Scottish family has much more interesting ancestry than my own, descended from Stevenson lighthouse builders and more recently, a successful female author.    All ‘minority’ nationalities are allowed to be celebrated in our multicultural age of inclusivity, but we now lack any coherent umbrella under which we can all identify.  In the US, immigrants (I believe!) are still required to pledge their allegiance to a flag that flies across the nation, with the national anthem played at every major event, but in the UK, we do neither and make little attempt to unify the various nationalities now on this island.   Harking on about Britain’s illustrious past is now frowned upon. Too much controversy with regards to power-plays and empire.  Modern Britain is no longer one evoked by Hovis adverts, ‘Last of the Summer Wine’, or John Major’s 1993 speech, where he said:   Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials. But is it, only 30 years on?  It is, at least in the main, still a ‘green and pleasant land’ as of the famous ‘Jerusalem’ lyrics, but perhaps only for as long as we can protect the green belt or keep the solar farms at bay.   The outdoors lover in me adores the very ‘English’ Lake District, with my coast-to-coast walk across the North of England one of my most precious memories. The history student in me loves the beauty and traditions our history has bequeathed us:  gorgeous cathedrals and stately homes - built over generations, not just lifetimes;  well-planned towns,  poetry, literature, philosophy and art.  And for some reason this tiny island (and the English especially) has gifted the world some of the best music of the last century.   And the love of all-things-British survives abroad, as the queues of tourists queueing for a photo outside the red phone box in the shadow of Westminster tower attest. A second cousin is the son of a GI-bride who adores British history and has written a history of York Minster over successive visits;  a good friend in Canada sends me frequent forwards about British humour, conventions and history;  all our overseas guests marvel at our history and generations-long traditions and would delight in my father regaling them with Shakespeare’s Henry V ‘St Cripsin’s day’ speech at parties. Which begs the question, what, if any of this, is worth us feeling pride in….?   Even the monarchy itself is faced with the existential threat of a rising tide of republicanism and the National Trust seems hell bent on apologising for who we were throughout history. Last week, I saw an arresting tweet by Gad Saad, a Canadian Professor of Behavioural Science which stopped me in my tracks.    World history is defined by the following simple rule.  There are two groups on either side of a river.  Each covets various resources from the other group.  The only thing that stops a perpetual conflict between the two groups is the realization by each group that the other will respond in equal measure (or worse) if attacked.   Now imagine that the West has decided to throw away this defining dynamic that shapes this fundamental historical reality.  Defending what is ours is rooted in our genes; it is a central feature of our human nature.  But the West has said that we are so progressive, so empathetic, so enlightened that we are not bound by pedestrian biology.  Hence, we will not defend our culture; we will not defend our heritage; we will not defend our religion; we will not defend our women; we will not defend our children; we will not defend our values.  According to our Western leaders, only barbarians worry about such defensive concerns.  We are open, tolerant, kind, compassionate, welcoming.  No amount of evidence can convince us that other groups might do us harm.  And hence, we brainwash our children who become our politicians; we rejoice in the rape of our societies because this proves that we are kind….  But how can you change anything when your society is hellbent on committing orgiastic suicide? Ouch. Whilst somewhat apocryphal, I tend to agree that our inability to foster any sense of shared identity amongst the disparate groups that make up modern Britain is a serious error and yet another reason why modern Britain is so polarised.  It strikes me that for a society to survive, let alone thrive, the people must feel proud of themselves, their culture, their values, their ideas, their history, and that they must pass that pride on to their kids. Yes, a reconciliation of the worst aspects of our past is hugely important - with many lessons to be learnt - but we seem hell bent on throwing out all the good with the bad and blaming ourselves for the mistakes of our ancestors. I’ll leave the last, more eloquent diagnosis of what might be going on to Thomas Sowell:  “Despite a tendency in some intellectual circles to see the nation as just a subordinate part of the world at large — some acting, or even describing themselves, as citizens of the world — patriotism is, in one sense, little more than a recognition of the basic fact that one’s own material well-being, personal freedom, and sheer physical survival depend on the particular institutions, traditions and policies of the particular nation in which one lives. There is no comparable world government and, without the concrete institutions of government, there is nothing to be a citizen of or to provide enforceable rights, however lofty or poetic it may sound to be a citizen of the world.”  God save the King!  Ing-er-Land! Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

It’s been a while since I’ve shared ‘my story’ (thank God). I used to do this a lot in my ‘Female Entrepreneur’ days to rooms of early-career women or invincible first-time founders. Years before ‘35 things I learnt by 35’ became popular clickbait, I had curated an entertaining monologue of anecdotes and life-lessons from across my career - something for everyone… (so thought my flattered ego).  Since retreating from London with a young family, I’ve gotten better at saying no, plus have had fewer reasons for self-promotion, but suddenly I find myself committed to an encore - the first in 5 years - and frankly, I feel a bit embarrassed. So I’m killing birds this week by using this post to try and think out loud on how to bring my story up to date and maybe draw out some different conclusions with more years under my belt.   The previous version, delivered to graduating girls at my old school in 2018 can be found here and as I commented in the blog-blurb at the time:  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. My inner philosopher came out …slightly patronising and preachy in tone I realise on re-reading — but as an exercise, it was an invaluable one. I’d love to write one of these every 5 or 10 years and see how my rules and advice would change… as even re-reading this 2 years later, some of these ideas have moved on.   Hello, 6 years later.   And yet I hesitate. Because increasingly I find the presumptuousness of the whole ‘what I want to tell you about life’ trend gives me the ‘ick’ - at least from anyone under the age of 65 or who hasn’t been seriously confronted by their own mortality.  The older I get, the more aware I become of how much I have to learn, let alone impart…   Life lessons assault us.  As previously discussed I feel an almost physical aversion to the modern cult of ‘personal brand’ and the narcissism I fear it encourages but it now seems to be a prerequisite for authors, musicians or creators to bring a ‘following’ with them should they want to go ‘pro’.  Even start-ups now only seem newsworthy if their founders’ stories are newsworthy. Above all, it has struck me that my lessons - borne from my interests, my background, priorities, values, family-life and financial circumstances - are only really relevant to… er… me.   The value in stepping back to consider these lessons is always greater for the story-teller than the listener.   What is it they say?  That we should not compare ourselves with others, but with who we were yesterday.  We should be our own competition.  Strong sentiment but surely we can’t help but look for mirrors in the faces around us- whether close at hand, or in the spotlight.  Chat shows, biographies, Desert Island Discs and podcasting wouldn’t exist and be so popular if this wasn’t the case. Stories are the most powerful way of influencing people; shared fears, hopes and experiences are the glue that connects us.   We seek inspiration for ideas we can borrow and combine into mash-up role models:  prioritise like her, write like him, parent like her, financially-plan like him, command speaking fees like her etc.   