It's like Sons of Anarchy has invaded the cruise.

Read more

It is quickly followed by people on Temu Hazmat quite cleaning up the mess and the pool getting closed .

Read more

Logical choice, but it's not working out.

The constant walking to get to things. The masses of people - apparently it's a Spanish extended weekend. The shit food is really getting to me. The Halloween stuff is a bit of a letdown.

I think I am done wit…

Read more

I have arrived. I have four days here for Halloween craziness before I move on to the cruise .

Port Aventura is very well decorated and the western hotel is better than the one in Disneyland Paris by a mile

Read more

Read more

Billionaire Lifestyle Stock photos by Vecteezy

I’ll never be a billionaire.

I was sitting around a table with some friends during our yearly gaming retreat in the country, and we were all laughing about how none of us has the psychological makeup to ever become certifiably rich. It was us looking across the table at each other and saying: “Yeah... this is the reason why we’re never going to own a mega-yacht.”

The great thing about it is we weren’t lamenting some grand moral failing or a lack of ambition. Well, okay, from a certain perspective, I guess it was some sense of a lack of ambition, to quote Obi-Wan, ‘from a certain point of view’, but here is why you might never be super rich—and why that isn’t just fine. It’s actually pretty amazing.

Read more

I will be filming the experience hopefully in a new way, we shall see. Always trying to push my personal boundaries.

Read more

Read more

Since I have this Substack and a YouTube channel that touches on introversion, I started hanging out in online introvert haunts to see what my fellow introverts discussed and what language they used.

Never assume your experience is the same as everyone else, right?

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting such an onslaught of pessimism to the extent that it feels like introvert misery porn.

The Video

The video associated with this article is on YouTube.

What is an introvert?

So let’s briefly get into what being an introvert actually means before we continue.

Being an introvert means you get your mental energy from solitude, internal stimulation, and, for some, deep conversations with individuals or small groups. That is it. That’s all it means. It doesn’t imply social incompetence or disengagement. It certainly doesn’t mean you despise your fellow human beings. It doesn’t indicate loneliness or unhappiness.

The truth is, many introverts are socially skilled, connected, and confident. They’ll just be mentally knackered with too much of it.

I always recommend people read the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, though I’m not sure I believe in the argument that the world is built for extroverts any longer, which is probably another article.

Now let’s continue.

What is introvert misery porn?

Introvert misery porn represents the online conversations I encounter in introvert communities. It’s always online; I don’t encounter it as much face-to-face. It overemphasises and dramatises the negative emotional experiences that people associate with their introversion.

It tends to frame introverted people as chronically misunderstood.

Some of the language they use around that is terrible. Socially disadvantaged? Is that really true anymore? Emotionally burdened, obviously, often in ways that encourage identification with suffering rather than understanding.

It doesn’t associate introversion with agency or growth. It turns introversion into a story of consistent struggle and victimhood. They don’t try to explore their introverted state; they just wallow in its negativity. The problem is that this doesn’t reflect my life experience, and I'm not convinced it has much to do with being an introvert.

This online community language focuses on:-

• Introverts can’t function in a social world

• Introverts are consistently exhausted or overwhelmed

• Extroverts dominate everything

• Introverts are doomed to loneliness

• Being introverted is a burden or a flaw

These messages are misleading for several reasons.

First, they seem to be based on a stereotype. The sort of straw-man introvert that introverts define themselves against. The trouble is, it is a straw man, right? I just don’t get it. It seems to be the basis of internet discussions these days: describing yourselves through a taxonomy, but based on an extreme straw-man reference point.

Second, you read a lot of the conversation, and they’re talking about social anxiety disorders, shyness, or even forms of trauma that literally have nothing to do with being an introvert. Those are other things layered on top. Obviously they have these life experiences, but that doesn’t preclude putting on your adult pants to discuss what may be the actual cause of those experiences.

Third, and here we go, some of these personal preferences are personal preferences framed as pathology.

Is it an experience thing?

At first, I asked myself whether I was closer to this messaging at any point in my life.

I think there’s some truth that I was a bit closer to it when I was younger. If I look back to when I was younger, two things were true: I was very shy, and more socially anxious, especially in new situations where I’d be asked to do things I wasn’t comfortable or familiar with or didn’t know how to do it.

