David Charles

How to set up a free custom email address using Gmail

2017-09-08T17:14:00.003+01:00

Have you always dreamed of having your own custom email address, but never wanted to shell out £50 a year in hosting? Well, now's your chance!

This hack uses an app called Mailgun in combination with a personal Gmail account. You don't need to know exactly how it works (I don't), but it helps to be familiar with the concept of DNS records - and know how to change them with your domain host.

The following steps should be read with reference to the original source at Simply Ian. That page is pretty much accurate, but a few details have changed since 2015. If anything, the process is even easier!

One final warning: when you sign up to Mailgun, you do have to enter your bank details. They will only charge you if you send / receive more than 10,000 emails a month. And if that's you, then please stop spamming me.

Buy your custom domain if you don't already have one. I use Godaddy so can guarantee this hack works with them. This is the only cost associated with the process. EXAMPLE: I buy www.monkeytennis.biz.
Set up a Gmail account if you don't already have one. EXAMPLE: I set up monkeytennis@gmail.com.

Note: This will probably work with other suppliers like Outlook, but I haven't tested it. Be my guest and let us know.

Sign up to Mailgun using the Gmail address you'll use to manage the account.
Click Domains at the top, then Add New Domain.
Type in your new domain. Ignore what it says about subdomains. EXAMPLE: monkeytennis.biz.
The next page will tell you how to set up your DNS records.
Open a new tab and go back to your domain host to set up those DNS records.

Note: If you get an error (I got plenty), just refresh the page and check to see if your entry is there after all. Chances are it will be. Proceed.
Note: This is the most difficult bit of the whole shebang. Keep the faith.

Back in Mailgun, you can now click through and check that your domain has been verified. Is everything set up okay? Great.
Also in Mailgun, set up a Route. Click Routes at the top, then Create Route.
On the next page, you want to keep Expression Type as Catch All. Simply tick the Forward option box and enter your Gmail address. Then press Create Route.
Next you want to set up your SMTP credentials. Click back to Domains at the top and select your domain. Then under Domain Information, click Manage SMTP Credentials.
On the next page, click New SMTP Credential.
Now enter the username and password you want to use for your new domain, then click Create Credential. Be inventive! EXAMPLE: Login: alan@monkeytennis.biz Password: norwichlegend.
Now zap on over to your Gmail account settings.
Under the section headed Send Mail As, click Add Another Email Address. Insert your desired name and your new email address. Keep that box ticked. Go to the next page. EXAMPLE: Name: Alan Partridge. Email Address: alan@monkeytennis.biz.
Here you want to change the server to smtp.mailgun.org (I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but that's what I've done). Your username is your new email address in full and your password is whatever you set up in step 13.

Holy haddock - we've finished!

One last thing you might want to do is make your new spangly custom email address the default, so your emails are sent from this address as standard. If so, then go back to your Gmail account settings and click Make Default next to your new email address. If you're not sure on this final piece of the jigsaw, check out this guide on Lifewire.

Finally, you might want to test the shit out of your new email address. Go ahead and thank me: david at david charles dot info. You're welcome.

What are we waiting for? A Box Hill Microadventure

2017-08-27T14:17:00.000+01:00

When was the last time you caught a train to nowhere, walked across fields and up a hill, before sleeping out under the stars?

That was the question I was asking myself after finishing last week's piece on A.I.. The next question was: What are you waiting for?

Turned out there were a few things to wait for (my sister's birthday, house admin, a statistics exam), but yesterday afternoon I finally boarded a train for Epsom, 8 miles from a hill.

I won't bore you with the mile by mile photogallery because who cares. I'd just ask you the same questions I found myself asking last week:

When was the last time you caught a train to nowhere, walked across fields and up a hill, before sleeping out under the stars?

What are you waiting for?

Maybe you don't care for a walk and a hill. Fine, whatever you're into. But if any part of you is wondering, then here's some encouragement from what I learned last night.

DO take a stove for a cup of tea in the morning. I use an MSR pocket rocket (a superb gift!). It's well worth the weight for a morning warmer.
DO jump into any rivers, lakes or puddles. Paddle, wade and swim if you can. You never regret taking the swim.
DO swing on rope swings if you're lucky enough to pass one. YES.
DON'T bother with walking boots. They're hot and heavy. I used cheap walking sandals (without the back straps) and my boots stayed in my bag (still heavy).
DON'T take a tent. Are you insane?
DO take a bivvy bag. I use the excellent but tightly fitting Alpkit Hunka (also a superb gift!). Only use it if it actually rains. A sleeping bag and a sleeping mat are fine otherwise. My sleeping bag: cheap Eurohike. My sleeping mat: expensive Thermarest. Both well worth the money.
DO find level ground. Tempting as the hill views are, I can never sleep on a slope.
DO take a sleep mask. The stars are really distracting. ;)

2040: Don't Worry, Be Happy

2017-08-18T16:15:00.000+01:00

I've been reading a lot about Artifical Intelligence recently. It's a topic that has a way of capturing the mind. Not surprising given the mind-boggling timeline:

We're already surrounded by Artificial Narrow Intelligence, software that can do one thing really really well. Like suggest films, books and music you might enjoy, help drive your car and make sure your home is warm when you get home from work.

Loads of clever people and well-funded businesses are - right now while you're sitting there reading this email - working on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), software that's as good as humans at managing complex ideas, solving abstract problems - and, critically, learning from experience.

The average estimate for when those clever people will crack AGI is 2040 - that's 23 years from now. If that seems hard to believe, go back to 1994 and tell your younger self that in 23 years they'll have a device that'll give them instant access to a library of millions of books, films and songs, that'll track their location, monitor all their communications and upload that data for MI5 to keep for eternity, and that can build 3-D virtual worlds where they can interact with real and virtual people. Oh and it'll be the size of a chequebook. (While you're there, you might as well tell them that chequebooks won't exist any more either. If that doesn't blow their mind...)

So now we've got AGI - and plenty of people believe it'll happen before 2040, by the way. From this point on, by definition, computers will be able to do everything humans can do.

In fact, because they can learn from experience and don't have down-time ("sleep", "eat", "get bored") it will take [insert short span of time - could be a few years, could be a few hours] for this AGI to reach super-intelligence.

Super-intelligence is incomprehensible to us lowly humans. It's like us trying to imagine what life must be like for an ant. Except we're the ant.

An Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) could solve ALL THE PROBLEMS. Including death. Or it could basically fuck everything up royally. It depends how they're coded by those boffins in Step 2. To be honest, I'm pessimistic. Those boffins in Step 2 are still human and are mostly just trying to have fun / get laid / win fame and glory / pay the bills / become masters of the universe. And the idea of controlling an ASI after the fact is laughable. It's super-intelligent - it's not going to be fooled by an on/off switch!

At this point, all bets are off. It's a coin flip: either we get immortality (some of us at least) or we get oblivion (all of us, definitely).

This isn't necessarily as doom-laden as it sounds, or as Sci-Fi likes to make out for the purposes of making money with a scary story. As the comprehensively fascinating article by Tim Urban at Wait But Why? suggests, we're all heading for oblivion anyway, so why not take a punt on ASI saving us? ASI would not only solve death, but climate change, the refugee crisis, food shortages and famine, over-population, Donald Trump, all human misery, war and peace and the colonisation of Mars. It could be quite good.

But this is the big picture. ASI doesn't currently have much direct day-to-day relevance for me or many people I know. I'm not a computer scientist or an ethical philosopher. I have no influence over the progress or direction of AI. Nevertheless, AI raises a heck of a lot of questions that are of indirect relevance to all of us - and of profound, pretty much insurmountable importance to everyone under the age of about 65.

Am I really happy with how I'm spending my time, given that ASI is more than likely to render all my human efforts absurdly pathetic within my expected life time?

How am I going to get my head around the fact that ASI will be able to do comedy and writing a lot better than me? (Not hard, fnar, fnar!)

What niche can I find that won't be swallowed up by ASI? (A: There is none.)

Should I worry about my long term health, or just about surviving until ASI has solved disease and ageing?

Do I need to relax about politics and just leave it for ASI to sort out?

Is there a problem here that I could delegate all my motivating worries to ASI and end up in a miserable purposeless funk? Or is this the ultimate a capella triumph of Don't worry, be happy?

Are we all just setting the scene for ASI? What kind of world do I want to bequeath to ASI?

What will happen when the one biological imperative that we all share - to procreate and pass on our genes - is rendered futile because ASI means we can live forever?

Do I really need to invest in a pension that'll give dividends for eternity?

I'll be 58 when ASI is expected to hit. Old enough to witness the horror and glory, too old perhaps to really exploit its strengths given that I'm a writer, not a computer scientist.

Strangely enough, I do take comfort from the idea that ASI will shortly blow into our lives. It puts things into perspective: I am a tiny blot on the surface of the universe. I am an organism, just doing the things that organisms do. The pressure's off.

No Shampoo

2017-07-14T17:07:00.000+01:00

I haven't used shampoo or conditioner on my hair for 3 months. (Or body wash, shower gel or anything other than soap to clean the rest of me!)

This doesn't mean I'm a greasy mop-head of dreadlocks and dandruff. As far as I can tell, my hair is identical (except a couple of inches longer).

So what's my secret? I use a little mixture of bicarbonate of soda for shampoo, and a similar concoction with lemon juice to condition. It works.

It's not about money. 500ml of Boots shampoo only costs 75p. That runs my Spartan regime close, to be honest.

It's about why? Why buy another lump of plastic full of plasticky ingredients to do mysterious things I don't understand to my body?

Presumably, the answer to that question should be: because it gets great results, better than doing something more simple. But, as my experiment shows, that's not even remotely true.

I can't tell the difference. Actually, I can a bit. My hair doesn't smell of fake perfume. It smells faintly of lemons.

From this experiment, I've learnt what I always knew: I don't need my shampoo to contain preservatives, thickeners or additives to make the liquid pearlescent or create a pleasing lather. That's basically all marketing fluff. Here's Pantene Pro-V:

Water, Ammonium Lauryl Sulfate, Ammonium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Chloride, Cocamide MEA, Glycol Distearate, Dimethicone, Fragrance, Panthenol, Panthenyl Ethyl Ether, Cetyl Alcohol, Polyquaternium-10, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Benzoate, Ammonium Xylenesulfonate, Disodium EDTA, PEG-7M, Citric Acid, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone

God knows what it's doing to our hair. I don't.

But now I do know how my shampoo and conditioner works. The bicarb contains loads of sodium which wicks dirt away from the scalp. The acidic lemon juice is just to balance out that alkaline and really does smooth out the feel of the hair.

Simple.

SHAMPOO RECIPE:
Get an old bottle. Put in a scoop of bicarb. Fill up with water from the tap or shower. Shake the bottle and pour onto your scalp. Massage a bit and then rinse.