The problem is that huge success in one field for any one of these people has usually come at the cost of something… breadth of knowledge, family, friends, mental health, balance...  How many of us are actually willing to make those sacrifices?  And yet how many of us still end up feeling like failures because we don’t?  Scott Galloway (NYU professor, author and entrepreneur) spoke brilliantly on this at a recent podcast recording I went to  - admirable (if a little unlikeable) for his single-minded focus on wealth and status-creation, which he was honest enough to admit came at the expense of knowing his children when they were young. He asked everyone in the room the question: what is ‘rich’?  It brought to mind a social media reel I’ve now seen 5x of ‘influencers’ on the street asking passersby: ‘If I gave you a million pounds now, but told you you wouldn’t wake up tomorrow, would you take it’?  No?  Well that’s what tomorrow’s worth then’.   I for one, have always chosen balance and a ‘bit of everything’ over obsessive success in any one field.  It’s why I’ll never be super-rich, but it’s also why I have so many awesome, wacky stories - from zoom calls with Royalty and starring in a documentary in Sri Lanka to going on a 48hr trade mission to China with a Prime Minister on the ministerial plane and (although I credit good fortune equally for this), I believe it’s partly why I have deep love and friendship in my life.  I find the time to invest in it. Last time around my 4 key life lessons were tailored to a room of 18 year old girls and consisted of: 1) why they should reject the modern feminist victimhood narrative 2) the importance of building and nurturing networks 3) staying curious and keeping out of echo-chambers 4) recognising and embracing the fact that we will not always be happy and don’t need to optimise for such (alongside inappropriate school girl memories).  I stand by pretty much all of those 6 years on - although take a slightly more nuanced view on some of 1.  On re-reading, I also realised that I forgot the importance of 2 as I’ve let my network slide over the recent young-children years.  Time and prioritisation simply hasn’t allowed for it making it so much harder now to reconnect or pull in favours when I haven’t had the energy to throw out any of my own karma for a while.  But perhaps my greatest learning of the last 5 years is the fact that I haven’t needed high profile success, status, travel or extreme experiences to have a fulfilled life.  Sharing the experience of parenting with my husband and watching our babies turn into fascinating, wildly different little people has been the biggest adventure, bringing with it so many new learnings: seeing the oddness of the world through their new eyes; rediscovering the joy of music, play or nature; remembering the importance of silliness; investing in the daily minutiae of our local community; building a ‘home’ and sanctuary for those I love...   plus how to survive (if not thrive) on limited sleep and with a constant bounce-head.   My suspicion is that these revelations in so many women at the same life stage are much more responsible for the gender pay gap than ever given credit for.  By no means the sole factor, but a significant one given how many higher-earning women I’ve observed de-prioritise their careers during these years.  Parents of young children learn how to say ‘no’.  We are constantly letting people down and bailing on plans last minute.  But yes, I could probably have worked better during the last few years at pareto-principling the 20% of my network engaged in the problems I now care most about.  I’m currently working hard to build it back up and in fact, this blog has been instrumental in reopening many of those old doors.  And maybe, without really realising it, Antidoters has provided a distillation of life-lessons over the last few years… a way to consolidate and make-sense of what I’m learning and thinking as-I-go. (Just with slightly less of ‘me’ and more my personal Antidoter inspirations as its focus).  Undeniably though, the value is primarily mine, so that Jess tomorrow competes better with Jess yesterday.  And if anyone else enjoys the weekly provocation-vomit, that’s just pretty cool.    I’ll adapt Dan Priestley’s book quote:  The blog (or speech) that most changes your life is the one you write.  (Book to follow).    And with that said..  apologies, I’m going biweekly for a while to get my head down on a few other products, including a book.  Back in July. X  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Been pondering age this week as I watched the stoic, moving interviews with D-day heroes and then observed Joe Biden, staggering, confused and slurring in recent public appearances.  Contrasting these with the coverage of young, ‘passionate’ activists disrupting campuses or destroying works of art or with all the young faces we see around us daily- eyes down in digital worlds and the generational differences today can seem starker than ever.  Yet another line of polarisation. With the exception of veterans and maybe presidents, respect for our elders now seems deeply unfashionable and it’s no wonder given how few of us mix outside of our age-demographics.  We inhabit entirely different cultural siloes: we listen to different music; get our news from different sources; binge different dramas; use different colloquialisms and admire celebs or ‘influencers’ that other generations will never encounter.  Many of these have always been the case but never before as mutually exclusive by generation.  Most of soceity would been vaguely aware of most major national/global celebrities when I was growing up, but ask my mother who Mr Beast is or a teenager who Jeremy Clarkson is and they’ll both just blink blankly.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. In the absence of actually knowing (m)any, it’s little surprise older people are frequently derided as out-of-touch: blamed for Brexit and Trump, high house prices, and much of our economic inequality (until that is, they age beyond being ‘dangerous’ and inexplicably, patronisingly become ‘cute’).  Simultaneously young people are branded lazy, angry, materialist or ‘snowflakes’ in outlook by many elders.  As ever, antidoters…  neither are fair or accurate generalisations.  Of course, the political polarisation of young and old has been well documented for generations.  Why is it people typically move right as they age and what does this mean for politics in a rapidly ageing world?   Is it, as often assumed, that people tend to gravitate towards more self-preservationist politics… for their assets, customs or the social conventions that they fear are in terminal decline in a world evolving so rapidly without them?  Or might it be that their more extensive life-experience provides them with more data points, experience and realistic insight into human nature?  Are conventions and traditions experiments proven to work over generations, discarded at our peril or is tradition “one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.” (Warren Ellis) or ‘the democracy of the dead’ (Chesterton)?   In a world that seems to prioritise ‘lived experience’ over data and evidence, it’s curious that the biggest proponents of this world view - the young -  can be so dismissive of the opinions fostered over decades-long lived experience.   It is assumed that the passionate activism of youth reflects greater concern and empathy for the world.  Yet In his defence of ‘respecting our elders’ at an Oxford Union debate, quotes a myriad of research that consistently demonstrates that older adults are generally more ethical, more cooperative, and more trusting than younger adults with the latter displaying “a greater propensity for deceit, manipulation, and selfishness compared with older people”.  On the question of ‘wisdom’  he comments:   The very fact that we can even ponder this question suggests that we live in a society of relative comfort—a luxury secured through the efforts and decisions of previous generations… Not all old people are wise, but almost all wise people are old….  True wisdom is not just about making good choices; it also encompasses the ability to retain sound judgement across a diverse array of situations, especially unfamiliar and challenging ones. … Only by respecting elders enough to listen to how they made their decisions, including concentrating on where they might have gone wrong, can we hope to do any better than them.  