But that had nothing to do with me being an introvert. I could address those two things as social anxieties, rather than just being norms of my introversion.

As I moved through life and grew more confident through experience, my shyness was eradicated, and I now face new situations and moments of discomfort with complete confidence. You could even say, you know, a strange sense of discovery. It’s still true that I draw my mental energy from solitude, internal stimulation, and specific conversations with individuals and small groups.

I’m not prepared to describe my life in the context of the introvert misery porn narrative, but it is true that I experienced more moments of stress and discomfort due to these issues that age and life experience gave me the confidence to eradicate. So you could say, again, in a small way, my life was closer to elements of the introvert misery narrative when I was younger, even though I’d not consider myself a member of the club even back then.

Superpower as kryptonite

The introvert superpower is allegedly deep thinking. I don’t disagree with that as a concept, but they turn that very superpower into their kryptonite. I can use a thread from a channel that often posts content that lacks a certain uplifting introvert spirit, and he said that deep thinking about things led them all to be depressed.

I had to respond.

I certainly didn’t agree with the argument that introverts are from the “island of misfit toys.” I mean, what the hell is that? Are we Sid’s toys in Toy Story?

I got a response from another watcher who literally argued that introverts' deep-thinking nature was the source of the problem, and that the content creator was just being honest. Is it, though? You can’t allow something that should be a positive to become a sort of crippling weakness, because where does that lead you? How can allowing that to be the case lead you to a better life?

I responded, as the whole point of this propensity to deep think as a superpower is to deep think yourself out of problems, right? You have the power to change how you see the world. Move on and apply your supposedly vaunted superpower to something else that enhances your life.

Is it fear?

Once you get past social anxiety disorders being mistaken for introversion, you move on to what is fear being mistaken for introversion.

Let’s test two statements:

1. You get more introverted as you get older.

2. People are becoming more introverted.

You hear these statements all the time. I don't think either is true. They’re not becoming introverts; they’re just isolating, which isn’t the same thing as becoming introverted or actively choosing meaningful solitude.

You can replace the general statement that “people are becoming more introverted” with two things:

1. The general enshittification of how we interact with the world (apps, social media, crappy services) disconnects people.

2. They're being reclusive out of fear of where the world is going.

And I mean, I do sort of get that, but saying it’s something else isn’t representing the truth. We can’t equate introversion with fear of judgment, a lack of social cohesion, or avoiding life because of perceived threats. I don’t think introversion is increasing; I think anxiety, fear, overstimulation, and withdrawal behaviours are.

It’s about outcomes

As introverts, we need to be calm, confident, and balanced. So my framing isn’t “introverts are broken and misunderstood.”

We should see ourselves as thinking through depth and with intention. Whether we like it or not, we live in a social world, and I don’t see that as pain and rejection, but as being selective and finding meaning. So I don't see myself as a victim. I view my temperament as a tool I use consciously and wisely to move myself out of situations and into a better state.

It’s ultimately about outcomes.

We can leave ourselves feeling stuck in validated suffering, but I just don’t get how that helps. We have to move toward being centred, capable, and authentic, and march toward a road of inner peace and tranquillity.

It’s a pity that big events like D23 or Blizzcon stepped back from that all-online model. I don’t fully understand why they did that, since I’m pretty sure it wouldn't dent their live attendance at all, but such is life. I watched the elements of BlizzCon that became available on YouTube this year, and it brought up a thought I haven’t had in a while.

Is digital exploration valid?

A blizzard for Blizzard

I didn’t think I’d ever get into a Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO). Everything about them I labelled as toxic to my personality. The level grind. The raiding culture. Punishing death penalties despite it being inevitable. Enforced PvP or grouping.

World of Warcraft promised to be different, and while other games had started to focus on a different approach to MMO’s before Warcraft, they got the headlines and made the marketing work. I was also a longtime Blizzard fan from the heyday of console games like The Lost Vikings (1992) and Rock’n’Roll Racing (1993) on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Then other people came from games like Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which was a lead-in to the game's background.

There was also a confluence of extended friends, some into MMO games historically, and others drawn to Blizzard’s incarnation of the genre just like me. World of Warcraft was just a whole time, place and people confluence that is almost impossible to repeat. I’d also just come back from a failed migration to Australia, so there probably was a deep-seated need for another form of connection even if it wasn’t physical or face-to-face.