CONDITIONER RECIPE:
Get another old bottle. Squeeze some lemon juice in. Fill up with water from the tap or shower. Shake the bottle and apply to the body of hair. Massage a bit and then rinse.

Vary your regime to suit your hair. You can use any acid for the conditioner; some people use cider vinegar. But why would you do that when you can use lovely lemons?

I find a 500ml bottle lasts for about 5 shampoos.

For a great introduction to No Poo Hair, see: http://theartofsimple.net/how-to-clean-your-hair-without-shampoo/

Counselling, Meditation and Psychedelics

2017-07-07T13:39:00.000+01:00

Some of you probably know that, over the past 10 weeks, I've been studying person-centred counselling at the CityLit in London.

Some of you are perhaps also aware that I've recently (re)turned to mindfulness meditation to manage stress levels, as part of a concerted campaign against elevated Thyroid Peroxidase antibodies in my bloodstream.

And probably all of you know that over the last couple of years I've been investigating the transpersonal potential of psychedelics.

What I am slowly realising, however, is how tightly these three areas are woven together.

The importance of counselling to the psychedelic experience

I always knew that my psychedelic experience in Amsterdam last September certainly contributed to my decision to enroll on the counselling course, but now I'm wondering if the connection is stronger than I realised.

A positive psychedelic experience is almost entirely determined by the set (the substance used and dosage) and setting (one's internal psychological and external physical environment). One element of setting that was particularly important to my experience was the presence of calm and capable facilitators who could hold the space while I temporarily left reality and ego behind.

This is exactly the role of the counsellor following the person-centred approach of Carl Rogers. The Rogerian counseller offers empathy, congruence (authenticity) and unconditional positive regard to the client. The idea is that these core conditions sufficiently ground the client that they are able to find their own way through their problems and come to a place of authenticity and self-actualisation for themselves.

Rather than giving the client any solution, the person-centred counsellor holds the space so that the client can discover solutions that are true for themselves. Similarly, a psychedelic experience cannot be dictated by another person. You will have your own unique experience and encounter whatever is true for you - not what is true for me or any teacher, counsellor or guru. (Your choice of substance will have a say in what you experience, but that's not my point here!)

The importance of meditation to the psychedelic experience

Researchers at Imperial College have found that the psychedelic experience is most fertile or prolific when in a state of surrender or acceptance. This is where meditation comes in: the mindful practice of acceptance of the present moment.

If you are able to surrender yourself to experience, you are more likely to have a unitary experience under psychedelics. It is these unitary (or mystical-type) experiences that are the best predictors of sustained improvements in mental health and well-being.

The idea that meditative practice facilitates psychedelic experience also chimes with its traditional religious-spiritual use - not to mention the observation that psychedelics and Eastern philosophy, including meditation, seem to walk hand in hand wherever I look!

The importance of meditation to counselling

I believe meditation can also help person-centred counsellors maintain those core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard.

During skills practice on my course, my mind often drifted away from the listener and onto other things. Am I doing this right? Why am I leaning forward? What's the observer writing about my performance?

The principles I'd noticed during meditation helped me gather myself and refocus on the listener, allow the skills to act through me rather than being distracted by concerns about my performance.

The important of psychedelic experience to meditation

Psychedelics are certainly strongly positive to your practice of meditation. There is no time or space while inside the psychedelic experience: there is only the here-now, identical to the everywhere-when.

In 2010, I went on a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat in Herefordshire. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life, but I did very little meditation and did not continue the practice after the end of the course. Although I took many valuable lessons from the retreat, I could see no benefit from the mental work of meditation itself.

Fast-forward to 2017 and I resume some form of meditation for stress-relief. But the real breakthrough didn't come until last weekend at the Breaking Convention, when I sat down in front of a machine fired powerful white LED lights at my pineal gland.

Lucia No. 3 is a light therapy that stimulates something like a psychedelic experience. Although the light is unquestionably white to the outside observer, in my mind's eye that light split into the full spectrum of all colours and morphed in ever-changing kaleidoscopic patterns.

During a 17-minute session under this light, I had my first experience of true meditation. I wasn't trying to meditate, but I just noticed that nothing beyond this moment was real. All my tension, anxiety and suffering dissolved, predicated as it was in either past or future. In this moment there was nothing but the shapes and colours in my mind, the sounds in my headphones, the touch of the seat beneath me, and the warmth and scent of the room.

It was a moment of revelation, not unlike the revelations of unity and connection that I felt under psychedelics.

These moments are essential to what Carl Rogers called self-actualisation: a state of flourishing that is the goal of all life on earth. But you can't access a state of being without knowing that it is there and a glimpse, like I had with Lucia 3.0, makes all the difference.

Knowing that such a meditative state is possible for me without the use of psychedelics has made it accessible in my meditation in a way that it never was previously - not even after a 10-day Vipassana retreat.

The importance of psychedelic experience to counselling

I believe that counselling, meditation and psychedelic use are mutually supporting and reinforcing practices. For some people, including myself, I believe that they are each uniquely essential to self-actualisation.

Psychedelics emphatically open up for the first time previously unimaginable possibilities of being. Meditation can both help you surrender to the potential of psychedelics, and continue the work once you have come back to reality.

Meanwhile, counselling and counsellors hold the space so that there is a reality to come back to. In turn, psychedelic use can show counsellors how to connect with empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard to their clients.

A 2017 Imperial College study found that, after taking psilocybin for their depression, patients reported increased "connectedness" and "acceptance". My own subjective experience is that this increase is certainly not limited to people with depression. I believe that such an experience would be invaluable to person-centred counsellors.

(And I'm not alone. Dr Andrea Zeuch believes that anyone working in an Intensive Care Unit should have had a psychedelic experience to help them understand and better care for their patients.)

It's a position that's hard to explain in writing, so I will leave you with two quotes from Carl Rogers, the founder of the person-centred approach to counselling, and from Alan Watts, a scholar known for popularising both Eastern philosophy and the use of psychedelics.

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” – Alan Watts.

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” ― Carl R. Rogers

I'd be amazed if Carl Rogers himself had never taken a psychedelic!

Foiled Episode 1: Everything's Kings (BBC Radio)

2017-06-29T12:57:00.000+01:00

This is mad, isn't it? A year ago I was in the London Welsh Centre, watching rehearsals for a hair-based theatre comedy called 'Foiled'. Being one of the writers, I loved every minute - but I never expected The Stage would call it 'the perfect comedy' in a 5-star review.

That was dreamy enough, but imagine being given a BBC Radio series! Insane. And it's being broadcast TOMORROW.

YES - Saturday the 1st of July at 1pm.

Without any further messing about, here's the link to Episode 1: Everything's Kings.

Episodes 2-4 will delight and amaze on the three subsequent Saturdays in July - and yes, don't worry, if you join my mailing list I will be furnishing you with direct links every Friday. ;)

Also, no need to panic if you have alternate plans working/sleeping/frisbeeing at 1pm on a Saturday - all the episodes will be available to download for listening at your convenience. I believe that BBC Radio is even operational overseas. So if you find yourself abroad, don't be inconvenienced - just put your headphones on and enjoy.

And if you do enjoy, feel abundantly free to share the love with friends. The whole cast are on Twitter and it's a fact that actors don't need food if they have praise. You can find them all on this list.

Huge thanks, as ever, to YOU for supporting Foiled from Day 1. Me and Beth would also like to thank everyone who has been on the crew of the good ship Foiled in the last 18 months, particularly Tom O'Brien who directed the Edinburgh show, and Dom Morgan who played Richie.

Here's to many more voyages!

The Science of Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience

2017-05-11T12:40:00.000+01:00

“I don't take reality for granted.”

Weird stuff happens. People really do experience telepathy, alien abduction and pre-cognition.

In the UK, we usually push such stories to one side and either forget about them, or (worse) medicate them. David Luke, Senior Lecturer for Psychology at the University of Greenwich tries to understand them.

I'm in the back room at Cafe 1001, in the heart of hipsterville on Brick Lane in London. It's crammed with mostly young professionals and students, but there are pockets of older people.

Many have experience of psychedelics – my white-haired neighbour generously shared his story of being injected with the venom of a psychedelic toad in Mexico – but many don't, here to add substance to their friends' Gap Year stories of Peruvian shamen.

What This Is / What This Is Not

I'm going to use David Luke's talk as a jumping off point to introduce you to the fascinating scientific renaissance in psychedelic research. By doing this, I'm actually limiting us to only the first half of his talk.

If you want to hear more about his investigative psychology into exceptional human experience - including how he managed to use mescaline to stimulate pre-cognition of future events (whaaaaat?!) - then I sincerely urge you to hunt down one of his highly stimulating and entertaining lectures. Or buy his book, Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience.

On with the programme...

What Are Psychedelics?

Psychedelics are the most direct way we have of altering our state of consciousness and having moments of exceptional human experience.

“LSD is like a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain.”
- Alan Watts (apparently)

Psychedelics compounds used to be neatly divided into two categories: tryptamines that act on our serotonin receptors and phenethylamines that act on our dopamine receptors.

Tryptamines	Phenethylamines
LSD	Mescaline
Mushrooms (psilocybin)	MDMA
DMT	2CB

Then Salvia was discovered. Salvia isn't even an alkaloid – it's a structurally unique diterpenoid. How many more psychoactive structures and compounds are to be discovered, explored – and legislated against!

Sasha Shulgin, "the godfather of psychedelics", proposed that the number of known psychedelic substances would increase by a factor of 10 every 50 years. He was bang on.

In 1900, Western medicine knew of just 2 psychedelics, rising to 20 in 1950 and 200 in the year 2000. According to David Luke's research, in 2012 there were 350 psychedelic drugs known to science (many of them created by Shulgin himself, a self-fulfilling prophet).

The 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances might have stopped almost all legitimate scientific research for 40 years, but discoveries and use have continued unabated.

What Happens During a Psychedelic Trip?

Remarkable developments in neuroscience since 1971 mean that clever people can now see what happens in the brain during a psychedelic trip.

This has led to two major discoveries: one exactly as you'd expect and one a complete surprise, to layman and expert alike.

[caption id="attachment_2997" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Brain network connectivity under a placebo (left) and psilocybin (right). From Petri et al. (2014). Far out.[/caption]

When you take a psychedelic, crazy things happen. You'd expect the brain to be making many more disparate connections than in daily life. Exactly as you can see in the image above.

What you might not expect is that the brain, while tripping, is less active than normal.

Contrary to popular (and until recently scientific) belief, the psychedelic imagery of an acid trip is not stimulated by the drug. Rather, it seems that Aldous Huxley was accurate in describing the mind as a “reducing valve” of reality.

Psychedelics reduce activity in parts of the brain that make up something called the Default Mode Network. This network has been likened to our sense of ego or “self”.

By reducing brain activity in the Default Mode Network, psychedelics allow “reality” to flow unchecked, and without engaging the filters and biases of our ego.