And yet now we fetishise youth. Case in point: Greta Thunberg, whose hero-worshipping never sat well with me and frankly, struck me as exploitative.   How, at the time, did we make a 14 year old without a geography GCSE a figurehead for one of the most deeply scientific issues of our time, advocating simplistic policies that would have seismic economic ramifications for the poorest populations in the world?  Quite how qualified she is on the complexities and history of the Middle East conflict at the ripe old age of 21 is another question.  ‘How dare you?’ Quite.   Both Old-Agesim and ‘Teenism’ are rife, but rarely get limelight from the other ‘isms’ beyond the odd conversation around whether carpark app-only payments or ‘digital natives only’ job adverts are discriminatory.  Groups of ‘youths’ are watched suspiciously, banned from shopping in groups and frowned upon for high jinks in public places whilst also told they also spend too much time on their devices.  Where are they supposed to go and what else are they supposed to do but ‘hang about’ in a country that’s seen youth funding cut by £1.1Bn over the last decade?  There’s not even a high street to speak of anymore beyond overpriced coffee shops, vape shops and charity shops (huzzah!).  Incidentally - this recent McDonalds advert capitalises on this brilliantly.  Fantastic advertising. Many over 40s accuse the young of being lazy.  #Quietquitting is a hashtag trending amongst GenZ (& below) to promote opting-out of hard work because, as , an expert on generational difference explains:  “Gen Z have grown up in a time when work doesn’t pay…. Average real wages are now no higher than they were in 2005. They may have increased in the last two years, but as we know, so has the cost of everything else - despite the fact that early-career salaries now (whilst not bad in absolute terms), buy a lot less after rent and living expenses”.  With the average house price now 8x the average salary, getting on the property ladder is near impossible for even higher-earning 20 or 30-somethings without a bank of Mum and Dad.  It’s no wonder they’re a bit bitter, not drinking the kool aid or signing up to emulate their parents’ stressful lives.  Forty-something is an interesting vantage age from which to observe both… and to give both a bit more of the benefit of the doubt.  The kids are alright.  Many are friggin awesome. They’ll undoubtedly do much better with less smartphone time (interesting updates on my explorations to come)...  But…  so are the oldies.  They’re just growing/ grew up in such different, unrecognisable-to-each-other worlds.  As with all questions of polarisation, the solution needs to involve more and deeper societal mixing.  More cross-generational conversations; more IRL community initiatives.  To be honest, this was my hope for the recent Tory ‘national service’ manifesto initiative but its poor (rushed?) announcement and positioning saw the community-value of the ‘civic’ applications sidelined by the furore over the military service elements.  The potential for the former to not only build skills but foster community-harmony by bringing people into regular contact with those of different socio-economic backgrounds, ideologies and age could (have?) provide(d) a powerful antidote to polarisation.   Personally, in the modern battle between old and young, I’m genuinely not sure which side i’m falling on right now. I’m at pivot point.  Or maybe not, Grandma. (the Greta comment might have edged it).  You tell me.  Boring bit where I ask you to please share this, forward it, link to it on (bl0ody) social media - as whilst I get so many lovely text messages from people who enjoy different editions (& it’s led to some fascinating intros) - it would always be nice if a few more people were reading it… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

This week I saw someone edit a Linkedin post because of feedback that the person they were quoting was a ‘troll’ (irrespective of the evidence within the quote);  I observed three people sharing a Piers Morgan soundbite with the careful caveat ‘it’s rare I agree with this guy but…’ ;  I saw someone else I respect get chastised for liking an X/ tweet from a persona-non-grata; … and I had a long, (depressing) conversation with my 10 year old about why it’s wrong for children to chant ‘Furry!’ as a slur at another on the playground (!?).   Whilst I didn’t immediately connect the last to the others, it occurred to me that many adults now also need this reminder.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Please share and subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. When did ad-hominem and who’s saying something become more important than what is being said?  It’s particularly tiresome in an election period.  Discredit the player (or throw a milkshake at them) and the substance goes unevaluated.   Undeniably, it’s effective as the more x-ist, nutty or ‘extreme’ someone is branded, the fewer platforms they get. The problem is that it typically forces them further to their extreme, often taking many fans with them, so counteracting the efforts of the ad hominem detractor. A test for you.  What’s your gut response to the following quotes?  “Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place” “Words build bridges to unexplored regions”  "It takes less courage to criticise the decisions of others than to stand by your own." “The really strong have no need to prove it to the phonies’  ‘I believe in one thing only, the power of human will’  ‘Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep’  ‘The great thing about letting people be true to themselves is they often do very good things indeed. What do you think about them if I tell you that they’re from Goebbels, Hitler, Attila the Hun, Charles Manson, Stalin, Mussolini and Katie Hopkins respectively?    And yes, the image above is another.  It’s from a 10-year old Pinterest page that strung inspirational Hitler quotes over Taylor Swift images and received 10s of 1000s of Swifty likes and shares (and you can still play this who-said-it-game here).   ‘Misinformation’, or an excellent mind-game to challenge our instincts? Sadly it proved far too dangerous for the young inventor to continue. She was hounded into closing her accounts (more).  Wild times. Even I now have to be careful about who I ‘follow’ these days with my equalities role…  which seems madness.  Surely understanding better those with whom you might disagree is a critical part of forming a fuller world view? When did we get so comfortable playing the player, not the ball despite the oft-used Solzhenitsyn quote that reminds us that ‘the line separating good and evil passes…  right through every human heart”.  It’s this type of thinking that leads to package beliefs:  the knowledge that if someone thinks ‘this’, they’re also highly likely to believe ‘that’, ‘that’ and ‘that’.  It’s profoundly unhealthy and lazy tribalism, albeit reassuring.   It’s good for us to remember in the current climate that party politics doesn’t have to mean signing up to everything in one side’s manifesto, but simply making our own evaluations as to which package is, on balance, better and likely to do more good than harm.  We’re allowed to (and should)  prioritise different things within the packages or interpret our hopes or fears about the long term ramifications according to our experiences, world-view or knowledge (with the rapidly declining field of ‘History’, often providing the most unfashionable steer).    One way of reframing this that I have enjoyed is ’s concept of ‘star manning’, which I’ve mentioned previously, but is worth a reminder during angry political campaigning months. It’s easy to straw-man or caricature an opponent’s idea, with vilifying the view-holder the laziest and most dishonest manifestation.  It’s much more challenging to steel-man (engage with the strongest interpretation), let alone ‘star-man’ -  yet it’s an exercise that would help us all.   To star-man is to not only engage with the most charitable version of your opponent’s argument, but also with the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements Whilst star-manning Hitler might feel like a stretch, he goes on:  The thought of extending charity to those looking to erase us seems masochistic, even suicidal. But this perception of existential threat is an illusion. Yes, there are monsters in the world, but they’re so few in number that you’re unlikely to actually encounter one. More often, you will run into ordinary people under the influence of bad ideas—ideas that lead them to think and act in misguided, even monstrous ways. And of course, they’ll be thinking the same thing about you. Our error is in assuming these people are lost to us. The truth is we all have more in common than we think and we can find common ground with pretty much anyone the more we track up their arguments and seek to more fully understand why they feel the way they do.  