So, slightly later than everyone else by a few days, I walked to the store in a veritable blizzard to buy Blizzard's World of Warcraft at retail a few days after launch.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

Warcraft was a lifestyle

Okay, I’m half joking; I didn’t descend to the levels of The Guild web show, which is great, by the way, but it did become a core part of my life: the question is why?

How hard I went into Warcraft is relative. It didn’t take over my life, but it did take over all the time I spent gaming on my computer. I stopped playing anything else, and I just played World of Warcraft. It was addictive for two reasons: exploration and connection.

If you expected me to say loot or that it was engineered to be sugar for the human brain, you’d be incorrect. This was 2004. A simpler time. To riff on Obi-Wan, World of Warcraft in 2004 was an elegant design for a more civilised age. It was built on polish, adventure, and respect for the player, long before modern gaming traded genuine craft for weaponised FOMO and psychological hooks.

Connection cadence

A large part of what made Warcraft fun was the connection.

You connected with random people to do various activities, often in dungeons, and those serendipitous connections were often fascinating. People of all ages and from different parts of the world. You know you’ve entered a surreal world when you have to stop your dungeon run because one of the group members has been called to by his Mam to have a bath, or because your raid tank has fallen off his chair and finished the raid with a potentially broken arm.

We had a guild called The Dungeoneers; only God know how that name wasn’t taken, right? It was great doing end-game dungeons and the smaller raids until we merged with another guild of ex-FPS players. I have no idea what we were thinking. We even met with them in the real-world and culturally? It was obviously it was fracked.

The truth was that the various Warcraft chats, with varying degrees of openness, were a way to maintain a more constant, frequent cadence of conversation with the fabric of gaming friends who joined the game at launch. I’d say the level of discourse between various people was at its highest during playing Warcraft, for me at least.

Exploring a fantasy world

A big part of the game was exploring the world, even though it wasn’t a real place. Traversing the land and seeing its wonders. Encountering the fantastical creatures that lived there. Seeing new cities and locations. Entering various dungeons with their own stories, inhabitants and antagonists.

I know it sounds strange, as it’s not real, but the wonder of it was amazing.

You end up with distinct memories. When you cross into another zone and are instantly killed by a bear way above your level. When you’re a lower-level Horde and a bunch of humans ride past, decked out and on their horses, galloping to the Scarlet Monastery dungeon. The first time you get on an airship to a distant location.

I have these memories despite having a machine at the time that meant it took me an hour to get into and out of cities because of the lag.

The end of an era

My journey with World of Warcraft finally came to an end around 2007 to 2008, as I played large parts of The Burning Crusade but none of The Wrath of the Lich King.

It ended for a number of reasons.

The Dungeoneers sort of fell apart a bit, and I think a few real-life friends fell out because of it for a period. It was usually the raiding dramas that came with 40-man raids at the time.

This is because raiding becomes like a job. Set raids. Set times. Do you work to make sure you’ve created enough potions so you don’t weaken the team. Rules over loot. Frustration when 40 people don’t orchestrate perfectly. The end-game experience was so different from the cornucopia of exploration and connection that was the levelling process. If the levelling game conjures small muscle memories of travel, the endgame starts to feel like a corporate job.

Is it then surprising that people have been trying to connect with those halcyon days of 2004 again?

Will Warcraft be forever?

I mean, people still play it, but Blizzard hopes so through World of Warcraft: Forever.

There is a whole article, or even a series of articles, on how the game, known as World of Warcraft retail, has changed over the years. What matters here is that World of Warcraft: Forever is designed to recreate that 2004 experience and never move away from it.

I am looking at the idea, and I think I’ll be drawn in again.

It’s partly nostalgia, but not entirely. I find myself coming back to the game's muscle memory for exploration, even though it sits in a digital world. I want to level up and experience the world again with tweaked graphics that make it look like you remember it, rather than how it actually was.

I may spend as much time finding a spot to take in the view and snap a screenshot as I do trying to level. I’d be in no rush to get there. I’d want to soak it up, take it slow and be open to serendipitous connections.

I guess I’d want to experience it the way I try to experience life.