There would seem to be a contradiction between these two neurological discoveries: that psychedelics encourage more disparate connections, while simultaneously making the brain less active. But there is no contradiction.

David Luke asks us to imagine London rush hour traffic. The city's network of roads are both very active and the flow of cars highly congested. Now imagine you asked half of the commuters to stay in bed that morning, and sent the other half to far flung places – Bognor Regis, St Agnes, Kirkstall.

That's your brain on acid: less active, but making more disparate connections.

The Dangers of Psychedelics (Or: What Rarely or Never Happens on a Psychedlic Trip)

Hopefully one day scientists talking about psychedelics won't have to waste time telling us that LSD and mushrooms are non-toxic, non-psychotic and non-addictive. But we are not yet at that day.

Bad Trips

According to the 2014 LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT User Survey, more than 50% of recreational users of both LSD and psilocybin had never had a “bad trip”. Only 10-15% of users had bad trips a quarter of the time or more often.

Important Side Note: The research did not take into account the user's set (their state of mind) and setting (their surroundings) when they took the drug. Set and setting make up the context for your psychedelic experience and are critical in determining how your trip will unfold. Many people take psychedelics in contexts that they can't control and with strangers, at an acid rave for example. Not always a great idea.

By contrast, around 85% of LSD and psilocybin users reported “personally meaningful, mystical and/or spiritual insights” at least a quarter of the time they tripped. More than 50% reported these experiences at least three quarters of the time.

The figures for DMT, smoked, vaporised or orally consumed, were skewed even further in the direction of “successful” trips.

I think this is an important starting point when considering the dangers of psychedelics. Most people, most of the time have profoundly positive experiences.

Nevertheless, bad things do happen.

Flashbacks

“What do you do for recreation?”
“Oh, the usual. Bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.”
- The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers 1998)

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder – AKA flashbacks – are a thing. David Luke is currently working with three such cases (one of whom was in the audience at Cafe 1001), but he describes the phenomenon as rare. He has only come across these three cases in his entire academic career.

David Luke also suggests that people who experience these unnerving persistent hallucinations can still learn to live a normal life with them. Indeed, in response to an audience question about mental health, he argues that, in other cultures, “sufferers” of HPPD might be accommodated and their visionary power valued.

Mental Health Problems

Using a data set of over 130,000 randomly selected US adults, including almost 20,000 psychedelic users, Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Suzanne Krebs found no connection between lifetime psychedelic use and increased likelihood of mental health problems.

In fact, their results show that psychedelic drugs use is associated with a reduced likelihood of having been a mental health inpatient, or planning or attempting suicide in the past year.

[caption id="attachment_2996" align="aligncenter" width="419"] The association between psychedelic use and mental health. From Johansen & Krebs (2005). There isn't one.[/caption]

Death?!

The lethal dose of LSD in humans has never been found. Extrapolating from experiments with rats, it would be approximately equivalent to taking 10,000 trips all at once.

Even then, David Luke tells an anecdote of a drug smuggler who accidentally took his entire supply during a transatlantic flight – and survived. Meanwhile, you can buy a lethal dose of paracetamol (10-15g) in your local Tesco.

Other Bad Stuff

In 2010, David Nutt, former UK government drugs advisor, published a study that attempted to measure the relative harm of a whole array of drugs, from legal alcohol and tobacco to highly illegal LSD and magic mushrooms.

David Nutt and his team at the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs looked at mortality, health damage, dependence, mental impairment, injury and a whole host of other personal and social adversities, inclucing crime, environmental damage, loss of relationships and economic cost.

I recommend reading the original study, but this graph gives you an idea of how misplaced our fears and energies are with regard to drug use.

[caption id="attachment_2995" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Drugs ordered by their overall harm scores - the taller the column, the greater the harm. Blue is harm to the user; red is harm to others. From Nutt et al. (2010). Yes that's alcohol on the far left and mushrooms on the far right.[/caption]

Psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms are the least harmful recreational drugs we have in the UK, roughly 4 times less harmful than tobacco and 10 times less harmful than alcohol.

Therapeutic Uses of Psychedelics

The popular myth that psychedelic drug use will only “blow your mind” is unfortunately supported by the classification of LSD and others as Schedule 1 substances: those with high risk of addiction and no known therapeutic use.

In truth, as well as being highly unlikely to foster dependence, psychedelics are potentially of great therapeutic use.

Promising clinical trials suggest that they may be significantly more effective than other pharmaceuticals at tackling severe depression, addiction and anxiety in a variety of different contexts.

Here's an incomplete list of recent studies using psychedelics in a therapeutic context. A great summary and bibliography of these studies (aside from the autism study, linked separately below) is found in Nichols, Johnson and Nichols Psychedelics as Medicines: An Emerging New Paradigm (2016).

Disorder	Psychedelic	Sample Study
Addiction: alcohol	LSD	Krebs & Johansen (2012)
Addiction: alcohol	Ketamine	Krupitsky & Grinenko (1997)
Addiction: alcohol	Psilocybin	Bogenschutz et al. (2015)
Addiction: general	Ayahuasca	Fabregas et al. (2010)
Addiction: tobacco	Psilocybin	Johnson et al. (2014), Garcia-Romeu et al. (2014)
Anxiety, social: autism	MDMA	Danforth et al. (2015)
Anxiety: advanced stage cancer	Psilocybin	Grob et al. (2010)
Depression, recurrent	Ayahuasca	Osorio et al. (2015)
Depression, treatment resistant	Psilocybin	Carhart-Harris et al. (2016)
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder	Psilocybin	Moreno et al. (2006)
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder	MDMA	Mithoefer (2013)

David Luke is quick to point out the irony of psychiatrists beginning to use prohibited Schedule 1 psychedelics to cure people of addiction to legal and lethal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. That is the very odd world we live in.

Side Note: There is also a growing literature around the potential therapeutic use of psychedelics for inflammatory diseases. These are a major component in leading causes of death, disability and reduced quality of life – coronary heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, arthritis and asthma to name but half a dozen. See Nichols et al. for more on this new avenue of exploration.

Psychedelic Citizen Science

David Luke repeatedly stresses that more research needs to be done on psychedelic use. This is an important point and deserves its own paragraph:

More research needs to be done on psychedelic use.

Having said that, thanks to the curse of government prohibition and the blessing of the internet, more and more power and legitimacy is in the hands of citizen scientists.

Psychedelic drugs are natural and widely available. They even grow in our fields. You can buy growing kits for psilocybe mushrooms, download field guides, or join picking meetups all over the country.

You can order psychedelic truffles from pefectly legal head shops in Amsterdam (delivery isn't legal), or go to the "Dark Net" for anonymised transactions for a bewildering array of drugs bought with digital, untraceable Bitcoin. (Here's a step-by-step guide to the darknet from the Psychedelic Society.)

You can download thousands of open access academic papers from top psychologists and neuroscientists, attend conferences and talks (like this one), or join forums with thousands of other psychonauts, pooling decades of experience.

You can even join more formal citizen science studies like Jim Fadiman's microdosing experiment.

Knowledge is out there.

The Future of Psychedelic Regulation

David Luke stresses the need for us to make "some good choices" with regard to future psychedelic regulation. I'm optimistic.

No matter what the law says, legal enforcement is the responsibility of the police and your local police commissioner decides the policing priorities for your region.

Recognising studies like David Nutt's on the relative harm of drug use, both Durham and Bristol and Avon police forces have deprioritised first time and possession drug offences. We could yet reach de facto decriminalisation.

What we need is more research. At the moment, psychdelic research is funded in the main by philanthropy. Sometimes, remarkably, through crowdfunding.

Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in funding psychedelic research because the "one hit and you're fixed" results aren't profitable. The current UK government aren't interested in funding research either because that'd really pee off their Daily Mail fanbase.

But keeping government and big pharma out of the research could be a great thing. Independently funded scientists can do independent work that is focussed on the good of the general population, not of governments or pharmaceutical companies.

A Final Word

David Luke stays behind long after his talk, answering questions, sharing insights and generally being a good person. I suppose this is what draws me to the subject. Without having a monopoly on such traits, I am yet to meet a psychonaut who isn't really nice.

I was invited to this talk as the guest of Funzing, an online hosting platform for an eclectic variety of events in London. Basically what would happen if Uber did disco yoga, offender profiling or hummus workshops. So thanks to them.

How to get a BBC Radio Comedy Commission

2017-03-10T14:53:00.000+00:00

In January 2016, Beth Granville and I were commissioned to write four episodes of our sitcom Foiled for BBC Radio Wales. I still get goosebumps writing that sentence! Getting a comedy commission from the BBC really doesn't happen very often in a writer's life and I feel fantastically lucky.

Earlier this week, Beth and I were invited by London Comedy Writers to share our recipe for the secret sauce. This blog is more detail on how I reckon we got that BBC radio comedy commission.

First up: a lot of people imagine that being paid to write comedy is a dream job. And it is. But it's still a job and demands the commitment you'd find in any boring 9 to 5. Work is work, with its own obligations and frustrations as well as the satisfactions.

The only difference is that you usually get paid for any boring 9 to 5. With writing, you have to work upfront and hope the money follows. There's nothing at all wrong with writing comedy for fun, not profit. But if you want the profit, then you need the work – sometimes without the fun.

The History of Foiled

Foiled is a Welsh sitcom set in a hair salon called Bleach for the Stars, “managed” by hair-brained Senior Stylist Sabrina Edwards, but only kept in business by stylish assistant Tanisha Jones.

Foiled started life as a 20 minute play written by Beth Granville following a commission by Dirty Protest theatre company. It was produced as a site-specific piece in Cardiff in December 2011 – more than five years before the radio commission. The play, by all accounts, was very well received.

Since Beth brought me onto the project in 2013, we've written six more different versions of Foiled.

90 minute play in 2013. This was read to an invited audience at the Conservative Club, Cardiff. Fun, but didn't go anywhere.

Three x 10 minute webisodes in 2014. These were read and critiqued at London Comedy Writers, but never made.

28 minute pilot for radio in 2014. This was read at an evening we organised at the Drill Hall and then (unsuccessfully) pitched by the Rubber Chicken production company to BBC Radio Wales.

28 minute TV pilot in 2015. This was pitched to half a dozen producers and (I think) submitted to the BBC Writers Room. Nada.

60 minute play in 2016. This was written in the first few months of the year, then developed and rehearsed with director, designer and actors in June and July, before being performed 29 times in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Roughly 700 people saw the show, including reviewers, producers and other industry professionals. After Edinburgh, we had interest from three different theatres to extend the run and a couple of producers who were interested in pitching for radio or TV. Oh, it also cost more than £18,000.

Finally: four episodes for a 2017 BBC Radio Wales series. After Edinburgh, Foiled was pitched a second time by the Rubber Chicken to the BBC and, reassured by the success of the Fringe show, they went for it. This is the first time we have been paid up front for any of our work on the project.

