Like minded people: WTF?

Read any list of advice about how to improve your life and ‘finding like-minded people’ will appear. It’s a guaranteed sign of a half-assed list produced by someone with little knowledge of the human condition.

My birth year cohort was about 450,000 men.

I’m a lifetime bachelor. According to an ONS dataset I can’t find again, that’s one in ten of my birth year cohort. 1 of 45,000

I have an undergraduate degree from the mid-1970’s. Counting in the polytechnics, one in five of my cohort got one of those. 1 of 9,000.

I have a postgraduate degree. One in ten undergraduates did that in the mid-1970’s. 1 of 900.

I’m still working. Half my age cohort are doing that. 1 of 450.

I’m long-term sober. I can’t remember the last census count from AA, but it was less than 100,000. (Really. And even then, that’s a gross over-estimate of the number of ex-drunks with long-term sobriety). Out of an 18+ population of around 50 million. Which is 1 in 500.

So that’s me. Unique in my birth year.

We’re all equal, right? Well, if you want, but we’re all different. Some of those differences matter, and many don’t. Being a lifetime bachelor matters (as does being MGM’d as a baby, but that’s another story). That my degrees were in Philosophy of one kind or another, mixed with chunks of mathematics and logic, matters. Philosophers are not as other people. As for being long-term sober having worked the programme and done the Steps, you can’t even imagine the difference that opens up.

This is not a play for tragic status or for sympathy. I don’t want either. There are a bunch of other people whose experiences, on the way to wealth, artistic recognition or athletic success, separate them from everyone else except the other fifty people who went through the same wringers. I have nothing in common with them either.

My question is: who the frack are my ‘like-minded people’?

I have some friends. We can communicate. I think they might be insulted by the suggestion that they and I were ‘like-minded’.

So I have another question: why are ‘like-minded people’ important? Or is it a code? For, you know, being gay. Or fascist. Or an Aston Villa supporter. Or a Conservative in Rotherham. Or a train-spotter. Something that give my identity a distinctive flavour.

My identity, such as the poor worn-out thing is, has no particular flavour. So maybe there are no ‘like-minded people’ for me.

What To Do Now I’m 64?

Birthdays are probably exactly the wrong time to take a look at my life and figure out how to change it for the better, but that’s what I started to do. So here’s part of the inventory.

For a few years after about 2008, I had a picture of myself as an older man fighting to get out of the trough of a long relationship that ended badly, needed to get back into and then stay in shape so my blood sugar got back into sensible levels and I would not walk around in a brain fog. That’s why I started back at the gym in autumn of 2010. In 2014 I got my Over-60 Oystercard, and for the next many months, every time I used it I thought about my age and not wanting anyone to see I had the card. In 2015 I decided to get my teeth fixed, and took the braces off towards the end of 2016. While the braces were on, eating nice food in pleasant restaurants was sometimes actually painful, and every other activity was accompanied by a low-level non-stop irritation from the braces. I stopped going out for about the last eight months. When the braces came off, It took a while to get used to eating with unencumbered teeth. Which takes me to 2017.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but the orthodontic treatment gave me a picture of myself as an older man struggling with a problem of age. Wonky, misplaced teeth is not, I grant, a stroke, or a heart attack, or a broken hip bone, and that’s what makes my reaction worse thank you very much. Those would be Real Serious Events, not just teeth. However, you get your teeth straightened out at sixty-one and let me know how you handle it. That compounded with A Man Working Past Retirement (or Up To State Retirement Age), which I became in 2014. These are not good looks.

Start with the fundamentals.

I’m a long-term sober alcoholic. If I get to sleep sober, that’s a good day. Living sober gets easier but it never gets easy. Emotional sobriety is like a strict diet: it keeps me out of trouble, but people were designed to live with occasional dramatic episodes.

I have to watch my blood-sugar. So I have to be the older guy who still looks good (as one with anterior pelvic tilt can) in a tee-shirt. Sure, there’s a tinge of vanity-as-motive in there, but it’s mostly about the blood-sugar. Visits to the gym are necessary, not some indulgence.

I am in my mid-sixties working with ambitious people twenty or thirty years younger. Call my nephew when you’re doing that and keeping up. Even showing up for work every day is an achievement at this age. That’s where almost all my energy is going now, but it’s also where all of my money comes from. So. Prioirities. I don’t give myself enough credit for it, and I’m going to start now.

I’m not going to go on complaining about the iPhone zombies, Millennials, Boomers or any other darn group. They don’t behave as my generation did when we were their age, but then the precise conditions of really-existing post-modern capitalism at this exact moment in time are very different from the conditions prevailing when I was their age. Their responses to those really-existing conditions are exactly the ones Capitalism needs at this stage of its evolution. Anyone who complains is on the wrong side of the inexorable evolution of capitalism. (This doesn’t mean that the evolution of Capitalism is morally acceptable, just that it is inexorable, like the tides and volcanos.)

I’m going to stop trying to track the way the world is going. It’s a way of pretending to be involved in what’s going on when I’m not involved at all. And I figure I’ll be gone before whatever catastrophic social circumstances occur, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, so why bother? Old people tend to be left alone by social revolutionaries anyway.