It’s normally from a good place and even just acknowledging that diffuses the difference.  Eduardo refers to a black musician who collected the robes of KKK men he de-radicalised by befriending them - a huge lesson in humility to anyone tempted to demonise others.   Closer to home, I’ve been fortunate to rub shoulders with enough politicians to know that in the main, there’s huge respect and indeed a lot of close-friendships between many on opposite sides of the house, something we’d never know from our media diet.   After all, they have much more in common with each other than the electorate given the bizarre lives they lead.   I’ll leave the final word and credit on this to Angel Eduardo, (no sense in re-writing an already brilliant post during yet another bounce-head week), the antidoter of the week:  If you’re still unconvinced—if you’re reflexively rejecting this notion outright, you have to ask yourself: Why? Why wouldn’t you want to acknowledge your interlocutor’s humanity, your mutual quest for safety, security, and satisfaction?... Of course, just because you’re acting honorably doesn’t mean anyone else will, but someone has to be first on the dance floor. Besides, you never know who might respond in kind until you try. If we’re to make any progress, we need to actively foster a culture of good faith and honesty, based on the knowledge that we all have the same fundamental desires. It begins with each of us making the choice to see the other as human—flawed, perhaps ignorant, maybe even dangerous, but also human—no matter what they think. It continues by encouraging these exchanges in others, and praising star-manning when we see it. Many may still think this idea naïve, but they’re wrong. Idealism isn’t naïveté—it’s ambition. It’s a refusal to concede the future to the present. It’s knowing how you want the world to be, orienting your behavior in that direction, and trying to inspire others to do the same. It’s also an acknowledgment that our fates are intertwined. Whether we ultimately agree or not, whether we try to communicate or not, whether we choose to be compassionate or not, we have to accept that we’re all on the same boat. We will sink or sail together, and we ignore this fact at our own peril. Perhaps try an experiment this week and post or defend something good from someone you think (are are supposed to think) is abhorrent.  And maybe pause to ask yourself how abhorrent their intentions really are.   This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Hands up if you’d be up for a quick drug to fix the biggest problem in your life. 🙋Unless you live under a rock, you will have heard that this is now available for one of the most sizeable (sorry) facing Western populations: Fat.  And the ramifications could stretch much, much further than waistlines. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Please subscribe for free to receive new posts and share to support my work. Obesity has become the biggest cause of preventable death in the West.  In the US it contributes to the premature death of more people each year than all American deaths in battle ever (source: Johann Hari).  In the UK, over 60% of the population are now overweight - a contributing factor in more than 50% of cancers and with preventable diabetes now costing the tax-payer 10% of the NHS budget.   In

Entrepreneurs are optimists by nature and masters at turning problems into solutions.  Many of the best harness counter-intuitive thinking that plays on human emotion rather than rationality - as best articulated by the Prince of behavioural interpretation (who may or may not appreciate being verbed).  So how can we harness his antidoter ways of thinking to solve the teen smartphone problem? (or get him in a room with Jonathan Haidt for a brainstorm - I’ll make the tea and take notes). My career has been shaped by seeking to fuel the innovations of optimists.  It’s why I’ve invested the last three years at Sweatcoin, an exciting business which took the huge problem of our increasingly sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles and turned it into an opportunity.  They believed (and have since proven with over 150M global users) that incentives and rewards can represent a paradigm shift in how we think about movement:  the difference between choosing to stand on a moving-up escalator or walk up it; of taking the stairs rather than the lift or proactively getting off a bus a stop early.  Each additional step = points which can be spent on a range of goods and services.  It provides daily nudges that have the power to impact life-long behavioural change.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Ultimately, the Sweatcoin vision is to create a ‘movement economy’, one to rival the attention economy - but unlike the latter, offering a win-win for all, connecting brands and users in a marketplace of reward and benefit, with the potential to save the taxpayer billions on preventable diseases. (Type2 Diabetes costs the NHS £14Bn a year, >10% of its total budget and more than the police, fire and judicial system put together(!!).  With news this week that diagnoses are up 39% for Under-40s in just 6 years, move more, people. Move more).     Being a small part of Sweatcoin’s success leads me to wonder how such incentive-led solutions might be harnessed for other problems I care about.  Working closely with such do-ers also explains my frustration with the opportunity cost of so much navel-gazing social discourse and the negativity of tear-down strategies.  Too many super-smart people get stuck in awareness-raising-mode (often misdirected by biased data) or rage, seeking to dismantle rather than build to take bites out of problems.  Rory Sutherland is the master of positive alchemy and counter-intuitive thinking. He wrote the book on it.  He is one of the most erudite, amusing and potentially irritating podcast guests, with his hosts struggling to get a word in edgeways as he goes off on tangents of whimsical anecdotes to highlight insights into behavioural science E.g. here, here, here  (lesson to podcasters: just let him rip). He is particularly strong on how simple reframing can solve problems. E.g. repositioning the annoying bus that arrives to unload plane passengers as a VIP chauffeur direct to immigration to avoid the queues; how a fraction of the money earmarked for HS2 rail could have created greater opportunity if it went towards upgrading existing trains with greater comfort and reliable wifi for relaxation and deep work opportunities; or how the Uber live-map functionality is ‘a psychological moonshot’- not reducing waiting time but making it 90% less frustrating.    As an Ad-man, he frequently references the many brands that have successfully played with perceptions, turning weaknesses into strengths - think Guinness’s ‘good things come to those who wait’, Stella’s ‘reassuringly expensive’ or Marmite’s ‘love it or hate it’.     Some favourite quotes:  “Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.” “The skill you need to win an argument is not the same as the skill you need to solve problems, yet our education system conflates the two (and we only reward the former in politicians)”.   “A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.” “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” “It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.” “what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal” ‘A rich man is any man that earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband’ (*possibly not his but sounds like it should be) On listening to Rory, I find my brain fires in different directions.  Of course, one strategy is simply to challenge preconceptions and problem-diagnosis with nuance (the antidoter blog strategy), but how can we also channel energies and his type of thinking into incentivising, positive solutions?   Take kids and smartphones. Now the evidence is in for its many negative impacts, my fear is that we are at risk of creating a punishing vacuum for the young with few alternatives in our safety-first culture.  Where are the incentives?  There are fewer youth clubs or places to hang out; fewer parents willing to give their children the independence in real life (IRL) that they enjoyed (despite evidence it’s much safer than the online world); poor public transport, plus - most fundamentally -  a huge chasm to cross before we can reach a tipping point of those without the internet in their pockets being numerous enough to occupy each other.    We urgently need entrepreneurs to rush into this challenge.  How do we reframe screen abstinence as IRL opportunities and make it cool?  What incentives could we provide as an alternative to scare-mongering, nagging and abstinence? Can we connect IRL brands (who will be losing business to the 7 daily hours now spent on devices) with teenagers in a loop of reward akin to Sweatcoin’s model?  How can we encourage investment in new offline business models when incentives are now so skewed towards the 100x returns that only tech-scalability can offer?    One aspiring business I’ve discovered (through this blog and its associated Linkedin posts) and hugely appreciate is ‘The Den’ who are building a nationwide network of social clubs, designed by teenagers for teenagers.  Take