Hopefully that gives you some idea of the work that's gone into the project. It also gives you a clue as to what I'd recommend for any writers who want to get a paid commission.

1. Write something good.

This is a given and I guarantee will be much less than half the work you'll put into the project. Don't sweat too much over the early drafts. Get something that's good enough to share and then share it with people you want to work with.

2. Collaborate with others.

Including Beth and I, at least 16 people worked on Foiled in 2016 alone (special thanks to Kate, Ben, Robin, Tom, Dom, Steph, Joe, Libby, Amy, Roz, Chloe, Rebecca, Rich and Alex). 16 is a very low estimate, by the way. My point is that none of this would have been possible without a lot of collaboration.

3. Get your work on its feet and pay for it yourself.

If you're not prepared to make and finance your own work, you can't expect others to step up. We were lucky to have generous friends and audiences, but taking Foiled to Edinburgh cost £18,533.81, of which almost £13,000 came from personal savings and loans.

You'll see from the history of Foiled that good things only came when we invested in staging our own work. Yes, I know it's a lot of money, but it was worth every penny.

4. Keep learning and keep re-writing.

Thank god we didn't get that 2014 radio commission or fluke the 2015 TV pitch – it wouldn't have been a third of the show it is today. It's no coincidence that Beth and I met on an Arvon Foundation comedy writing course. We are both dedicated to learning how to write more better. Open your work to criticism, listen and re-write.

5. Be generous.

This sounds strange, but is arguably the most important thing you can do. There are so many great people making great work that there is only one thing differentiating us all: whether the people who make commissioning decisions have heard of you, and whether they want to work with you.

The easiest (and most pleasant) way of making this happen is to be generous. Go to their nights, support their work, buy them a drink, tell them funny stories, help them out, be their friend.

Beth is superb at this side of things – me not so much. But you need to be a person that people really want to work with because it's so much easier to recommission Two Pints of Lager. Please don't let that happen!

So that's the fundamental 90% of how to get a BBC commission (at least in my opinion). I still don't really know, of course, and I'm still learning, but this is most of what I've learnt so far.

If you're short on time, stop here and go back to re-writing or buying drinks. For the rest of you, here's the other 10% - the specifics, the details, the nuance.

1. Write something good

This, as I said, is a given. Don't panic at the blank page; use the power of positive constraints to get ideas flowing. The original Dirty Protest commission came to Beth with four strict constraints:

The location was a hair salon.
There could be no more than four characters.
The theme of the play had to be a night out.
It must be 20 minutes long.

Today, five years later, we've kept the same location, the same three central characters and one of the episodes for the radio series is about their work night out. The only thing that's changed is that we now have to write 28 minute episodes!

There was actually a fifth constraint for Beth: she only had two weeks to write the whole thing. Deadlines have a wonderful way of concentrating the mind. It was the same the moment we invested the first £300 on our Edinburgh show in 2016.

Is “good” proportional to the amount of time you spend writing? The answer to this question is absolutely yes, but it's not the strongest correlation. According to my diary, Beth and I spent 65 days working on Foiled in 2016 and every one of those days made for a better play.

In my opinion, however, “Good” is most strongly correlated with how much you share your work with collaborators, critics and audiences. Listen, learn and re-write.

Beth and I work as a double act. Many (I dare say most) commissioned sitcoms have more than one writer, all the way from Simpson and Galton to Pemberton and Sheersmith. As well as the good company, working as a pair means that you get immediate critical feedback on your work. If one of us laughs, we keep it.

2. Collaborate with others

I can't emphasise how big a part collaboration played in the long road to commissioning. Find great creative partners and pay them whatever you can to work on your project.

For us, the most significant creative partner we had was director Tom O'Brien who threw his whole body and soul into the project for two months, although we could only pay him for two weeks. Under his guidance, the characters became flesh and blood, the salon became bricks and mortar. To someone used to seeing abstract words on a page, it was miraculous.

Collaboration is the fastest way to create your work. That's why you shouldn't spend too much time on writing something good – it will and must change, perhaps radically, as soon as you start collaborating.

There's a sweet spot: write just enough to make sure you're not embarrassing yourself when you share it with trusted collaborators, but not so much that you're in a care home before it gets made.

There is also a sweet spot with collaboration: listen carefully to feedback, but re-write on your own terms. It's not only your work any more, but it is still plenty of your work!

The most important non-creative collaborator we hired was Chloe Nelkin, a fantastic PR consultant. She was able to attract big name reviewers to see Foiled in Edinburgh – an almost impossible task for new writers at a huge festival with over 3,000 different shows.

Our superb Stage and Scotsman reviews played a significant part in convincing BBC Radio Wales that the show concept was good and that Beth and I were competent writers they could trust. £1,600 well spent.

Most of this collaboration, you'll note, costs money.

3. Get your work on its feet and pay for it yourself

What more can I say? If you're going to spend all this time and energy writing, then you might as well go the extra mile and make it happen. Film, stage or podcast the fucker. Whatever you do, make sure you aggressively pursue an audience.

That means you've got to think about what will get you noticed. There are so many people making great work, what will make you stand out? That's why hiring a PR was such an important step for us and could be for you. If you can't sell your concept to a PR agency, then what makes you think you can sell it to the BBC?

With Foiled, our hook was that the play was set and staged in a working hair salon. Chloe also loved that it was female-driven comedy, and she wanted to work with us. The hook was a hit, the PR found an audience, the show was funny and we got the attention we needed.

Money, money, money. If you ever want to take some out, you've got to put some in. Making comedy for free is fun, but it won't turn into a career. The Foiled project didn't have any income at all until audiences started paying - after 90% of the work had been done. But we're hopeful that from here on, we'll get paid for at least half the work we put in.

Support yourself by turning your project into a second (or third or fourth) part-time job. Foiled took up most of our spare time in 2016, but you'd be surprised at what you can do if you set aside a couple of hours a day for twelve months.

If you can't afford to make your show as it stands, then you have no option but to change the script. In other versions, Foiled had four, five or six characters. We could only afford three actors, so we put them into cryogenic freezing for Edinburgh. Now we can resurrect them for the radio series!

4. Keep learning and keep re-writing

Invest in your writing. Expose your work to criticism, take writing courses, read books that will teach you style and structure, then study your format with these lessons in mind.

If you're in London, take your work to London Comedy Writers. Professional actors will read your script and a very knowledgeable audience will give you reams of critical feedback on the spot. Don't stop there: take notes, record the session, listen back and re-write.

The Arvon Foundation comedy writing course doesn't seem to be running this year – but the principles of any good writing course apply equally to comedy. It might seem like a lot of money, but don't overlook the networking potential of these courses. Arvon was where I met Beth, of course, but also our mentor the comedy writer Christopher Douglas. Both have had a profound effect on my professional development – besides giving me plenty to laugh about.

I've read dozens of writing books, but if I were to recommend just one, it would be Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. It focusses on screenplays, but Blake's entertainingly memorable principles apply equally well to shorter, live and non-visual formats. Buy it now.

It's hard to underestimate how much re-writing has gone into Foiled. There were well over 70 drafts and redrafts of the Edinburgh script in 2016. We use screenwriting programme Celtx to write the scripts and I have more than 30 different Celtx files on my computer, each one a radical re-write or new episode of Foiled in various different formats.

Foiled was an unpaid part-time job for over a year, and now it's full time. I logged 22 hours on Celtx last week alone, writing and re-writing.

5. Be Generous

At the end of the London Comedy Writers Q&A, Beth had to run off to Soho for drinks. “Oh, yeah – and that's how you get a sitcom commissioned!”

Photo: © Alex Brenner

No Tabbed Browsing

2017-02-24T14:37:00.000+00:00

WARNING:

This could be the most boring positive constraint ever conceived. To be honest, I did feel pretty embarrassed about sharing such a geeky post. But if, like me, you sometimes feel chained to the hedonic treadmill of The Internet, then I have no shame.

This positive constraint has helped me spend less time in from of the computer, while making that time more productive. Thanks to No Tabbed Browsing I have spent less time aimlessly browsing the web and more time getting shit done.

I won't blame you if you skip this one, but if you think you might have a problem – enjoy!

Do you remember your excitement when tabbed web browsing was introduced? I do. Without the laborious faff of opening up a whole new instance of Firefox or Internet Explorer, browsing the web became almost frictionless.

It seems obvious now, but back in 2002 it was revolutionary. You could middle click on any link and it would open silently in the background while you continued to read the page you were on. A miracle!

My desktop instantly became less cluttered, with twenty tabs open in just one programme. And I could leave those tabs open for days at a time, until I worked my way through them (or more likely shifted them to a bookmarked folder).

For fifteen years, I rinsed this delightful innovation, using it to rattle through thousands of web pages every week. I never dreamt that there could be a better way – far less that this better way would be to return to the untabbed browser style that was buried with AOL and Netscape.

The End of the Love Affair

My change began with a realisation: try as I might, I can't read everything on the internet. It slowly dawned on me that this Herculean – nay, Sisyphian task meant that I wasn't giving the articles I do want to read the attention they deserve. I was skimming and flitting. This (I speculated) was having a negative impact on my retention of information.

I had a sense that I was aimlessly browsing to certain websites, particularly the BBC, when I had any brain down-time. I doubted this was doing the job of settling or recharging my brain and was thus foolish. Wouldn't I be better off going for a walk or having a lie down?

Even the things that the internet does well, like quickly answering specific queries, I was not doing efficiently. Rather than dashing off another tabbed web search the second I have a question, a more effective method would be to write down whatever I want to know and batch these activities into one searching session.

My analysis ended depressingly: “This is fairly typical,” I wrote, “of my current scatter-gun approach to my career as a whole. I'm spraying my attention all over the place and thus not making progress in the sustained manner I wish.” (Don't ask why I wrote for myself like the executive summary of an accountancy firm's annual report.)

Nine weeks ago, I started an experiment in the way I use my computer. I found a plugin for Firefox, TabMix Plus, that would allow me to hide my tabs. (Don't you dare open that link in a new tab! And see the end of this post for a screenshot to show how to hide your tabs.)

I would, from now on, go back to opening a new instance of my browser every time I wanted to read something new. On my ageing computer, this takes all of three seconds and irritatingly opens in front of whatever I'm reading, not at all like the silent (but deadly) background load of a new tab.

So what happened? Am I using my computer time more efficiently? How has my browsing changed? Am I still trying to read the whole Internet? Luckily, I am an enthusiastic gatherer of statistics. I'm away in Wales at the moment and my bedtime reading is a book called Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics. So here's my analysis.

The Statistics

In the nine weeks since I instituted No Tabbed Browsing, I have used my computer 1 hour and 8 minutes less per day compared to my average throughout the rest of 2016. That's more than 7 hours less every week.