Somewhere a guild forms

As I was writing this, I got a message from my nephew linking to shorts he is creating and saying I should start playing World of Warcraft again. I was like, funnily enough, I’ve been leaning into this since watching BlizzCon. They’re forming a small guild to level and eventually do 10-man stuff. A sort of friends-of-friends thing where most people know each other at most one step removed.

That nailed it.

The potential for exploration was always there, and this now provides an avenue for connectedness. Even though I will inevitably level slowly and explore in their slipstream, it will give me a fabric of conversation that will be great, especially since two of these people are my relatives (my nephew and my brother).

It’ll also be sort of interesting and intriguing being a Warcraft character in Jack’s videos.

Azeroth Awaits, Again

Come November 4th, it’s likely I’ll be creating my own blue elf and taking up the adventure in Azeroth again. Possibly. Maybe the call to a sense of vestigial exploration in a digital fantasy realm will fade, but I am not sure it will. If it does, it will be through experiencing it.

The potential for that guild experience probably seals the deal.

It will come down to how it feels. The vistas to see. The experience to have, and whether they try to rejuvenate and recreate it, and whether it fails or succeeds. I’ll guess I will find out.

Well... that’s probably closed the deal.

Read more

I don't want to suggest that other people’s experiences are wrong, or tell people to pull their boots up and sort themselves out, but to offer another experience of introversion that rarely gets talked about when introverts assemble online.

The Video Alternative

This is the video of the essay.

Thanks, Eileen Gu

It’s taken me a while to put together my counterargument to the prevalent narrative in introvert community spaces because none of my attempts felt sufficient. That changed when I saw a video of Eileen Gu answering a question from a puzzled reporter.

Eileen answers in a way that provides a perfect foundation for a completely different view of what it means to be an introvert, and it sits in direct opposition to the usual misery narrative. I find I can translate Eileen’s experience to my own, though it has little to do with the mindset of competitive sport.

My head is a good place

“I’m an introspective young woman... I spend a lot of time in my head... and it’s not a bad place to be.”

- Eileen Gu

If you dare to peer into introvert communities on the internet, you are met with a very specific, almost tragic aesthetic. It’s what I call ‘introvert misery porn’. The idea that existing within your head means you are fragile. The implication being that existing within your head is a defensive mechanism, a way to build a bunker because the outside world is just too loud, our fellow human beings are awful or too exhausting, and overall, the world today is just too scary to handle.

Like Eileen, I have no apology for existing in my head. It’s not a social deficit or a coping mechanism. Why does spending quite a bit of time existing within your own head have to have that narrative of it leading to misery? I don’t agree with it. Like Eileen, I spend a lot of time in my head, and it’s a good place to be. In fact, it could be said that a lot of stuff has to compete with it, and it’s pretty strong competition.

Existing within your head doesn’t mean you are trapped behind a locked door. Instead, it’s a perfectly fine, vibrant space that simply has the door politely shut from the inside until something more interesting knocks.

But a closed room can still become a stagnant place if you fall into the established narrative that thinking leads to negativity. That doesn’t have to be the narrative in your head, but it requires a very specific kind of internal tool.

Thinking is a superpower

“I journal a lot, I break down all of my thought processes. I think I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking... it’s in like a tinkering like a scientist kind of way.”

- Eileen Gu

Imagine if you could be someone like Reed Richards. A genius scientist of such ability that he always has to consider whether he should, rather than whether he could. I’m not saying you’re a genius because Reed Richards isn’t just smart; his other superpower is elasticity. He can stretch, reshape, and mould his physical form to fit any situation.

This is what a metacognitive person does with their thoughts. While we all have our mental hang-ups, a metacognitive mind thinks about thinking like Reed Richards, viewing them with elasticity and the ability to tinker.

The standard introvert narrative focuses on ruminating in negative loops, ensuring their thinking becomes their own kryptonite. The metacognitive introvert uses thinking about thinking to tinker like Reed Richards: breaking loops, considering how one thinks, forging a different narrative, and seeing the world differently.

While Eileen uses this thinking-about-thinking to tinker with her thoughts and her relationship to sport, it doesn’t have to be about such extreme success. It can be about a creative mind focused on exploration and curiosity.

From audience to author

“Because it’s so interesting... you can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are... with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be.”