However, Brexit is Brexit, the EU is the EU, and the market is the market. I need to take a view on whether investments are the best place for my money. This is where I have to remember I’m supposed to be a strategist, or was, once.

I am a life-time bachelor. That isn't changing, and nor do I want it to.

I waste a lot of time on the Internet. This is to do with being frazzled at the end of a day: too tired to focus on a plot, or a book, or a project, not tired enough to crawl into bed at eight-thirty. Plus the feeling that out there somewhere in Internet land is someone who will say something that will give me a new direction. Nah. This means the hard work of shaking off an old bad habit and getting into some new ones. Or going to bed really early, as I was doing at the start of the year.

I know. It sounds like more of the same. Fine-tuning. The sign of a life that’s fundamentally sound. Not exciting, not fun, but sound. Which, given that I’m an alcoholic, is pretty good.

I have three behaviours that may or may not be symptoms of something I need to change. I don’t go on holidays; I can barely remember to do anything about the few social events that happen; and I have little to no enthusiasm for movies, shows and theatre. I’m not going to examine those in this post.

I turned 64 last week. This is a song about that...

The Implicit Choice in the Maslow Hierarchy

"The hierarchy remains a very popular framework in sociology research, management training and secondary and higher psychology instruction.” So says Wikipedia. Judge an theory by the company that company that keeps it, and Maslow’s Hierarchy should be tossed in the bin for no more reason than that it is "a very popular framework in sociology research, management training and secondary and higher psychology instruction”. These are not reputable, hard-science, subjects. What they are, are normative theories disguised as descriptive ones. Morality passing itself off as science.

Maslow’s Hierarchy is the idea that people have a bunch of needs, some of which need to be met more or less well before we can go on to meeting the others. At the base of the pyramid he put physiological needs;: air, water, food, sleep, clothing, shelter. That’s the Rule of Threes: three minutes without air, three hours without shelter in extreme conditions, three days without water, three weeks without food. Those will kill you. Three days without sleep risks permenant damage to your mind.

Next is Safety, so that we’re not being raided by Vikings, dragged off to prison at two in the morning because we said something wrong, mugged when we take money out of an ATM, let go from work because the order book is looking thin, or getting beaten and abused by parents, teachers, policemen, or the other kids at school.

Given some safety, we can move on to Social Belonging as evidenced by having friends, intimacy, and being on good terms with our family of origin and our own family if we have one.

After that, we have Esteem, that our abilities and contributions are recognised by people whose opinions we care about, and that generally, the people around us think we are a Good Fellow. And then at the top, we have Self-Actualisation, which is realising one’s potential and abilities.

Notice that without the idea that these items are a) needs, b) ordered, and c) must be satisfied in order, this is just a list of stuff that we would like to have. It has no force.

The Hierarchy does not describe how we botch our way through our lives, grabbing an hour of self-actualisation at the gym, an hour of living death on the commute, eight hours of insecure employment (lack of Security) to pay the bills and the taxes that provide policemen and defence (Security, of a sort), before returning to a frugal meal and an empty bed (lack of Social Belonging), while trying to get a promotion, improve our professional networks (Esteem), and maybe get a drink with the Lads at the weekend (Social Belonging). Jeez, what a mess.

A number of things are not on the list: wealth or high income, exceptional athletic, artistic or intellectual achievement, religious vocations, or anything else that requires sustained, time-consuming dedication and the risk that all the effort might not lead to the winner’s podium or the award ceremony. These are examples of self-actualisation, but cannot be achieved without delaying other lower-order needs for so long it counts as abandonment. In other words, without some nifty verbal gymnastics, the Hierarchy is self-contradictory. You can’t have it all. Not without a lot of money, luck and a solid character.

But maybe decribing these compromises wasn’t Maslow’s aim.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.

Maslow originally put sex in the physiological needs, and large numbers of puritans disagreed with him, or prissily said it was there because the survival of the human race. Some descriptions of the Hierarchy leave it out. Was Maslow on to something? Perhaps he thought that if a vigorous young man isn’t getting laid on the regular, he’s going to be distracted in the pursuit of his higher needs? I was a young man once, and I approve that insight.

That was what made me wonder if Maslow was pointing at something else, but happy to be lucratively misunderstood. I started this with the intention of explaining why the Heirarchy was nonsense. Then I wondered: what if Maslow was right? Not about how people manage to bodge and survive their way through the circumstances of their lives, but about what the circumstances of our life must be, to be satisfying as it is lived, rather than in retrospect when there’s money in the bank, awards on the walls and every Maitre d’ in town knows your name and face. What if the Hierarchy is actually a diagnostic tool rather than a truth about people?

C-Heads describes "the 21st century girl… a chick of many talents, one moment she’s in Europe, the next she’s in Asia. She’s working on several artistic projects at once and killing at every single one. She’s a mix of races – picking up different cultures as she travels. She’s the mysterious girl at the party you want to know her life story who everyone has their eyes on", and yet… what? She can go through the Maslow levels, tick or cross as applicable. When she finds herself arguing about whether this or that is really a need, that’s a cross. Now she can see what’s missing. And she may understand that, if she wants to go on killing it at every single project, then that's the price she pays.