Even if I remove two weeks that could be outliers - Christmas and New Year - I'm still using the computer 45 minutes less per day. That's 45 minutes I can use to go running, cook food, talk to friends or just spend in bed.

Perhaps more pertinent, though, is a measurement of efficient computer use. Using a free monitoring programme called RescueTime, I'm able to track what programmes and websites I use throughout the week.

RescueTime then calculates a percentage score for productivity, based on my assessments of whether a particular programme or website is productive or distracting. BBC News, for example, is ranked as Very Distracting, whereas OpenOffice Writer is Very Productive. It's not a flawless system, but over a period of months, I reckon it balances out.

I can then use this percentage to calculate the number of productive hours I spent in front of my computer. It's always possible that I was just working less in the weeks since I instituted No Tabbed Browsing! (Not that working less is necessarily a bad thing.)

The results here are more interesting. Productivity in the 9 weeks since No Tabbed Browsing has increased to 64%, from an average for the rest of 2016 of 57%. That's a huge increase – imagine you could squeeze an extra 7% out of your working day without any increase in hours.

However, it does also appear that I was indeed spending less total productive hours in front of the computer. My average daily productive computer time before the experiment was 2:42. In the 9 weeks of No Tabbed Browsing, this fell to 2:14 (or 2:26 if I exclude the holiday period). That's 16-28 minutes less working time per day – suddenly the water is muddied.

From these two calculations – productivity score and total computer time – I can see that I spent just over two hours a day dossing around on my computer in the year before No Tabbed Browsing. Since then, time-wasting has dropped to only just over an hour and a quarter. Given the glories of the world beyond my screen, this significant fall can only be a good thing.

But where was that wasted time going? There's not much distracting content on my computer – I don't have any games and I rarely sit down to watch a film. My only regular source of distraction is the internet.

Unfortunately, accurate historical internet use statistics are hard to gather from the browser I use, Firefox. However, I did take a measurement in the week before I started No Tabbed Browsing. In the week beginning the 12 December 2016, I visited 2188 unique web pages. Websites I visited multiple times, such as the BBC home page, are only counted once in this figure. That's a bewildering 312 pages a day, or (allowing for sleep) 20 pages every hour - a different web page every 3 minutes for a whole week.

That is INSANE.

In contrast, during the first week of my experiment, I visited just 342 web pages. That's still 49 pages a day, but a much more manageable number considering my prior affliction. If I run the numbers based on per hour of computer time, in the week before No Tabbed Browsing, I visited 49 web pages per hour. In the week after, that fell to 26 web pages per hour.

This lower trend continued for a month after the start of the experiment, but I have since seen a return to numbers in the 40-45 pages per hour range. One week at the end of January, I somehow managed just over 70 web pages per hour of computer time! Frantic. With my reduced computer time, however, absolute numbers of web pages is still about half what I managed in the week before No Tabbed Browsing.

There's another interesting angle on how my internet use may have changed thanks to No Tabbed Browsing. Because Firefox only records the last time I visited a particular web page, I can estimate what percentage of my web use is trawling for distraction rather than visiting a specific page I want to read.

In that last week of tabbed browsing, 70% of the pages I visited were ones I haven't visited since. In the first week of January, 88% of the pages I visited remain unique. Although not secure, the results are suggestive. I'm landing less often on distraction gateways like the home pages of the BBC, Guardian or Reddit, and more often on pages that I find through search or recommendation.

Conclusions

I sincerely believe that No Tabbed Browsing has made internet trawling more difficult and this has made my computer use in general more mindful. After nine weeks, total computer hours remain lower than before. My internet use, although now back at similar levels per computer hour as before the experiment, is more likely to be what I define as productive. This is reflected in the persistent 7% increase in productivity reported by RescueTime.

A good case study for how my internet use has changed through No Tabbed Browsing is the BBC – my all time favourite site for news, sport, analysis and boredom-relief.

In the nine weeks since starting this experiment, I have visited 292 BBC web pages, about 32 pages every week. In the nine weeks immediately before the experiment, however, the parallel figure was 762. That's 85 different pages every week for two months. If you're wondering, yes that figure does hold up. Over the course of 2016, I read an average of 81 unique BBC pages every week.

Now I love the BBC, but how much news does one man need?

Even more interestingly, the trend for my BBC browsing is downward: in the last four weeks I have averaged only 24 pages per week. I'm slowly being weaned off my distracting news addiction (and I don't think that it's entirely down to how depressing the news has been, especially for a Liverpool fan). It's totally unquantifiable, but I feel a better person for this change. No Tabbed Browsing is here to stay. In fact, I'd like to find a way to extend it...

[caption id="attachment_2970" align="aligncenter" width="700"] TabMix Plus. Hide the tab bar: Always! (Click for larger image)[/caption]

We Meat Again!

2017-02-17T18:21:00.000+00:00

I hadn't eaten meat for seventeen months, not since September 2015. Then, two weeks ago, I terminated my vegetarian No Meat experiment in spectacular fashion: scoffing the biggest, fattest steak I could find.

Sometimes positive constraints are so successful that you never want to live as you did before. Since 2010, I have never once wished I was on an aeroplane instead of on a train, boat or my own two feet.

But while I haven't longed for a bacon butty, a sirloin steak or pan-fried liver, I have occasionally wondered whether my previous meat and beans diet was, contrary to all conventional dietary advice, actually healthier for me than my vegetarianism.

Could meat really be healthier for me than veg?

To be honest, my evidence for this suspicion is pretty thin (pun alert). However, in September 2015 I weighed a moderately healthy 66kg; by May 2016 I tipped the scales at only 61kg – a startling loss of over 7% mass. Never a porker, my BMI was slipping perilously close to the Underweight category without me really noticing.

My weight loss had a knock-on effect with the medication I take for an underactive thyroid. With less Me to activate, my thyroxine levels rose into excessive territory. I noticed I was becoming hot, tired, insomniac, irritable and fretful more easily and more often.

After a battery of blood tests, I reduced my thyroxine medication and felt a little better. The reduction in thyroxine arrested my weight loss and after a few months it has stabilised to around 63kg.

Then, for the first time in my life, I was assaulted by Irritable Bowel Syndrome and bed-ridden with nausea until I cut out Fermentable Oligo-, Di- and Mono-saccharides And Polyols (FODMAPs) from my diet. Six weeks of gluten-free, lactose-free, fun-free eating later, I knew a heck of a lot more about my gut and the biochemistry of food, but I wasn't exactly a model of health.

I know I'm not the only person to have found this winter particularly hard, but I've basically been knackered since November. Being a hypochondriac with a love of spreadsheets is a mixed blessing. I know exactly how many days have been lost to my malaise. As of today, 34 in the last 151 days; 23% of the last four months have been spent sneezing to greater and lesser degrees of violence. (And yes I have been supplementing with Vitamin D.)

I don't publish this as a hideously public whinge-athon, merely as a partial explanation of why I might like to experiment with eating meat once more.

Nobody ever said that vegetarianism is wholly good for every human, all the time. Having spent 17 months in a primarily plant-based dietary experiment, I feel I am now in a position to ask and answer a fair question: Am I better off eating meat?

(Yes, I am deliberately making this about me because there is one thing that does seem to be clear: eating meat is TERRIBLE for the environment.)

So here I am, almost two weeks into a 30-day experiment with eating meat once more. But first -

What did I learn as a vegetarian?

It's hard to do justice to the contrast between my diet today and my diet seventeen months ago. For most of 2013-2015, I'd estimate that 90% of my nutrition came from nothing but the following foods:

Beef mince

Tinned tomatoes

Beans (butter or black, with kidney a distant third choice)

Hummus

Coleslaw

Fruit (bananas, apples, satsumas)

Cheese (cheddar, grated)

Eggs

Butter

Cream (often drunk straight from the tub)

Milk (by the pint)

Cake and biscuits

That really was it - barring occasional meals cooked by friends, family or restaurant chefs. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. If there was anyone who desperately needed a positive constraint to add variety and flexibility to their diet it was yours truly.

So without a doubt the number one thing that I've taken from my time as a vegetarian is, well, food.

Spreading my culinary wings really took a shot in the arm from my medically advised FODMAPs diet. The baffling restrictions forced me - in classic positive constraints fashion - to cook with all manner of new (to me) vegetables – parsnips, pumpkins, plantains. And that's just the Ps.

Eating, I've learned, is a lifetime's endeavour. Its variety, flavour and tradition is breathtaking. (If only for the reason that you should never try to breathe while swallowing.)

Vegetarianism, Meatarianism, Flexitarianism?

No matter whether I end up on a primarily meat- or plant-based diet, I will be forever grateful that vegetarianism has taught me so much about food and how to cook. Herbs! Whoever knew that fresh herbs could make things so tasty? I now keep a caddy of mixed chopped parsley and coriander in the fridge for delicious green sprinkles.

Vegetarianism hasn't been perfect for me. I'm convinced that I've had more gastric distress – even before the IBS kicked in last year. I've tended to eat more gluten as a vegetarian, which may or may not have been giving me sharp, all-day headaches. Perhaps too my wintry sluggishness is down to some unidentified nutritional deficiency from a lack of meat.

But I know meat isn't perfect either. Quite apart from the embarrassment of serving up meat and beans to your friends every mealtime. Last Tuesday, I ate tripe for the first time in my life and spent the whole night in the toilet dealing with the consequences. Moving swiftly on.

Nevertheless, for the next couple of weeks I'm aiming to add meat to at least three meals a week. Experiments are only experiments as long as you observe and respect your results. Time will tell, but I'm hoping that this flexitarianism might a least help me put some weight on these skinny bones.

And even if not, then at least I'll know I've tried something different.

From Syria to Switzerland: Hossam's Journey

2017-02-10T12:15:00.000+00:00

In October 2015, I met a Syrian family near Spielfeld on the border of Slovenia and Austria. They were huddled together in the cold, waiting to cross into the first country in the EU that was even slightly capable of receiving them.

At that time, nearly 7,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq and beyond were landing in Greece every day. Making a notable exception for Angela Merkel's conscience, most European governments were doing nothing more than passing the problem as quickly as possible to their neighbours.

At Spielfeld, it was instantly apparent to me that World War III had begun. Hundreds of refugees were arriving by trains that ran every two hours. They walked from the station towards Austria along a closed highway in the identical marching mass that I last saw in black and white photographs from World War II. Except this was happening right in front of my eyes, in three dimensions and in colour.

[caption id="attachment_2163" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Refugees arriving at the Austrian border, October 2015[/caption]

By the end of 2015, 65.3 million people would be forcibly displaced from their homes, the highest number since the post-war period. This can only be World War III. We just haven't felt it yet: 86% of refugees are hosted by developing countries. At the end of the last road in Slovenia there was a long queue, as people waited to filter through huge white tents where they would be recorded and passed onto Austria. For the wealthy EU, this global conflict is about to get real.