This week I’ve been overwhelmed by ‘bounce head’.  My term for something every working mother will understand:  the feeling of holding more to-dos and conflicting emotions in your head at any one time than it’s possible to get down on a list; that sees your focus bounce back and forth constantly, within seconds from the most mundane lifemin to the most important family, friend or working-life priorities. Sometimes known as ‘the mother’s mental load’, here’s mine this week in no particular order but as they bounce around my bounce head: Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A CEO Linkedin strategy; de-flea-ing an unhappy cat; 2 x two-page-long packing lists for school residential trips; replacing a rotten window frame that has just fallen off its hinges; inviting 20 Health-tech leaders to an event in Amsterdam; messaging eight mums re. dates for a birthday sleepover;  two more chapters of the book draft I’ve promised a publisher by end of June; booking a summer holiday; (damn it, and camp bookings between those dates); a 5-page business award nomination; puppy training for a dog that won’t stop rolling in sh1t; getting the final slides in for a main-stage talk at London Tech Week; replacing cricket whites that now flap around the calves; refunding unhappy guests in a tired, requiring-update Airbnb; 378 pages of board-paper reading (and more importantly, thinking);  four waiting loads of washing; trying to find a pitch template I saved 2 years ago to share with an impressive social entrepreneur I’ve just met;  buying four birthday party gifts;  follow ups to four exciting meetings;  a marketing strategy for the local town market; walk the new puppy; and all this around the existential emotional worries: an act of utter carelessness that has hurt a much-loved friend; that one child has received next to no 1:1 attention of late or that another’s academic confidence is in decline -  oh, and a blog to write.  And it’s only Tuesday.  Aaaaaaaand breathe.  Bounce head is not actually about the sheer volume of the to-do-list but the head f*ck that comes from moving from one highly emotive or important issue to five other mundane, urgent actions in the space of a single minute.  And I bet many mums could meet or raise me on that list in any given week.  Our heads are a constant melee of emotion, guilt, frustration, irritation, deadline pressure and exhaustion - we’re Neo in the Matrix, dodging bullets that just won’t stop coming. We’re left with an inability to prioritise the deep work that is really important until we’ve cleared some of the mental load of the urgent - with much of the latter triggered by immediacy - a call from the school nurse; a customer complaint or the sports kit left in the footwell of the car that is required prior to the away-coach leaving at 1pm.  This is the reason that I lose patience with the ‘productivity’ industry (primarily promoted by childless men).  Yes, it would be lovely to eat the frog, time-box, read more self-help books or just do the three important things that day.  To choose not to worry about the washing piles or the kitchen table covered in a detritus of scrunched-up uniform in bags, dropped flower heads and sticky stains - but for most mums, the urgent can’t wait for the important.  The sh1t hits the fan when it choses and it’s impossible to push the little irritations into the back brain to enable deep focus elsewhere.  Decks must be cleared.  And much of this is female.  It plays out along gendered-lines in so many family homes around me and all over the internet with men stepping over the optimistic pile on the bottom step or able to focus perfectly well on their laptop amidst the scrunched up uniform and on top of the sticky stain.  (Here’s Sally from Home & Away crying as she has this phenomenon explained to her by a psychologist, quoting how much more biologically wired women are to this, than men).   Those women blessed with partners, could, and should delegate more. We know this… and here’s one doing so, refusing to do her grown ass man’s laundry or book his hospital appointments, but I personally think she misses the point.  We’re not trying to be martyrs.  Many of us need to have a finger on the pulse of all the minutiae of detail within the walls of the family sanctuary.  Indeed, we are the pulse of the family home and calendar.  Many of us want to be.  Feminism has risen all our expectations and flung open doors of opportunity - especially for the professional class - but it hasn’t fundamentally rewired us.  Is this just the price we pay for wanting it all, or am I just personally an idiot for taking on too much, being unable to delegate and martyring myself in the process?  All I can think is that maybe it’s no wonder increasing numbers of GenZ women don’t want to follow in their professional mother’s footsteps…  You’ll miss these days, they say.  Those were the happiest years of my life, my mother tells me.  And I know I will.  There’s so much love amidst the chaos.   And there are solutions beyond just taking less on and learning the power of no. Family management apps, shared calendars or software project management tools; even virtual lifemin concierge services like BlckBx (which I use and am a big fan of - currently on the task of ranking local secondary schools for me -  but which sadly can’t measure a rotten window, read a physical gas meter, or take the sports kit back in).  As a company perk, it’s positioned at fast-paced companies who employ busy professionals, run by entrepreneurial women who know these challenges well.  (Indeed, its annual cost paid for itself in just one insurance policy renegotiation this year).   Workplaces generally are waking up to this challenge, allowing women greater flexibility or part-time hours and (albeit with less speed and uptake) rolling out similar incentives for men to try and address the imbalance.  These work and do help the many women who use them, but we should be under no illusion that their disproportionate take-up does have an impact on the pace of female career-progression - and ultimately the gender-pay gap.  What proportion of this gap might be influenced by choice is a question I’ve wrestled with for many years, especially when it’s a choice made by some of the highest female earners in society who are often also the loudest critics of ‘the patriarchy’.  For my part, of course there’s also the therapy that is this blog-theme and the time required to write it (in a week I can’t afford to). It forces me to stop, breathe and consider the antidotes to this conundrum - and there are many to remind myself of that slow my pounding heart.   The new puppy and the requirement to get her out on walks - come rain or shine - has provided another.  Walks that remind me to feel grateful that I have people in my life who I love so much to want to ‘win’ this admin for;  work that I’m motivated and energised by and want to do well; opportunities that i’ve created that excite me; and most of all a husband who (post cowering at my initial outburst) understands that, to use Brene Brown’s analogy on the ‘crock of s**t’ that is the concept of a 50:50 marriage, when I’m at 20, he needs to find 80: We have to sit down at a table anytime we have less than 100 combined and figure out a plan of kindness to each other. The thing is… marriage is not something that’s 50:50.  A partnership works when you can carry their 20 or they can carry your 20 and that when you both have 20, you have a plan where you don’t hurt each other.  As ever, I’m in awe of anyone that has to manage this solo.  Heroes.  This week, maybe have a think about anyone you know who’s either struggling to be the 100 by themselves, or who’s on a 10 or 20.  Can you give them 10 of yours?  Or maybe just be a walking companion?  It’s not just partners that make a difference, but good friends.  Now the pressures of the start of this week have abated and I’m back to 50, I’ve resolved to do better.   Further reading * Update: Great minds: Here’s Mary Harrington today much more eloquently tackling the same subject matter and identifying the difference between the ‘CEO of Earning’ and the ‘CEO of the home’ and the division of labour that fluxes according to each individual’s circumstances. Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

