I turn 50 in two months. I've got two daughters in their twenties, one at uni and one working a job that would once have been solid and secure, the kind of role that used to come with a pension and a future, but now offers barely any security at all. And I'm fed up watching people over 35 dish out advice to them like the world hasn't changed since we were that age. It has. Massively. And pretending otherwise isn't wisdom, it's laziness. Thing is, this isn't even new. There's an inscription on an ancient Egyptian tomb, thousands of years old, that reads something like "we live in a decadent age, young people no longer respect their parents." Seneca was saying the same thing two thousand years ago, moaning that the young men of his time had "grown soft and effeminate" and didn't work like his generation did. Every single generation looks at the one coming up behind it and decides they're the first ones to go soft. They're not. It's the oldest lie in the book, and people my age and older are repeating it word for word. You're All Lazy - The Work Ethic Myth Nobody's ever wanted to work. That's why it's called work and not fun. My generation didn't graft any harder than my daughters do, we just had it easier and won't admit it. My eldest is grinding through a job that used to mean stability and now comes with none, no real contract security, no guarantee she'll still have it next year. My youngest is at uni watching the goalposts move on what a degree is even meant to guarantee her by the time she's done. Neither of them is short on effort. What's short is the payoff. Telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps assumes there's a ladder there to climb. When your wage barely covers rent, there's nothing left over to save with, no matter how many hours you put in. You hear blokes down the pub talk about the earned pint, how it tastes sweeter after a hard day's graft, when you've built something and stood shoulder to shoulder with your mates. That only works if your labour actually means something. If you're cheap and replaceable, or your job could disappear in a restructure next quarter, the pint doesn't taste like anything.

Depression isn't loud. Not most of the time. It's a hum, low and persistent. A dull ache in the soul that makes everything feel heavier, slower, harder. Some days it's barely noticeable. Other days, it wraps around your chest and squeezes until even breathing feels like a chore. This chapter is about those days and what to do with them. There's a a strange little Canadian superhero called Puck. You don't know him unless you're into the deeper cuts of the Marvel Universe. He's not flashy. He's short, scrappy, scarred. Not the sort of character who usually gets the spotlight. But his story says something powerful about pain and about endurance. Puck, whose real name is Eugene Judd, lives in constant physical agony. Not metaphorically, literally. His body locked in a state of suffering after trapping a dark, magical entity inside himself to save others. Every day, he wakes up in pain. Every move, every breath, hurts. But he doesn't stop moving. What makes Puck remarkable isn't a shiny superpower. It's that he fights through pain, not by ignoring it, not by numbing it, but by focusing past it. It's a form of mental discipline that's deeply human. It says: Yes, this hurts. But it does not own me. Pain Doesn't Have to Be the Enemy Mental anguish isn't so different from chronic physical pain. It drains your energy, messes with your memory, robs you of joy. Depression lies. It tells you nothing will ever change. That your thoughts are truth. That the feeling you're in right now is permanent. Learning to focus past the pain means accepting its presence without letting it control you. You don't have to fight it directly. You don't have to pretend it's not there. But you can learn to move through it. This is not toxic positivity. This isn't "just think happy thoughts." This is about developing the mental muscle to stay standing even when you're carrying weight you didn't ask for. It's choosing to take the next breath. To stand up. To reply to that text. To take a shower. To show up for the things that matter. Not because you feel great. But because you're still here and that means there's still a choice.

There's a story from the Zhuangzi, a Daoist text written around the 4th century BCE, in a chapter called "The Mountain Tree." A man is crossing a wide river in a small boat. Another boat drifts out of the mist and crashes into his. He's furious. He shouts. He's ready to have a go at whoever's responsible. Then he looks up and sees the other boat is empty. No one's in it. It slipped its mooring somewhere upstream and drifted down on its own. His anger disappears. Not because the collision didn't happen, not because his boat isn't dented, but because there's no one to be angry at. You can't have a row with an empty boat. Why This Story Gets Misquoted Constantly You'll see this floating around social media as a Buddhist parable, sometimes even attributed directly to the Buddha. It isn't. It's Daoist, from Zhuangzi, and it predates Buddhism's arrival in China by centuries. The reason it gets mixed up is that Buddhist teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh being the most well known, have used it for decades because it captures something close to the Buddhist idea of the "second arrow": the first hit is the event, the second hit is the story you tell yourself about the event. Different traditions, same insight. Worth knowing which one you're quoting if you want to be accurate about it. The Same Collision, Two Different Reactions The whole point of the story is that the event doesn't change. Your boat gets hit either way. The dent is the same size. What changes is whether you decide someone did it to you. An empty boat gets a shrug. A boat with someone steering it gets a fist and a shout, even if that person genuinely couldn't help it, even if they were asleep at the tiller or fighting their own currents you know nothing about. This is worth sitting with if you've ever spent an evening raging about someone who cut you off in traffic, someone who didn't reply to your message, someone who let you down at your lowest point. The damage to you is real. But how much of the second layer of pain, the fury, the replaying it in your head at 2am, comes from the story you've built about their intent rather than the actual event?

There's a certain type of man who thinks the measure of masculinity is how ready you are to fight. He'll tell you it's about protecting your family. He'll tell you his daughter's boyfriend better watch himself. He'll tell you the world is one bad night away from turning on you, and you'd better be ready. None of it holds up. Start with the daughter's boyfriend bit, because it's the most tired one. If you've raised your daughter properly, she doesn't need you standing on the doorstep sizing up whoever she brings home. She needs to trust her own judgement. She needs to know that if something's wrong, she can tell you and you'll believe her, not that you'll go round making a scene and calling it protection. Threatening a teenage boy isn't parenting. It's a performance for an audience that isn't there. Then there's the bigger claim, that you need to be able to fight to keep your family safe. Weights don't make you tough. A six pack doesn't make you tough. The ability to think clearly when things go wrong does that, and that's a completely different skill to how much you can bench. If self defence matters to you, and I think it does, the answer isn't shadow boxing in your garage or watching UFC and imagining yourself in the cage. It's proper sparring, in a controlled environment, over a sustained block, at least 12 weeks, with people who'll correct you when you're wrong and won't let your ego run the session. You don't come out of that a hard man. You come out of it able to think under pressure, which is the actual point. I'd rather my kids learn to be a mediocre martial artist than never set foot on a mat. Not because they need to fight. Because the training teaches you what a real confrontation actually feels like, and most people have no idea. Watch enough CCTV footage of actual fights, not the choreographed nonsense in films, and you'll see how fast, ugly, and unglamorous they are. Nobody wins clean. Everybody looks stupid. That's the reality behind the fantasy the loud voices are selling.