- Eileen Gu

When you encounter the misery porn narratives, I can’t help but imagine it as a bunch of introverts trapped in their own heads, like they’re strapped into a chair, forced to look at their thoughts like an old projector that constantly runs in front of their internal self, and they are subjected to the experience of these thoughts like an audience.

I guess I tend to think of it differently. I’m more a director or an author. I get to shape, frame, and establish what I think about these thoughts. Since I’m looking at it this way, I am trying to shape a story out of my thoughts and observations that feels substantially more positive than what's put forward on the internet.

An introvert in this metacognitive mode with few social anxieties can appear quite different.

You literally talk to yourself for hours. It’s why I can be on a cruise and define my own mental isolation, feel comfortable branching out and exploring when travelling or enjoy random, serendipitous conversations that I get to help shape and can leave at any time. All of these things then become a veritable feast in my head, along with things like role-playing games, reading, watching TV shows, and thinking about these videos.

Eileen is often seen as not an introvert because of her media presence. These things can be learned or even enjoyed in controlled circumstances. Introversion is about how you recharge, not necessarily social skills, talent or public confidence.

Breaking the narrative

“I get to become every day the kind of person that me at age eight would revere... I think that’s the biggest flex of all time, that you can have little younger you be proud of you today.”

- Eileen Gu

What traditionally happens at this point is a proclamation that Eileen Gu is not an introvert, as only introverts hiding from the world and wracked with social anxieties count, therefore proving a sort of circular truth.

You can be an introvert who feels like the traditional introvert narrative you find in communities is very alien to your life experience. You’re not shy, though I used to be. You don’t have social anxieties, though I had a few minor ones in the past. Your high locus of control and metacognitive nature may mean that how you think isn’t your kryptonite, but your superpower; like Reed Richards, you tinker, author, and direct it into the shape you want, backed by the neuroplasticity to make it a reality.

When I was younger, I’d send my brother to the store to buy the sweets I wanted. While there are many reasons I am different now than I was when I was younger, one is thinking about thinking: to be, like Eileen Gu suggests, a version of myself my younger, more anxious, driven self can be proud of today.

My entire life, I’ve prided myself on navigating complex situations. On finding a way forward and communicating through chaos, no matter how complicated things got. So how did someone whose whole sense of self is built on solving problems end up completely trapped by one?

The Video

This is the video from this article that made it to YouTube.

Welcome to the Void

Shutdown. Physical illness. Sleep that’s a form of hallucination for your brain in that it only pretends it’s doing it. Being unable to enjoy anything else because your brain wants to just exist in the most cognitively unchallenging world it can live in as a form of escape. You fall into a void, except in this reality, Florence Pugh isn’t going to jump into your trauma as a Russian superspy to pull you out of it.

So, you’re trapped in a situation you feel you can’t escape.

I’ve never felt trapped before. In all other situations where I’ve felt things were edging to this level of unhealthy, I’ve metaphorically told the situation to shove it, and I exited stage left. I prided myself on always being able to do that. Anything I’ve chosen to do, I was there because I wanted to be, not because I had to be. This was one I felt more trapped in, and it wasn’t good.

When Daisy Dog didn’t make it past Easter, I was just done.

I was off sick twice for around three days total purely for mental health reasons. I used my private health care to ring a psychologist. She recommended anxiety meds and a form of therapy I can’t remember now. I wasn’t in favour of the meds. I’m from a generation that wants to solve the problem, not permanently mask it with drugs (apparently the psychologist took them all the time, which was interesting). The paperwork for the sessions just never triggered for some reason.

People in the generations behind GenX probably can’t even imagine what it took to get me to do that. Even during my two years of underemployment after the financial crisis, which was pretty hard to deal with, I never got this far. I think I benefited from my wife and me navigating it together.

I guess I did have my Florence Pugh then.

So, how did I get to this point?

No Sign of Rescue

I tried; I really did. My GenX, metacognitive brain, and high locus of control wouldn’t let me believe there weren’t lanes I could engineer or find to exit the road I was on. I tried all the advice from the established narratives.

I tried applying all my usual skills, tactics and experiences to shape my environment back into something that didn’t expose all my triggers. I think I’m pretty good at that, but it never worked. I tried getting more rest, but as stated, this was hallucinatory and, yes, people suggested sleeping tablets, but this seemed to be masking the problem rather than dealing with it.