Activism is in-vogue.  So much so, ‘Activist’ appears to now be a job-title according to LinkedIn and it’s perhaps no surprise given that rage has replaced sex as the hottest marketing tool (Scott Galloway is great on this here). Maybe it never left, and arguably, we have much progress to thank it for.  The right to protest is a fundamental democratic right that most of us in the West believe in wholeheartedly.  It can be hugely inspiring to observe and no doubt participate in crowds thronging together in a single, shared world-changing purpose.  Feeling like we’re ‘doing something’ and ‘making a difference’.   As Yascha Mounk writes in the Spectator this week of the current protest :  Its ostensible cause is hardly ignoble. It’s possible to be appalled both by the 7 October attacks and the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. It would be inhumane not to share the widespread horror at what is happening in Gaza. And anti-war rallies have, of course, long been part of the student experience, a hallmark of a free society.  But as the above article goes on to demonstrate, I am not alone in fearing that the current angry, lawless iterations risk damaging their causes more than furthering them. Like this? Intensely dislike it? Please sign up & share to help spread the word so we can all have a civilised debate about what I get wrong!   Like many, I’ve watched the on-campus protests in the US and many others in recent years- increasingly imported to the UK - along with their descent into unruliness with a mixture of alarm and fear.  Where is the line between peaceful protest and anarchy?  On the current issue, I utterly accept my own ignorance, despite having sought to read as widely as I can from all sides.  But given my ongoing ignorance of the complicated historical, religious and ideological context, I defer the debate to experts and instead, like many, to resort to favouring gut instincts based on my own values - democratic processes, respect for law, tolerance of difference, free speech, debate and the rules of modern warfare - all of which, frankly appear under threat.  It is alarming. And deeply upsetting to witness mass loss of civilian life, but personally I choose not to wade in and fuel any agenda with further ignorance. The issue on which I have Antidoter concerns this week is around modern activism itself.  Primarily… does it actually work?  As far as I can observe, it seems to turn people away rather than towards the violent protestor’s cause (and I do draw a distinction between peaceful and violent), driving even deeper wedges down through society between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.  Have we entirely lost the ability to converse respectfully on contentious issues, instead requiring shouting and worse - destruction and violence - to make ourselves heard?  When passions run high, anger is unavoidable but common sense suggests it’s rarely the best strategy.  If we resort to dehumanising each other and violence, have we not already lost the argument?   As the saying goes - never negotiate with terrorists… and as any parent of toddler-terrorists knows, it is rarely effective.  To acquiesce to the demands or descend to the level of the screaming child rarely gets results, and worse, it risks damaging the causes the protesters care so much about.   In our attention economy, it’s become performative and darker. As I’ve come to realise, it’s perhaps the most high-profile symptom of so many of the various issues I’ve discussed previously -  polarisation, privilege, victimhood and narcissism.   Many (not all!) activists drink from a firehose of one-sided, angry, politicised content and then tribe-up in self-affirming bubbles of outrage to signal their global-good-person credentials vs the ‘unenlightened’. These days, it’s fuelled by binary short-form content which is performative by design, stoking fear and rewarding outrage.  The intention now seems to be to stir up physical altercations that can be filmed and distributed to create social stars of the creators.  There is little that depresses me more than the sight of 100s of onlookers getting their phones out to record a confrontation for an opportunity to win followers by throwing fuel on the fire.  Is it really being recorded for ‘evidence’ and the greater good? To my mind, it just shows a lack a basic humanity, bordering on glee, to be so close to the drama. And of course, the proliferation of these videos, from every possible angle warps our sense of their prevalence.  Ignorance and hypocrisy can seem rife (no doubt again, amplified by opposing sides): Palestine protesters unable to name either the river or sea, or define ‘intifada’; UK BLM protestors kneeling and shouting ‘don’t shoot’ to unarmed UK police;  Both pro and anti Brexit tribes conflating the powers of the EU, the Euro-zone or the European Court of Justice; Just Stop Oil protestors using oil-based paints to destroy priceless works of art (created with oil-based paints); climate protesters flying around the world to rallies or causing miles of idling motorway traffic that exacerbate pollution.  Youth, anger and ‘how dare you’ soundbites now trump degrees or Nobel-award-winning lifetimes of experience.    Shadowy well-funded political organisations pull strings behind the scenes, funding placard production at best, bussing in ‘professional’ external activists at worst, or providing tents, play-books and police-baiting strategies - often recycled from the last anti-capitalist/ anti-establishment upswell.   Key organisations supporting the current US protests, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), explicitly celebrated Hamas’s terror attack in the days following 7 October. In the UK, the Socialist Workers Party is always found at protest rallies, no matter the cause, handing out free placards and flags.  (More here).   On campus protestors can come across as entitled - typically middle class and from affluent families - albeit fleshed out by outside ‘professional’ agitators who have made up a heavy proportion of recent arrests. It will be interesting to see what happens on campuses once the summer break arrives. This week at Dartmouth University the student government held an open "no confidence" vote on the president's handling of campus protests. It passed (no confidence) 13-2 (with 3 abstentions). When then repeated with a secret ballot, it failed 8-9 (with 2 abstentions)...  making something of a mockery of the process and serving to demonstrate the huge recent growth of self-censorship that open hostility to others’ ‘wrong’ opinions results in.  Is this not the definition of bullying?  When public property is damaged or everyday people seriously inconvenienced, prevented from hearing diverse viewpoints or worse- vilified, a cause rapidly loses support.   Back in the votes-for-women time, there was a divide between the more militant suffragettes and the more peaceful policy-focussed suffragists, with Fawcett, the leader of the latter accusing the former of setting the movement back.  She commented:  "I can never feel that setting fire to houses and churches and litter boxes and destroying valuable pictures really helps to convince people that women ought to be enfranchised." There remains to this day debate over which group affected more change or how far it would have happened anyway post women’s direct involvement in the war effort and amidst wider emancipation for men during that period.  I’ve long feared this in one of the realms I do know a little more about - the contentious field of gender ideology.  I wonder if the biggest threat to trans people going about their daily lives in peace is actually trans activism.  