I crossed easily to the Austrian side, joining hundreds of people suspended between nations. Dozens sat around waiting patiently on the cold ground, tending rough fires made from scavenged wood and rubbish. The trees were stripped bare, and acrid smoke from burnt plastic rose into the frozen air.

A wire fence penned in those who queued for Austria and the refugee camps. The crush is humiliating. One man begged for water for his children. An announcement burst out over the rough camp-fires, in Pashto, Arabic and English: "Please stay calm. Take a seat and stay calm."

[caption id="attachment_2937" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Hossam, a secondary school maths teacher from Aleppo, Syria[/caption]

Hossam and his wife, their three children, and his wife's father, sister and brother have travelled here from Aleppo in Syria. “I can't bring my father and mother,” Hossam says, “because they are very sick with cancer.” They're in hospital in Aleppo, but he can't speak on the phone with them any more because his Greek SIM card doesn't work in Austria.

[caption id="attachment_2932" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Hossam's maths class in Aleppo, Syria[/caption]

Hossam's a secondary school maths teacher. Three weeks before I met him, Hossam's school classroom took a direct hit, blowing a hole in the roof. Teachers and pupils hid in the school for five hours, unable to escape because of snipers, who would shoot anyone and everyone. “The snipers don't care about children or woman or man: they kill all.”

[caption id="attachment_2933" align="aligncenter" width="768"] The crater in Hossam's classroom roof[/caption]

Hossam's children's school also came under attack that same day. ISIS had entered Aleppo and suddenly there was no bread, no water. “Aleppo before was a very beautiful city,” he says. “Now everyone who stays in Aleppo is waiting for death.”

Hossam's journey "was not so bad". The family took only twelve days to reach this No Man's Land on the edge of Austria. They travelled from Syria to Lebanon, then took a boat to Turkey, and another boat with thirty others to Greece, where they were washed up on a small military island base.

[caption id="attachment_2934" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Hossam's children in Greece[/caption]

From there they were taken to Lemnos where they paid for another boat to Athens, a public bus to Macedonia and into Serbia. Travel through Croatia and Slovenia, all the way to Spielfeld, was laid on by governments desperate to move the problem further up the line as fast as possible.

As we stood around those acrid campfires, Hossam told me that he wanted to take his family to Germany, where his wife's brother lived. I wished him good luck, swapped email addresses and left him there, waiting.

Over a year later, an email arrived.

Hossam, his wife and their three children were now settled in the small town of Moutier, nestled in the Jura mountains of French-speaking Switzerland. When I told an Austrian refugee worker this, she was taken aback: “Switzerland, are you sure? Not even Austrians can get into Switzerland!”

“The beginning of the road to Switzerland was very difficult,” Hossam told me in his email. “After entering Austria, we had two days to go to Germany. Of course in the cold and rain.” Although he was helped a great deal by UN and Red Cross refugee workers, after a time Hossam decided his family would be better off escaping from the German shelters. They crossed the border to Switzerland by train and then walked to the nearest refugee centre in Basel.

[caption id="attachment_2936" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Waiting in Germany[/caption]

From there, the young family were transferred to a holding camp high up in the Alps. It was winter 2015 and they endured deep snow and cold. Mercifully, they only stayed at this camp for two and a half days. “The system is more like the military regime,” Hossam says. Phones were forbidden, you couldn't bring your own food and weren't allowed to eat after six in the evening. “We suffered a lot with the kids for food.”

Next they were sent to a refugee accommodation centre in the village of Malleray, Bern. The family lived in a room there for five months – but the kids couldn't go to school.

Then finally: “Four months ago we received a beautiful town house in Moutier.” The kids could go to school and the parents could begin language courses. “My wife bought the French course and I bought courses of French and German,” Hossam writes, adding proudly: “because my level of French is excellent allowed me to study two languages together.”

Hossam seems content that his family is, to a certain extent, now settled. But life as a refugee is never quite secure. “We had our second meeting with Migration three months ago,” Hossam says. “We are currently waiting for the answer.”

[caption id="attachment_2935" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Hossam and family[/caption]

Many thanks to Hossam and his family for sharing their story. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is remember.

A Really Good Day: Psychedelic Microdosing with Ayelet Waldman

2017-02-03T17:43:00.000+00:00

This article is ambidextrous. On the one hand, it is nothing more than a non-fiction book review. On the other, it is a fully-featured 3,000 word guide to psychedelic microdosing.

The book in question is A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life by Ayelet Waldman. The title is a little coy - presumably so she can slip under society's anti-drugs radar. Waldman is talking specifically about psychedelic microdosing, the habit of taking a very small dose of a psychedelic drug in the same way you'd take a microdose of caffeine with your morning coffee.

Waldman's experiment lasted a month and follows the advice of Dr Jim Fadiman, who has been collecting informal reports from psychedelic microdosers for the last ten years or so. Once in every three days, Waldman would start her morning with a drop or two of diluted LSD, then continue her day as normal, recording observations on her mood, relationships and productivity at work. This book is her lab report.

Are you ready for this? So we begin, in conventional book review fashion.

The book review

Ayelet Waldman is perhaps the perfect person to write this book. She's a former criminal defence lawyer who used to consult for the Drug Policy Alliance. She's a fierce advocate of drug law reform, but also a rigorous researcher and a talented writer. She's a mother of four, with a husband and a nice house in California. She's honest, funny and properly middle class. She's normal, which will come as a huge relief to anyone resistant to reading about the possible benefits of illegal drug use.

Other books written by Ayelet Waldman include Playdate With Death, Death Gets a Time-Out, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. She's not a hippy, she's not a dead-head, she's a populist. This makes me optimistic that psychedelic drug use is becoming socially acceptable and that our culture might yet come to think about psychedelics in a more mature, evidence-based way. But more on that later.

For those of you simply wondering whether to invest in this book, I'm not going to waste any more of your time. There is one circumstance under which you absolutely must buy A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman and that's if you're seriously contemplating running an experiment with microdosing for yourself. Read the whole book, cover to cover. Waldman is an entertaining and informative host and her interviews with Jim Fadiman are worth the £13.99 alone (Day 7 and Day 16 for the browsers among you). Think of this as an update on Fadiman's 2011 Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. (And if you haven't already read that, please do so.)

For the rest of you, for whom time and money are short, go down to your nearest bookshop and browse for five minutes.

If you're worried about the dangers of psychedelic use, browse the middle six pages of Day 3 (each chapter represents one day of Waldman's experiment). Teaser, quoted from a 2008 peer-reviewed article: “There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose.”

If you want to know how LSD works and how it might be more effective than legally prescribed pharmaceuticals, including anti-depressants, browse the seven pages of Day 5.

If you're curious about psychedelics, especially why they're still illegal for personal use and why they really shouldn't be, browse Day 27. I thought these were the best fifteen pages of the book.

If you're wondering what effect a course of microdosing might have on your life or the lives of your loved ones, browse the six pages of Day 30.

If you're not hooked in five minutes, don't buy it. You can't say fairer than that.

Okay, the review part of this book review is already over. What follows are some observations on the whys, whats and hows of microdosing, based both on Ayelet Waldman's book and my own research, beginning with the first question I'm always asked.

Wait, isn't this illegal?

That depends on where you live and on what psychedelic substance you are using. In Holland, the answer is no. In Amsterdam, you can buy psilocybe mushroom truffles over the counter and prepare microdoses yourself.

Substances like LSD are illegal for personal use across most of the world, but there are exceptions. In Switzerland, for example, certain psychologists have been licensed to use LSD as part of their therapeutic practice with their patients. In other countries, it is legal for certain church organisations to use psychedelics during their religious observances. Probably the most famous of these is the Santi Dime church that originated in Brazil.

Essentially, however, yes: the consumption of LSD in the UK is illegal. In fact, it's a Class A drug, meaning that you could find yourself imprisoned for up to 7 years for possession of even a microdose. As I understand the law, you must be caught in possession and be prosecuted within six months of the offence taking place. I'm not a lawyer, though.

Whether or not this puts you off any experimentation will come down to two things: your respect for drug laws and how desperate you are. Ayelet Waldman came to LSD microdosing because, after decades of prescription drug use to manage her bi-polar-like symptoms, she was desperate for something that might actually work.

Hopefully you're not at the point of last resort, so I'll address instead the question of how much we should respect our current drug laws.

Everything is a microdose

Two months ago, to deal with a nasty bout of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, I started eating a gluten-free diet. Almost immediately my symptoms cleared up – no more bloating, nausea or diarrhoea. It was a remarkable success and, after two months of a happy stomach, I felt brave enough to re-introduce a small amount of gluten, in the form of a wheat tortilla. Mmm... Mexican food. My stomach didn't show any anti-gluten sentiment, but after lunch I got a sharp headache that lasted into the evening. The next day, the same thing happened again. I recognised these distinctive headaches, a piercing needle through the temple: I've had them before. I also knew that I hadn't had them for two months.

I started out on a gluten-free diet to relieve symptoms of bloating, nausea and diarrhoea, not to relieve these after dinner headaches. I don't know about you, but headaches can have a profound affect my behaviour. I become sensitive to light and noise, so I retreat from public spaces. I find it hard to concentrate and want to do nothing but lie down in a darkened room. If I'm forced to concentrate or socialise, I'm less productive and more irritable. I'm still the same person, but I've shifted 10% further along the particular scale of myself, in the direction of closed-mindedness, isolation and irritability.

Everything we ingest has a biological effect on our bodies, a psychological effect on the way we feel and hence consequences for our behaviour. In this sense, I think of gluten-containing foods as being, for me, microdoses of crappiness.

Now, I don't particularly want to go in that direction, so I won't be rushing out to eat gluten anytime soon. But if you knew there was a substance that could reliably shift you along the particular scale of yourself in a direction you wished to go, would you take it? This is what many people find psychedelic microdoses do for them.

It comes down to personal inclination. Plenty of us take microdoses of caffeine to improve alertness, microdoses of alcohol to lower social inhibitions, or microdoses of sugar to boost energy. Each of these are legal in our society, while microdosing psychedelics suffers from the stigma of illegality.

This is a shame because, according to many informal reports, a microdose of a psychedelic has both a gentler and more pronounced effect on alertness, sociability and energy than any other enhancing substance. Psychedelics seem not to have any of the unpleasant side-effects associated with coffee, alcohol and sugar: there's no addiction, no hang-over and no diabetes.

The law that criminalises LSD while allowing more harmful drugs like alcohol and less effective pharmaceutical products like Adderall (a prescription amphetamine used to treat ADHD in the US) seems to be arbitrary. And this opinion on the law is beginning to hold sway: sensible decriminalisation seems to be the current global trend. The legal sale and use of marijuana in eight US states has drawn a lot of publicity recently, but Portugal successfully decriminalised possession of all drugs way back in 2001. Hard-line Republican judge Richard Posner called for the US to follow suit in a 2014 New Republic article on prison reform. Just last year, the General Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, made a similar appeal, writing in the Huffington Post.

