Modern Life
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Memes Won’t Save Men from Suicide. Real Connection Might.
We’re drowning in mental health content while men are quietly dying. Something isn’t adding up. Every day, millions of people scroll past a graphic that says “check on your friend.” They might tap it, feel a brief warm glow, and keep scrolling. Meanwhile, in the UK, multiple men die by suicide every single day. We’ve…
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AI Slop is Not New, Just Industrialised
The behaviour came first, the label arrived later. For many years, lazy and shady people have been building “channels” by scraping other people’s clips, Reddit posts, pet videos, podcast moments and news footage, then stitching them into compilations with a new title, thumbnail and maybe a watermark. AI simply took that lazy mentality and put…
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Why Social Media Feels Draining and Addictive
There’s a quiet shift that’s happened over the last couple of decades. Most people feel it, but struggle to explain it without sounding like they’re just “moaning about Facebook”. What Roy Baumeister has done, whether people agree with every word or not, is give it a bit of backbone. Not opinions. Not vibes. Actual psychological framing. And…
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The Quiet Mess Behind “Smart” Doorbell Cameras
The tech companies want you to believe your fifty quid door camera makes you safer. In reality, you might be installing a 24/7 surveillance device for other people’s benefit, handing out free intelligence to burglars, and feeding a data machine that knows more about your life than your neighbours do. This isn’t tinfoil hat stuff.…
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The Great AI Pivot: Everyone’s an Expert Now
We’re closing in on the end of 2024 and the AI grift is in full swing. Anyone with a few followers, or a few million, has gradually pivoted into talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as if they are seasoned experts. But let’s be honest, most of them haven’t a bloody clue what they’re talking about.…
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Stop Calling AI Tools Cheating, You’re Missing the Point
The question comes up now and then. “Do you use ChatGPT?” It’s asked with this peculiar mixture of curiosity and judgement, as though admitting to using AI tools is some sort of confession. The implication hangs there: using ChatGPT means you’re cheating, taking shortcuts, or somehow diminishing the value of your work. That attitude is…
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Why Long-Form Articles Matter in a Soundbite World
I was recently asked “Why Are Your Articles So Long?” It’s a blooming good question. Short answer: because they need to be. I research. Properly. I don’t throw half-baked opinions into the void and call it content. I build context, ask awkward questions, dig for angles that don’t fit the usual narrative, and refuse to…
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Why I Don’t Watch Porn and Feel Fine About It
Around 80 percent of men consume online pornography. I haven’t looked at it in decades – not from moral outrage, not from purity, just because somewhere along the way it stopped meaning anything. This is a personal account of what that position actually feels like, what it costs, and why awareness changes more than just…
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Webcams With Wandering Backgrounds Are Utter Nonsense
Somewhere in a meeting room, a group of very pleased-with-themselves tech people decided that what video calls really needed was a camera that stalks your face around the frame like a budget Spielberg shot. Auto-framing, eye-tracking, magical “keep you in the centre” nonsense. Clever demo. Terrible experience. The sort of distracting and annoying thing that…
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The Social Media Paradox – What Happened to Reciprocity?
What happened to “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”? For over six years I’ve been running a local community website, Facebook page and Facebook Group with over 12,000 people. In that time I’ve quietly promoted countless local businesses. Loads of them. Most I’ve never met. Most don’t even know I exist because I do…