Human beings are needy animals, and at any given time one or more of those needs will be going unmet. For many people, it’s far more than one and it’s every day of every week of every year. And the more lower-order needs go unmet, the shakier is the pursuit, and enjoyment, of the higher-order needs. The Hierarchy tells us where the structure of our lives and our selves is shaky. Reality tells us that the shakiness may just be the way it’s gotta be. Because The Hierarchy is impossible to satisfy from bottom to top. You have a choice: you can be satisfied and risk the occasional feeling that you haven’t made the most of what, if anything, God gave you; or you can aim to develop and exploit your abilities and talents, and accept the surety of dissatisfaction with this or that aspect of your life.

What would you do with a million pounds?

We used to have a game at junior school called “What would you do if you had a million pounds?” Since one answer was always “buy a house” and for that sum you could have bought about eighty (!) of my parent’s houses, at today’s prices, make that “What would you do if you had eighty millions pounds”.

I’d buy my sister a house, and I’d give my nephew some money so he didn’t have to take the first job that came along just to pay the rent, but could go find a step on a career ladder. My mother already has a nice house.

That’s what everyone says, as well they should. I suppose I’d buy myself something in central London, maybe in Bloomsbury or Marylebone. Or maybe not. Maybe I would travel round the world, concentrating on large cities and villages by the sea, to find somewhere I really wanted to live. If there was such a place. Or maybe I’d find a university which would let me use their library and let me do a PhD. Or not, these days, given the state of the modern university.

Perhaps I’d back some start-ups, but I know that a lot of those are basically CV-enhancement schemes for BCBG Ph.D’s: the idea is that the start-up is flipped to a large firm who really wants the top talent. Anyone outside the in-crowd is a sucker who is not going to get an even break.

Establish a scholarship for a British philosopher of mathematics to study for a year abroad, to be awarded annually. Maybe.

I could buy art. That would give me a faux social-life.

What I would not do is buy a £15,000 watch. Or a £250,000 sports car. I might buy a few days at Silverstone driving fancy sports cars though.

I could become an eccentric recluse in my Amsterdam house by a canal, watching movies in a special screeening-room and having meals brought in from the nearby one-star restaurant. On the days I was not watching films, I would go to Zandvoort by limousine and walk along the beach. It’s a large beach. I’ve just spent a few minutes fantasising about a year spent working my way round the beaches from Italy, south of France, Spain-Portugal-Spain, France again, Cornwall and ending in Wales. Or something like that.

Maybe I’d get some sessions with a celebrity therapist just for fun and the possibility they say something that changes me. Jordan Peterson could tell me I deserve all the problems I’m having because I don’t have family.

We used to have fun with this game. It was exciting to think of what we might do. Not so much now. I have a feeling that I would do a number of worthy things with it, and get a decent flat in the upmarket section of a serious town. The catch with growing-up is learning all the downsides and costs: the young only see upsides and benefits.

You Can't Get Too Much Counter-Propaganda

Ever wonder why the religious person sitting opposite you on the train is reading the Bible? I mean, haven’t they finished it yet? Or why recovering alkies go to three or more meetings a week and read the Big Book? Or why people read one self-help book after another, or yet another book on personal effectiveness? Or why people go to Church every Sunday? Let alone pray five times a day (Fajr, Dhuhr, ‘Asr, Maghrib, and ‘Isha) or even seven (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline). Or why men check into dark corners of the Internet to read their filthy alt-right misogynist propaganda? Okay. The last one is obvious: they are filthy alt-right misogynists. It’s entirely different when liberals read the Guardian (or the Evening Standard, or the Financial Times) for the latest revelations about how Brexit is going to be a disaster.

No. It’s not because they are insecure aand need their thoughts confirming.

If you don’t fill your head with the thoughts you want to have, other people will fill your head with the thoughts they want you to have.

Advertisers using whatever current cliches they think will get your attention. Politicians, who don’t actually care about you, since they are talking to a very small audience of other politicians, major donors and businessmen. Left-wing journalists (a tautology) pushing their agendas. PR agents agitating hashtags for their clients’ benefit. Songwriters pushing Blue Pill sentimentality and Girlzzz Just Wanna Party. Scientists pushing out pop-science gee-whiz to get publicity to keep the grant money rolling in. The news telling you that awful behaviour seems to bring rewards, at least in this life. Not to mention Facebook propaganda from your fake friends, or faking friends. And let’s never forget those communications from management, with more spin than Nathan Lyon.


That’s what will pour into my head if I don’t put what I want into it. I can go looking for different opinions, and I can keep track of what The Enemy are thinking, but then I know what I’m doing. If I just wander through this media-soaked world, watching TV, reading the Metro on the train, and overhear whatever the girl singer du jour is pushing at the moment, I’m going to pick up mainstream ideas. I can tell myself I’m watching ironically, or that I don’t believe it, but there’s a part of my brain that, in the words of Gabriel Shear…


Some alcoholics ask why they have to go to so many meetings a week. The reply is: well, you went drinking every night, right?

You can’t get too much counter-propaganda.