I tried to get more distance from things, but this isn’t really possible when you find yourself operating in structural conditions you don’t align with.

Take a break, come back refreshed. I took a couple of two-week breaks, which were great while I was on them but didn’t cure the problem. Nothing worked because nothing changed the fact that it was a temporary break from the trap, like a sort of extended-release that you knew was only short-term and the cell always waited.

It’s not all negative, as I’ve come to realise now, with some distance from it, that the things I didn’t believe helped at the time built a sort of subconscious momentum. The conversation with the psychologist, either because of its content or just because I’d tripped over the line into doing it, contributed. My trip with Havila Voyages up and down the Norwegian coast was so different from my everyday life that something started happening, even though I can’t consciously describe what.

I realised the true problem was that the environment in which I succeeded was taken away.

When Life Support Fails

One of the worst things that can happen on Star Trek is the imminent failure of life support, because you’re in the void of space, completely hostile to the human condition, and it’s the life support that keeps those intrepid explorers alive. It’s the same in life. If elements of your life support are stripped away, or the systems around you decide to change it to one more amenable to an alien species than you are screwed.

What I realised is that elements of my life support had gone. Unlike last time I experienced a trap I couldn’t easily escape, I’d lost my Florence Pugh literally a decade ago, then I lost my Krypto, and all this happened when my environment shifted so much it might as well have been for someone from Alph-Ceti-4.

So, what actually went wrong? The short answer is I’ve never operated in an environment where I lacked high context, architectural autonomy, and control over how things were undertaken, built and communicated. Take those away and my surrounding life support is altered to the point it verges on unsettling and stressful.

This creates a situation many people don’t understand, but it explains why established solutions don’t work.

People don’t get that existing in a low-context environment doesn’t give you the simplicity advantage it gives others. It makes things harder because you’re constantly seeking context to make sure you’re doing it right, rather than just doing what’s asked. My brain is excited about the internal map of how things relate to each other, often seeing things other people don’t; it’s the constellation that’s interesting, not the individual stars. I’ll burn energy like a dying star trying to see the constellation.

Everything I do in life is driven by authorship and agency. Everything. I don’t even have a single hobby that doesn’t involve literal authorship, and I abdicate it if agency is removed. It’s foundational. I can’t just do whatever I am told and have rarely had to.

As all life support settings are set to lower context, an inability to shape the chaos, a reduction in agency either directly or indirectly, my world shrinks, the walls of the metaphorical prison take shape, and my system goes into DEFCON 1.

There was only one solution.

Nuke the Site from Orbit

I came to the conclusion that the only solution was the one Corporal Hicks presented in Aliens: nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

As time allowed me to chip away at the reality of things, I came to the conclusion that when your environment becomes sufficiently different to the cognitive life support that keeps you breathing and engaged with life, you can’t go all Star Trek style and negotiate or mindfulness your way out of it.

You go Corporal Hicks.

It’s not a failure of your ability to persevere. It’s not that you’re failing at what you feel you’re good at. The only solution is total removal. The journey to this realisation was slow, and I’d say it’s even changed how I think about the future.

While I speculated in the title that resting more doesn’t fix burnout, I would say the right rest - the type you can have with considerable psychological distance for an extended period - may not solve the problem, but it can put you into the right frame of mind to understand what action you need to take.

If you’re watching this and you feel you’re in a similar situation, don’t let the standard narratives that you need more resilience or just need to recharge keep you in the trap. Sometimes you do, in a sensible, well-meaning and non-destructive way, need to nuke the site from orbit. As it may be, you’re operating in an environment where something has changed your life support.

Modern psychology says what gives me happiness is the pursuit of pleasure. What? I was like, where is my history of crazy parties, epic list of sexual partners and the odd visit to rehab? I’ve not even had a mid-life crisis, for God’s sake.

So, how did I get to this crazy idea that pleasure-seeking underpins my happiness? And how does something so off-target even help any of us?

Your Idol of Happiness

How do you find out what underpins your happiness? The idea is that everyone selects a single idol they worship, believing it will bring them satisfaction and fulfilment. This is known as the Four Idols framework

The four idols are: -

• Money

• Power

• Pleasure

• Fame.

