Shantideva, an 8th century Buddhist monk, wrote something I keep coming back to. If a problem can be fixed, why be unhappy about it? And if it can't be fixed, what use is being unhappy about it? It's in his Bodhicaryavatara, chapter 6, verse 10. I thought about that after listening to a podcast this week about the telegraph. In the same way the railway made the world smaller, so did the telegraph. The first public steam railway opened in 1825 and Morse's Washington to Baltimore line was demonstrated in 1844. The railway made it quicker to travel between two points, and the telegraph made it quicker to send a message and, of course, news. On 1 May 1844, news of a party nomination reached Washington 64 minutes before the train that was carrying it. A Civil War podcast I listen to said people didn't know the American Civil War had ended until weeks afterwards, and that some people didn't even know it had started. Now we know within seconds when Donald Trump says something questionable. If a farmer in the Australian outback found an alien ship, we'd know that in seconds too. I believe technology is neither good nor bad, it depends on who uses it and why. But I don't think our brains are built to deal with this much information. It reminds me of a story Annie Dillard tells in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. An Inuit hunter asks a missionary priest whether he'd go to hell if he had never known about God and sin. The priest says no, not if you didn't know. The hunter asks, "Then why did you tell me?" Dillard says she can't remember where she read it. Is ignorance bliss? I'm starting to think it might be. I've always been left wing. I believe that once education, health and the law are fully funded and never short of money, the rest can be a free market. Even so, I've caught myself arguing with Reform voters about the Makerfield by-election, which doesn't affect me. Was the time worth it? Stress releases cortisol, and I was getting wound up arguing with someone who'll only double down when they hear facts, because they feel attacked. Was that worth it? And why am I this worked up about Trump? I can't change anything he does. Shantideva would say I'm wasting my time.

A week that should have changed minds and didn't Undercover reporters from Channel 4 and the investigative outfit Verbatim filmed Reform's head of policy James Orr and Farage aide Dan Jukes talking to someone they thought was an American donor. Orr was recorded saying Farage "doesn't know, won't know. It's the kind of thing he would rather not know." They discussed funding opinion polls through the donor rather than directly, and a further £500,000 donation that in the end was never paid. Foreign donations to UK parties are illegal under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Both men resigned, and Reform has been reported to the Met and the Electoral Commission. Two days later, at the party conference in Birmingham, a protester who stood up during Farage's speech was pulled out by security while people around her grabbed her hair and jaw, and one attendee hit her with a walking stick. Farage laughed and called her "a screamer." Robert Jenrick's response when asked about it was "oh, boo hoo." West Midlands Police are appealing for her to come forward. You'd expect a story like that to cost a party support. It didn't. That's the part that does a logical mind's head in. Your brain doesn't experience being wrong. It experiences being attacked. In 2016, researchers Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris put 40 people with strong political convictions into an MRI scanner and showed them evidence that contradicted their beliefs. The study, published in Scientific Reports, found that the regions lighting up when people refused to budge were the amygdala and the insula, the same regions that activate when someone is facing a physical threat. Being shown that you might be wrong doesn't register in the brain as new information. It registers as danger. Facts aren't landing in the part of the brain that does reasoning. They're landing in the part that does threat. Why arguing with your mate doesn't work If someone close to you has been pulled into this, sending them articles is fighting the wrong battle. It isn't an information gap. You're not up against what they know, you're up against a threat response, and you can't out argue an amygdala.

I was diagnosed with bipolar in 2011. Years later, that got reclassified as cyclothymic mood disorder, which is basically the same beast wearing a quieter name. I've also spent my whole life around people close to me with mental illness. If you're waiting for me to tell you there was something quirky or interesting buried in that, there wasn't. It's miserable. It's painful. That's the whole story, no silver lining hiding underneath it. The Satellite Thing I saw an exchange online that stuck with me. Someone pointed out that in 1960, one in 200 people were diagnosed as autistic, and now it's one in 30. Somebody else came back with this: there were about 40 near-Earth satellites decades ago; now there's something like 47,000. Do you blame the telescopes for that? The point landed. We're not looking at an epidemic; we're looking at better instruments. Better diagnostic criteria, more awareness, doctors who aren't just handing out one label for everything that doesn't fit neatly. The sky didn't fill up with more objects because we built better telescopes. We just finally started seeing what was already there. I bring that up because the same logic gets used against people with mental illness, except backwards and badly. People treat a diagnosis like it's inflation, like everyone's just calling normal life a disorder now. They don't say that about diabetes or asthma. They save it for the stuff they can't see. The Comparison Problem There is nothing worse when you're struggling with an illness than someone saying "we're all a bit like that" or "we all have our ups and downs." Imagine saying that to someone having an asthma attack. "I had a bad chest once." Imagine saying it to someone on crutches. "I hurt my knee two years ago; it was murder." It sounds like sympathy in your own head, but what actually comes out is a worse version of their story—a billy-better-story. You're not connecting with them. You're competing with them, and they're too polite or too exhausted to tell you that's what just happened.

David Attenborough, aged 100, is out on the African savannah filming a massive, majestic lion with the help of his twenty something cameraman Tony. Filming from a safe distance, the lion turns its maned head, growls at the pair, and starts padding towards them. Attenborough calmly puts on some running trainers and heads off. Tony shouts, "What are you doing? You can never outrun a lion." Attenborough retorts, "As long as I outrun you, Tony, I don't give a shit." At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post, this has been a key metaphor for me since I stopped drinking. All you have to do is get a headstart on the person you were yesterday. The Hole Where the Monster Used To Be When you stop an addiction or a toxic trait, you find yourself with a lot of time, more like a large hole in your life where you no longer have to feed the monster. Willpower will get you past a few weeks. Discipline might get you a bit further. But when boredom sets in, you might let the monster you locked up back out of its cage. Stop Calling It a Monster Imagine if you didn't see it as a monster at all. Just a trap you fell into, like a dark pond. Gradually you learn to swim, you get better at it day by day, and eventually you're swimming alongside what you used to think was a monster. Now you see it for what it actually is: a highly marketed, socially normalised trap that charges you far more than it ever gives back. How Long It Actually Takes You'll hear that it takes 28 days to build a habit. That's not true, and it's worth knowing why, because expecting a habit to click into place after four weeks and then feeling like a failure when it doesn't is exactly the kind of thing that makes people give up. The 28 day (or 21 day) claim didn't come from any research on habits. It came from a 1960 book by a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz, who noticed his patients took around three weeks to stop being startled by their new face in the mirror. That got twisted into a habit rule over the decades and it stuck, because it's a nice tidy number.