I truly believe that everything we ingest is a microdose and that humans have a fundamental right to experiment with their own consciousness. Alcohol prohibition failed in 1920s America for good reason. I sincerely hope that our fifty-year psychedelic prohibition will also fail and that soon I'll be able to buy a safe microdose of a psychedelic in the same way that I can buy a safe microdose of painkillers for my gluten headaches.

Why microdose?

Based on numerous reports from informal experiments, most people seem to believe there are two conditions under which microdosing is a particularly useful tool.

When you have a specific goal that you want to tackle with your full concentration. Website coding, film editing, warehouse paperwork, drawing up architectural plans, surfing: all manner of tasks have been reported as productive and enjoyable activities under the influence of a microdose. Some people find that they are able to do two or three times the amount of work than on a normal day, that the work is of a higher standard and that they are more satisfied with their results. However, motivation for the task must exist before supplementation. Without clear goals and motivation, a day of microdosing can feel instead like a wasted opportunity.

When you have an important social event, particularly one that might go late into the night. This is especially relevant if you're not a natural socialite, find it difficult to talk to strangers or tire early in the evening. Feelings of enthusiasm and openness that arise while microdosing can make social occasions much more relaxed and enjoyable. You might feel more interested in other people, more prepared to listen without judgement, quicker to laugh, more connected and more able to help others open up as well. Without completely vanishing, mild social anxiety seems to dissipate, helping you relax even when not part of the conversation. The extra 2-3 hours of wakefulness that often comes with microdosing could help you socialise late into the night. Beware of combining a microdose with other psychoactive substances such as alcohol, however.

These are the two most frequently reported conditions under which microdosing has a profound and positive impact on people's lives. Other positive conditions include:

Microdosing to help find deep relaxation, perhaps in conjunction with meditation or yoga.

Partners using a microdose to help strengthen channels of communication in both personal and working relationships. Ayelet Waldman discusses her and her partner's use of MDMA for the purpose of marital therapy.

Microdosing as part of a training programme, athletic or intellectual. Microdoses seem to make you more in tune with your body, but also more open to new ideas and learning. Some people report being able to train harder and for longer, or perform at a higher standard more easily.

These are all examples of conditions under which the potential benefits of microdosing a psychedelic seem to be most present. I'll now be more specific about what those various benefits might be, as well as the possible negative side-effects, as reported by microdosing experiment participants, including Ayelet Waldman.

Potential benefits of microdosing LSD

According to Jim Fadiman, people who microdose have reported:

...improvements in their experience of depression, anxiety, vascular conditions, eating patterns, exercise patterns, creativity, relationships, and, in some cases, increased libido and diminished chronic pain.

Adding to that list, here is a collection of all reported benefits I have uncovered during my research, divided into four categories: emotional, intellectual, relationships and physical.

Please note: These are drawn from the self-reports of psychedelic microdosers. As such, this is far from implying causation– as Ayelet Waldman points out, it could just be one hell of a placebo effect!

Emotional

Contentment.

Increase in equanimity, an even temper, calmness.

Impulse control.

Reduced anxiety.

Elevated mood, happiness, delight, euphoria.

Feeling open and accepting.

Alleviation of depression.

Feeling like you've had a really good day (this is Ayelet Waldman's favourite).

Increased appreciation of nature.

More positive outlook on life.

Increased self-appreciation.

Intellectual

Increased productivity.

Losing track of time.

Easier access to “flow” state.

Ability to sustain creativity for longer.

More effective problem-solving.

Improved focus.

Relationships

Less frequent conflict with others.

More reasonable during arguments.

More likely to give other people the benefit of the doubt.

Increased compassion.

Better able to relate to other people, including strangers.

Reduced social anxiety.

Increased sense of empathy.

Physical

Pain relief. Ayelet Waldman reported that her frozen shoulder started to loosen up during her experiment. Other microdosers report reduced incidence of chronic conditions, such as cluster headaches.

Increased libido.

Heightened awareness.

Increased energy.

Improved diet, possibly due to heightened awareness of the body.

More regular exercise, also possibly due to heightened awareness of the body.

Reduced dependency on (other) stimulants, including caffeine and ADHD medication.

Increased athletic performance.

Reduced dependency on addictive substances, including cigarettes.

Potential Negative Side-effects of Microdosing

Many people have also reported undesirable side-effects of microdosing a psychedelic. It is worth pointing out, however, that these are usually mild and off-set by a range of positive benefits.

Sleeplessness. Short sleep duration. This could be the price paid for increased energy levels during the day.

Stomach upset, nausea or diarrhoea. These symptoms seem to dissipate once the psychedelic has passed through the stomach.

Flushing or hotness.

Agitation, restlessness and irritation.

Mild dizziness or tingling in the body. These could be a sign that the dose is slightly too high.

Anxiety. Ayelet Waldman's husband noticed that she seemed more anxious than usual on microdosing days.

Reduced appetite.

Extreme fatigue on non-microdosing days. According to Jim Fadiman, this has been the only reason that anyone has dropped out of the 30-day experiment.

Prison. The only man-made side-effect!

It goes without saying that if you experience undue discomfort or disquiet while taking any psychoactive substance, you should cease immediately and seek professional medical advice.

Non-existent negative side-effects

In an effort to dispel the more absurd myths that surround psychedelic use, the following have not been reported as side-effects of microdosing.

Weight gain.

Loss of libido.

Visions or hallucinations. Microdoses are deliberately sub-perceptual. If you do experience visions, your dose is too high.

Addiction. LSD doesn't work on the brain in the same way as addictive psychoactives like nicotine or heroin. Daily LSD use leads to drug tolerance, not addiction. This is why Jim Fadiman's protocol calls for two rest days between microdoses, to give the body a chance to reset.

Psychosis.

Death. I quote again: “There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose.”

Contraindications

There are no known contraindications for psychedelic microdosing because there have been no proper medical trials. If you are on anti-depressant medication, microdosing may blunt the effects of your SSRI (selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitor). Ayelet Waldman, who had a long history of SSRI use, stopped taking anti-depressants during her microdosing experiment. If in doubt, ask the advice of a pharmacist. If you have a chronic condition that is managed by regular prescription medicine, only proceed with extreme caution.

Okay, we made it! We've got to the end of what, for some of you, will have been the preamble. I hope that the preceding 2500 words have given you an idea of what's ahead and will help guide you through your own explorations of being.

How to microdose a psychedelic

In this section, I'm using LSD as an example. If you're using a different psychedelic, refer to Jim Fadiman's protocol.

Okay. You're aiming for 10 microgrammes (mcg) of LSD. Dose is important, but don't worry too much if you end up with 5-20mcg. The higher the dose, obviously, the more powerful the psychedelic effects. Reports suggest that higher doses in the range of 20mcg and above increase discomfort without any additional positive benefit. If in doubt, less is more in this case.

Your first task is to know what you've got. LSD usually comes either soaked into little cardboard tabs, or in liquid form. In either case, you MUST know how much LSD you have. This makes finding a reliable source for your psychedelic absolutely crucial. Unfortunately, without legal regulation, the best sources are those that come recommended from trusted friends.

Once you know what you have, you can divide the psychedelic into microdoses. If you have a tab, then you either need to get handy with some scissors, or you need to dissolve it in distilled water.

Make sure you keep track of your quantities. If you have a 100mcg tab of LSD, then dissolve this in 100ml of distilled water. Allow at least an hour for the LSD to dissolve fully. Now you can use a clean syringe to measure out 10ml of LSD-laced water for each of your microdoses.

If you have liquid LSD, then your job slightly more complicated. Liquid LSD comes in different concentrations: find out how much LSD is in each drop. If one drop contains 100mcg of LSD, then dilute one drop with 20 drops of distilled water. Each drop of the mixture will then contain 5mcg of LSD. Take two drops for a 10mcg microdose.

Whatever you do, keep track of what you're giving yourself.

Some Recommendations:

Microdose before 10am, unless you're prepared for a long night.

If using liquid LSD, it's a good idea to store your psychedelic in the fridge.

Keep track of how you feel throughout your experiment. Microdosing LSD shouldn't be undertaken lightly and you should treat your body with respect.

Make a few notes on your physical and mental health every day, including on the days you're not taking a microdose. At the end of your experiment, you'll have a picture of how microdosing affected your life.

If you're prepared to take this as seriously as it deserved, then I highly recommend you follow Jim Fadiman's protocol and register for daily check-ins with his research team. At the very least read his advice before starting. https://sites.google.com/view/microdosingpsychedelics/home

You can, of course, find a huge amount of information on psychedelics and microdosing on the internet.
- The Psychedelic Society website is home to a vast cache of knowledge about psychedelic use. They also hold regular events, including talks and socials: a good place to meet people with a mature attitude to all things psychedelic. http://psychedelicsociety.org.uk/
- The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is great for scientific research on psychedelics. http://www.maps.org/
- Erowid has information on psychoactives of all kinds, including LSD. https://erowid.org/psychoactives/
- There is also an active microdosing community on Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/microdosing/
- You can also find an excellent review of and extract from Ayelet Waldman's book on the Observer.

One final word

Microdosing is NOT a miracle cure for life. According to Ayelet Waldman, Jim Fadiman and many others, microdosing is more like a key that allows you reliable access to your best self and consequently a life that more often pleases.

As the legal disclaimer for another popular psychoactive drug says: Enjoy Responsibly.

No Bike Stand, No Problem: Dave's Bike Lock Stand

2017-01-30T16:08:00.000+00:00

PROBLEM: Fixing your bike without a workshop bike stand is a pain in the saddle.

SOLUTION: Dave's Bike Lock Stand™.

You will need

Your bike

Your bike lock (either cable lock or D-lock will do)

Something to hook onto, roughly 4 feet off the ground: a door handle, a tree branch, some random street furniture.

Method

Attach your bike lock to something solid on your bike. You'll have to experiment as bikes and hooks will vary, but I've had success with:
- Through the rack
- Under the saddle (pictured)
- Between the seat stays on the frame.

Hook your bike lock around whatever you've found to hook onto. Hey presto: your rear wheel is lifted off the ground and can spin freely when you turn the cranks.

Get fixing! Now you can adjust gears and brakes or get cleaning as you would with an expensive heavy professional bike stand.

You're welcome.

Notes and Warnings

If you're using a door, you might find that you need to adjust somewhat so that your pedals don't bash against the door. Locking on by your rack is better for doors than using your saddle, I've found.

Don't lock on to your back wheel - unless you're just using Dave's Bike Lock Stand™ to clean your machine.

Pros use flower pots, stones or bricks to hold the front wheel in place.
- Super pros use rubber bands to hold down the front brake.