This debate turns nasty very quickly and has actually appeared to damage public support (which has swung downwards in recent years) - whether by insisting on exposing children to over-sexualised drag content in the name of promoting inclusivity or labelling anyone daring to voice even a modicum of concern over the complicated balance of rights or myriad of issues self-ID presents - to children’s health, women’s sports or women’s spaces - a TERF, bigot or even child-killer.  Whether shifts in public opinion move away from the aggressive efforts of those who de-platform and choose violet protest or angry rhetoric over debate, or towards a (typically) more measured, longer-form debate of the other is a question that merits investigation as it may be a key to understanding how to actually shift public opinion.  Whatever the case, should a certain prospective president in the States wish to run on a ‘restoring order’ manifesto, it’s likely to find many more sympathetic prospective voters than it might have done prior to the recent uprisings.   The phrase ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face’ springs to mind.  More:   * Terry Eagleton In defence of our new student radicals  * Park Macdougald on The people setting America on Fire  * Yascha Mounk - How Universities Raised a new Generation of Activists * Washington Times opinion piece ‘Who is Paying these Outside Agitators?’  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

How does one market the certainty of death to people?  It’s tricky if not impossible given we all prefer (need?) to believe we’re invincible. And yet the Death Industry is the most market-robust of all, patiently residing in the shadows of the internet awaiting a google-prompt at our hour of greatest, heart-breaking need: undertakers, coffin-makers, florists, wake-providers and head-stone carvers.  It serves a never-ending stream of customers via calm, soothing websites suffused with love-affirming quotes and calla lily images. As you’ll know by now, I love a good snorkel around a new industry and this one intrigues me.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Specifically, the history-graduate-turned-tech-entrepreneur in me was troubled as to what the massive expansion of our digital footprint was doing to the historical record, both for society and for our own, personal memories. What will be left of our lives and the lives of those we love and will lose, with the days of discovering troves of handwritten love letters and sepia photos in a box in a cupboard now long gone?  Yes, there is a lot more content that has been captured in this modern, digital age, but how accurate - and accessible - is it to those we leave behind?  How considered and thoughtful? The art of letter-writing has all but died, so which parts of our scrappy digital archive would we want people to know is actually ‘us’ amidst all the guff and digital detritus of grown-out-of opinions, out-of-context throw-away comments, ugly photos and old passions long-since discarded. On whose servers, and how safely does it reside for posterity?   Death is the only certainty in life.  Remembering that can be a source of panic… or reassurance, depending on how we perceive it.  None of us are immune and it is a passage that every human in history has taken before us.  It’s the final, great equaliser.   Like many others, it is the deaths of those I love that occupy my fears more than my own.  My experience of it - of a parent, a sister-in-law, a close friend - all of whom passed well before their time, are a constant source of pain, but one I’ve learnt to channel into gratitude for the life, health and love I have.  Little glimpses and memories of their vivid lives surround me: old articles and a hand-written diary from my father; my sister-in-law’s powerful, poignant art covering the walls of my mother-in-law’s house;  squirly, hand-written notes on the Christmas decoration gift boxes from my friend that I unwrap lovingly each year on decorating the tree.    To know about your impending death, or not to know? That is the question.  Objectively, now that the shock has long subsided, in many ways I’m thankful for my father’s sudden death on a Winter’s morning on a mountain side- his favourite place in the world, with his family around him.  No fear or the cruelty and pain of a drawn out terminal illness.  But perhaps there are ‘advantages’ to the latter (if you can call them that):  an opportunity to prepare and think deeply about legacy and your loved ones.  A university friend wrote the most beautiful memoir of her life’s learnings for her twin six year olds during her terminal months. Kate Gross’s ‘Late Fragments:  Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) is an achingly poignant reminder of the beauty and fragility of life which I have now re-read 4x (and gifted many times).  It is the most precious gift she could have left for her young sons in the absence of her own loving arms throughout their childhood.    Perhaps this blog is a less profound version of mine to at least enable those I love to know a fraction of the myriad of thoughts that run through my head.  But will Substack still exist by the time my kids are of an age that they might be curious?  (Ironically, maybe i’ll produce a printed-out version for them in time).  And of course, not everyone is blessed with being able to weave words as beautifully and evocatively as Kate.  There are 10s of 1000s of photos now to prompt both tears and memories of happier times with passed loved ones, but it is the words, voices and handwriting we really cherish.  And I long for more audio and video of my father, more of his stories and life-lessons to share with the son-in-law and grand-children he never met.   One of my biggest regrets is for all the encyclopaedic knowledge that he had at his fingertips about nature, history and politics that he and his photographic, thirsty-for-knowledge brain had acquired across 60 years.  The myriad of birds he could identify by song in the garden; his deep knowledge about the movement of people over centuries which go towards explaining how national identities have evolved; how glaciation many centuries ago carved out the valleys and fells of the Lake District we love… deep wisdom, insight and interpretations extinguished in an instant.  What would Dad have done or advised in this situation?  I’ll never know.   Arguably we are all living ‘terminally’ to some degree but for most of us ‘legacy’ amounts to little more than the love we evoke in those closest to us.  And to be clear, this is no small or insignificant thing.  Perhaps it is the most important thing.  But this longing for more from my father (plus listening to far too many episodes of ‘Desert Island Discs’) led me to ponder on the opportunity of curating audio stories from every-day people before they pass.  Archives we can draw on for comfort and reassurance in our grief, on bad or good days.  Down another entrepreneurial rabbit hole I fell.   And of course, I found countless businesses meeting this need.  Companies that offer ghost-writers to research and write beautiful, custom printed book memoirs (here and here), online remembrance websites for grieving people to visit on anniversaries (here) or accessible via QR codes on headstones (here) and audio ideas similar to my own e.g. here and here,  but the more I explored the industry, the more I appreciated its challenges.   If providing a digital archive, how can any lightly-funded start-up guarantee that they can hold these, most precious of memories in perpetuity and that they won’t fall within the 80% odds of failed start-ups?  (Ultimately, it struck me that this was a content-creation/ data-storage business which would struggle to monetise in an attention economy world of free big-tech storage).  How does one yield the best content without expensive Kirsty-Young style competence in interviewing skill (which is not to be sniffed at)?   And perhaps most importantly, how does the instigator kindly and carefully broach ‘you’re either in the process of, or might soon die so would you mind please doing x’ to the desired subject of the archive?  It’s a morbid business. Literally.  But one I continue to believe there’s huge scope for. Conversations about special memories, experiences, failures and learnings are to be encouraged between family and good friends. They’re reminders of what’s important.  Why not make a recording of them a reason to have them?    But is this a business or simply a practice that could be more widely adopted - perhaps aided by prompt cards or format advice?  