To get to your primary idol, you do the following: -

• Identify the zero-value idol that you can just lose without thought

• Identify the one nice-to-have that you could drop

• Then engage in a Royal Rumble face-off of the final two

First, it was inevitable that I would cut Fame or Power. I chose to cut Power, as that doesn’t feel like me at all.

Second was harder, as it didn’t feel like Fame or Pleasure were my idols, so maybe it was Money? But I know I’ve actively not pursued a life focused on earning as much money as I can. I don’t even mean in some crazy millionaire sense, just in terms of maximising my wage-based earning potential. So that felt wrong as well. I decided to drop Fame. Okay, in the dim distant past I was recognised in Disney World due to my YouTube Channel, which was strange, so I ain’t seeking to be recognised on the street any time soon.

This left me with Money and Pleasure, and I certainly knew that, of those two, Money was sort of an enabler rather than something I pursued as a major driver, so I was left with Pleasure. At that point I just sat with it a bit confused.

Either this theory and process is groundless, or what I think of when I see the words money, power, pleasure and fame are completely wrong?

Origin of the Idols

In good old medieval Europe, Saint Thomas Aquinas established the Summa Theologica - basically, the things man substitutes for God. What can I say, Christian thought dominated almost everything, so wealth, pleasure, power and fame are viewed as substitutes for the divine, and this is why you’re miserable.

Money: Chasing material wealth, which only traps you in fear of losing it.

Pleasure: Seeking temporary sensory comfort requiring ever-larger doses that never truly satisfy.

Power: Trying to control your environment and others, which breeds constant paranoia and restlessness.

Fame: Relying on human approval for validation, making your worth a slave to the fleeting opinions of others.

It’s easy to discount this theory of Christian yore, but two things. Most of us accept that these things won’t lead to happiness in their negative forms, even outside of the Christian framing. It’s probably one of the challenges I was having. But here is the second thing: what if power, money, fame and pleasure have been re-interpreted not as things that distract you from the divine but as positive things that can act as a foundation for your happiness?

Does this explain why I’ve not ended up in rehab, or is it still confusing?

Modern Age Idols

The truth is, I shouldn’t have jumped into the process without really digging into how the words were being defined. What can I say? I was excited, and I jumped in immediately after hearing about it on a podcast. I’m human.

Modern thinking is more positive and diagnostic. They are drives to be understood.

Money: The desire to accumulate resources and to secure your future against an unpredictable world.

Pleasure: The instinct to minimise pain and enjoy sensory comfort to protect your daily peace of mind.

Power: The need for personal autonomy and agency, ensuring you have the freedom to direct your own life.

Fame: The deeply human need for social connection and community respect, validating your place in the tribe.

Now, I don’t know about any of you, but this starts to make more sense and totally reshapes the process. While I was making decisions under less-than-clear definitions, I think I got the right answer. I’d rank my priorities under the modern definitions as: -

• Pleasure

• Money

• Power

• Fame

Pleasure re-lensed as a way to ensure comfort and protect your peace makes perfect sense. It also explains why I’m very unlikely to go on a drug-fueled bender as long as an addiction to Mudslides when on cruises doesn’t count.

I do value money, but as a way to provide stability rather than trying to get as much as I can. Money is like my deflector shield for my peace and contentment.

The last two are close. There isn’t much in it, to be fair. I do see autonomy, agency, and respect for my opinions as important. The fact that I spend time producing YouTube videos and writing these articles has some of those elements, right? I’m prepared to admit that. So it got third place.

Pleasure makes perfect sense, as all the others are foundations for it rather than the top of the tree.

The Epicurean Twist

We’re going back in time again. Way before the Middle Ages and back 2,300 years, to ancient Greece.

Epicurus founded Epicureanism, a philosophy centred on achieving a tranquil, happy life. His definition of pleasure was focused on the absence of pain rather than indulgence or giving the latest hallucinogenic plant a go. It was all about living simply, cultivating close friendships, analysing fears rationally (especially the fear of death and gods), and moderating desires.

The poor guy just wanted to live simply on the outskirts of Athens away from the chaos of public life.

Now, Epicurean tends to mean someone who is a connoisseur of luxury, a “foodie,” or has gourmet tastes. Needless to say, I find the first definition more appealing than the second.

What Is Your Idol?

So, here is the question: if you were to go through this process yourself, what would your idol be? How has this made you reflect on your life?

It may surprise you.