Nostalgic conversations recorded and transcribed; a DIY ‘Desert Island Discs’ with Grandad perhaps; or a weekly exchange of voice notes with Grandma in response to prompts - ‘tell me about your favourite holiday’, ‘your biggest regret’, ‘your best friends at school’;  After all, we already have the tech to record and store these precious audio or video nuggets in our pockets.    Perhaps these could be projects initiated between young and old, helping to stem the rapid growth of loneliness in society and bridge the growing age-divide in society.   (They could maybe serve to repair a little of our rapidly waning ‘respect for elders’).  Student journalists could ‘side hustle’ it. (Are they any student journalists these days, or are they all YouTubing?); schools could move to integrate them as homework deliverables.  StoryCorps in the US is a fantastic non-profit initiative that harnesses many of these and has yielded over 700K individual audio studios for the US Library of Congress Archive - partly via audio booths placed in public places around the country.  Everyday people sharing beautiful everyday stories - of love, loss, adventure and daily life through the decades.  Death - the prospect of both our own and those we love - is perhaps the greatest antidote of all.  Life’s constant reminder to live well in the present, make memories, give more and love hard.   Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com

The self-belief industry (along with the exclamation mark) is off-the-charts thriving.  These days everything is all about soundbite self-empowerment. You-affirming slogans scream from posters on every wall, note-pad and card shop-shelf, t-shirt fronts, instagram grids and out of every music-speaker.  Riffing further on the themes of last week, is it any wonder that there’s been such a decline in mental health in a society that constantly encourages us to look inwards, at ourselves, at how everything makes us feel and to examine what we’re getting (or not) out of any particular situation.  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Stoking the ‘cult of me’ is a lucrative business. The ‘inside ourselves’ trends discussed last week is one manifestation, pop culture another with empowerment lyrics woven through so many top pop songs including  Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’,  David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ or Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’.  Indeed, Taylor Swift has created a one-woman billion dollar industry about her inner monologue affirmations.  But perhaps the best examples are the huge growth of ‘life coaching’ and the success of the self-help book genre:  self-empowerment through self-empowering others, if you will.  You can subtly ‘stop giving a f*ck’ like Mark, embrace the power of Eckhart’s ‘now’, think ‘fast and slow’ like Daniel or adopt either Stephen’s ‘7 highly successful’ or James’ ‘atomic’ habits.    But no, I’m not disparaging coaches or a whole genre of writing.  Indeed, as an entrepreneurial gold-digger, maybe I’ll join them.  ‘What’s the point of everything?’, along with ‘what’s the point of me?’ are the questions a huge market is currently seeking answers to - perhaps in response to the rise of societal cynicism and nihilism.  I have myself benefitted from a wonderful coach and many of these are fantastic books by talented writers distilling wisdom borne of centuries of population-wide insight.  But as we move from one concept to the next, perhaps feeling momentarily inspired and motivated, are we actually addressing what has created the underlying issues in our lives?   To learn about ‘me, me, me’ is the only place to look ‘someone else, someone else, someone else’?  The more interesting question perhaps being: when does self-esteem tip over into narcissism?  Here’s a helpful primer from ‘Psychology Today’ yielded from deep research on page 1 of Google on the difference between the two:   Whereas self-esteem refers to a person's subjective evaluation of their value and worth, narcissism refers to feelings of self-centeredness, self-importance, superiority, grandiosity, and entitlement. A person with high self-esteem thinks, “I am good.” A narcissist thinks, “I am special,” or “I am the best.” Oh. Too late.  Here’s Lizzo to drive the point home:   In case nobody told you today… You're special In case nobody made you believe (nobody, no, no)... You're special Well, I will always love you the same….  You're special Of course, self-belief can be self-fulfilling.  Supremely confident people are enviable and impressive, so where’s the harm in infecting more people with that glow of self-belief?  If we stop dwelling on our insecurities and believe ourselves capable, we can radiate confidence, which breeds confidence, freeing us to get s**t done without the neuroses.   But feelings are not facts. In fact, our feelings are rarely to be trusted… neither the negative, nor positive, I’m afraid.  Self-doubts take root and bloom, often when we’re tired, dejected or late at night when we should be sleeping.  Over-indulging leads us down a dark tunnel from which it can be hard to gain perspective.  But believing unquestionably that we’re awesome could be just as, if not more damaging.  I can’t help feeling it provides a superficial pick-me-up at best, an inflated sense of worth at worst… edging us into a narcissistic bitterness and/or blame for our unfulfilled-potential when we don’t feel we’re winning.  The reality is that we are not all born special, uniquely talented or perfect and the more we tell people they are, the more we set them up for disappointment when they realise the truth (particularly if delivered by Simon Cowell).  We only become special through our actions, deeds and hard work and if we spend all our time and emotional energy working on ‘self-care’, it inevitably comes at the expense of working on things for the wider world around us - from where much more joy, satisfaction and self-learning typically flows.  We can hack this by telling everyone we care - changing our profile pics to the next cause-du-jour, sharing reels of outrage about injustice - but who really benefits from this?   Interestingly, I recently heard from a charity CEO over dinner that their donations had fallen off a cliff due to people’s desire to feel like a good person being sated by public pronouncements now rather than donations.  It’s more visible and a great virtue signal to say, ‘Look at me! I’m a good person’.  Self-doubt and reflection is growth.  Taking a step or two down the tunnel can be incredibly helpful, enabling us to self-analyse, improve or adapt our strategies to different people or different conditions or to invest in more learning and skills.  Not everyone will or should have to fit around us and our ‘unique’ personality or style.   Slightly different ‘yous’ are fine and indeed, to be encouraged to bring out the best in others.  An extrovert shouldn’t always talk over an introvert;  strong opinions shouldn’t drown out weaker-held yet better informed ones; and youth doesn’t trump the life-experience of age.  Plus the ‘you’ you’re affirming might not be doing you any favours…  for your health - if overweight; for your relationships, if unyielding in your strong opinions of others; or for your career if you can’t take constructive criticism.   A bit is fine, with course correction, beneficial.  Just not so much navel-gazing that we get trapped in the mirror and tip into self-obsession.   So, herewith - some proposed new poster slogans - which may in time become chapter headings to my upcoming self-help book ‘You’re not that interesting and that’s fine’   * Most people don’t care or give you that much thought at all  * Your feelings are not more important than facts  * Curiosity killed nothing but bad ideas * Life is not a battle between good people and bad * Dare to say what others are thinking * Boredom is a good thing * Social media rots your brain, read books * Hard work trumps deep introspection * Go for an unplugged walk * The ultimate happiness of giving, not taking  And yes - you can buy many of these anti-slogans on t-shirts here  (further evidence of tipsy-induced creativity).   More Antidoters on this topic:   * Me, me me. Are we living through a narcissism epidemic? - Zoe Williams, The Guardian * Beneath the Mask of Vulnerable Narcissism - Rob Henderson * The Imposter Syndrome of Narcissism - 3 min clip from Modern Wisdom with Professor W Keith Cambell.  Thanks for reading Antidoters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit antidoters.substack.com