You can even still use the door if you need to! (Although some people might be surprised to find a bike locked to their front door...)

* Dave's Bike Lock Stand is not trademarked. Trademarks suck.

No Mobile Phone Revisited

2017-01-27T15:04:00.000+00:00

Two years after giving mine up for a month, I still don't like mobile phones. I find phones extremely distracting, not necessarily because of the notifications, ringtones and vibrations, but because of the way we use them and expect others to use them.

Mobile phones as social media

Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like people treat phones like an umbilical cord to your brain, ready to receive their stream-of-consciousness commentary on life. Phones have become a social media technology. The way we use social media has, I believe, changed the way we use other features of our phones, particularly messaging, whether the old SMS or new forms like Whatsapp.

With my ancient Nokia, I'm well aware that I'm seriously out of touch of modern telephony, but I've noticed a precipitous rise in serial text messaging. Instead of one concisely crafted message, I'll recieve five messages with information dripped through in thoughts and after-thoughts. This tells me two things: senders are putting less time into considering their communication, and recievers are forced to put more time into decoding the message.

This is a consequence of the near-zero cost of sending a message. Back when it cost 35p to send a text, no one wasted a single letter. How that's changed! Unfortunately, the cost to the receiver hasn't changed: we all still must pay attention, and with the cost of sending so low, receivers pay with their attention more and more often.

As data costs plummet, there is a new development in this regard: voice notes, short audio messages sent in lieu of text. This is even better for the sender. It takes even less time and attention to speak into your phone than it does to formulate and tap out even the most rambling of text messages. For the receiver, however, the opposite is true: a text message can be scanned in a fraction of a second. A voice note cannot: the sender holds your attention for as long as they want as you wait for the information to come across.

It seems unfair to me that the burden of cost is shifting more and more away from the sender towards the receiver. But, if you think about it, this makes total sense for those profiting from our communication. Phone networks, manufacturers, software designers and advertisers all want sending to be cheap because the more traffic there is on the network, the more interactions everybody makes with their business models.

Asynchronous vs synchronous messaging

Over the last two years, I've also noticed that asynchronous messaging systems are increasingly favoured over synchronous messaging systems - at least among my friends and colleagues.

Asynchronous messaging systems don't need the attention of both (or all) parties at the same time. Email, SMS and Whatsapp are examples of asynchronous messaging systems. Synchronous messaging systems demand the attention of both parties at the same time, a phone call for instance.

It seems that phone calls are now seen as an inefficient form of communication, demanding attention from both parties at the convenience of neither. Asynchronous communication, on the other hand, means that the sender can send when they wish and the receiver can read when they wish. Ideal!

Or perhaps not. Asynchronous messaging seems to massively increase the total message frequency. Instead of one five minute phone conversation in which information is exchanged and decisions are made, it seems that asynchronous communication can unfold over dozens of messages, spanning hours, days or even weeks.

Some people are perhaps comfortable with this; I'm still not. Whenever there is an open conversation on my phone, an unanswered text, I feel very slightly anxious. A tiny part of my brain is continuously aware of this task I have to complete. What's more, these conversations never seem to die. Another message (or five) soon pops up to replace the one you've answered in an infinite loop of communication.

Again, this is all great news for business, but a worrying trend for humans who depend on deep work to make their days productive and satisfying.

The meta-message

When we use our phones, we're actually sending two messages: there's the one we send by using our phones, and there's the one we send by using our phones. You can think of this as the meta-message - the message about the message. What are you saying to the world by tapping out a message while walking along the street? When you pick up your phone while having dinner with family or friends? Or while driving?

One of the lessons I have tried to implement from my No Mobile Phone experiment is to focus on one thing at a time. If I am using my phone, I am not also walking down the street, having dinner, using the computer - and certainly not driving. When you're on the phone, you're in the zone. We can't split our attention without paying a cognitive penalty. I want to write quality messages and I want quality phone conversations. For that to happen, I need to focus on the recipient, not on anything else.

A synchronous phone call sends a meta-message that the receiver is worthy of your attention in real-time. A phone call can be a minor inconvenience, introducing the friction of humanity to our communication. On the phone, you can easily throw me off-track with irrelevant chit-chat or awkward questions.

It seems like we like to use asynchronous messaging to relieve ourselves of the cognitive burden of real-time communication - but that sends a meta-message too. It can even feel disrespectful.

The wrong side of society

When I completed my No Phone experiment, I tried to cut down on my text messaging. I have, to a certain extent, been successful in this regard. I send far fewer "fishing" messages, messages that do nothing other than start an asynchronous message loop because I'm bored. Even so, I am struggling to break free of asynchronous messaging conversations, whether discussing work with colleagues, or arranging dinner plans with friends.

I'm struggling because I'm on the wrong side of society. I know this and I don't know what to do about it. I could simply join in - I already have a (contractless) smartphone that I use as a camera and for the internet when I have wifi. I could easily start paying £10 a month - exactly the same as I pay for my old Nokia - and eliminate the laborious irritation of opening five separate messages instead of glancing at the spooling conversation. I could start using voice notes myself and engage in the back-and-forth play of modern social media-like phone communication. I could.

But something tells me that if I did, then my communication load would increase significantly and that would have a real impact on my ability to work deeply with focus. When I look around at my friends, I often see them on their phones. A part of me thinks, Wow, I wish I was that popular! But then I wonder whether a part of them feels trapped by the communication treadmill that their smartphones not only enable, but actively accelerate. It seems like people with smartphones do an awful lot of admin. Maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not. I don't know.

Faith in friction

Ultimately, I still have faith in the friction that my old Nokia adds to my communication. My clunky Nokia cuts down the amount of communication I can be bothered to send by introducing laborious irritatants like opening multiple messages, and tapping out responses in T9 (remember that?). I am far more likely to call someone, or send a message that follows the One and Done philosophy. I genuinely hope that this constraint makes me a more considerate communicator.

Secondly, my Nokia severely reduces the amount of communication I can recieve by eliminating certain channels like Whatsapp altogether. I strongly believe that this helps me spend less time on admin and more time focussing on my work, free of distraction.

I concede that I'm on the wrong side of society at the moment, but I do also believe that we need to learn how to use our technology a bit better - for our sake and for the sakes of our friends and colleagues. If I could magically change three things about the way we use our phones - smart or dumb - I would wish for these:

Prioritise your recipient, not yourself. Do they need to know this now? Do I need an answer to this question now? Is asynchronous communication really the more efficient method if it means the conversation will drag out over the course of hours and days? If asynchronous messaging is the best method, how can I craft this message so that the recipient has all the information they need to respond in full with just one response? Think One and Done.

Stop multitasking. When you're on the phone, you're in the zone. If, while walking down the street, I suddenly remember I need to send so-and-so an urgent message, then I should stop, lean against a wall, concentrate on the recipient and send that message. If I can't stop and send that message - if I'm at dinner with friends, for example - then I should make a note to send it later. If I can't make a note, then I must trust that if the message is urgent enough, then I will remember later.

If in doubt, put it away. By default, I'd like to see no phones. No phones on the dinner table, no phones on the desk, no phones in the bedroom, no phones on the bus, no phones at stop lights, no phones lying idly in the hand. If in doubt, put it away and keep it away. Look up, and have faith that you and your world are even more interesting than whatever is buzzing away in your pocket.

And, yes, I am currently breaking at least one of those - we're all human :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

#21: Everything we know about psychedelics is wrong

2017-01-13T09:10:00.000+00:00

1. 15.4% of UK adults have taken Class A drugs

My upbringing was most definitely drug-negative. I went to a school where “drugs” were for drop-outs. It would have astonished me to learn that more than a third of UK adults (11.4 million 16-59 year olds according to Home Office statistics) have taken illegal drugs in their lifetime – and almost a sixth (5 million 16-59 year olds) have taken Class A drugs.

Fear began to mutate into curiosity when, in my thirties, I first met people who were both well-adjusted and regular psychedelic users. Through them, I learnt that behind the fearful media image of psychedelics there was both science and history, which could, if we allowed, contribute to a much more mature and complete awareness of psychoactive compounds.

Psychedelics have been used as both medicine and spiritual guide by humans for thousands of years and to dismiss such compounds as of “no known medical or therapeutic value and bearing a high risk of abuse” (the definition of Class A substances in the UK) now seems to me at best an act of gross arrogance, at worst gross negligence.

2. Psychedelic effects are supported by psyence

In 2008, Richard Griffiths of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University led a study into the mystical effects of psychedelics, and their continuing significance more than one year later.

More than half of the 36 people involved in the study, none of whom had ever taken psychedelics before, found that just one session of psilocybin was enough to rank inside their top five most personally meaningful experiences of their entire lives and this rating remained true fourteen months after the psychedelic was taken.

Think for a second about how significant that is. It ranks up there with falling in love, the birth of your first child or the death of a beloved parent. What's more, almost two-thirds of the participants concluded that this one psilocybin session had increased their sense of well-being moderately or very much, again with the results undimmed over a year later.

If this is news to you, then imagine my astonishment when I learnt that as long ago as 1991, psychologist Rick Doblin found that seven theological seminary students reported similar results – deeply felt positive mood and persisting positive changes in attitude and behaviour – twenty-five years after their only encounter with psilocybin.

Psychedelics promise instant enlightenment, but the lasting positive effects of psychedelic use is not just the boasting of hippies and drop outs: it's science.

3. Psychedelics are good for your mental health

Despite their reputation, there is no established scientific link between taking psychedelic drugs and either physical or psychological health problems. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, there has never been a recorded overdose of psychedelics and, in a comprehensive review of the literature in 1984, psychiatrist Rick Strassman found that “well controlled studies of neuropsychological function have generally failed to discern significant differences between groups of LSD users and controls”.

Two 2015 surveys with a combined population of over 300,000 people found that users of psychedelics were no more likely to suffer from mental health problems than anyone else. Quite the opposite, in fact: one of the surveys, of 190,000 people, found that “[l]ifetime classic psychedelic use was associated with a significantly reduced odds of past month psychological distress”, suicidal thinking and planning, and suicide attempt.

The UK-based Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs found that psychedelic mushrooms and LSD were around four times less harmful – to users and to society – than tobacco and more than ten times less harmful than alcohol. Psychedelics are extremely low in toxicity: it is far easier to overdose on paracetamol, which is deadly in quantities you can pick up in any supermarket.

One team of researchers conclude that “it is difficult to see how prohibition of psychedelics can be justified as a public health measure.” In other words: if you are a healthy adult, you have nothing to fear from responsible psychedelic drug use. Treat psychedelics as you should any practice, like meditation, that can mess with your head – with caution and research.

4. Psychedelic use is good for the planet

If you think about it, all learning is a reconfiguration or adaptation of our world view, another block of information or experience that you must somehow fit into your model. Sometimes it's better to reconfigure the model than to fall victim to the confirmation bias and distort the information to fit.

When we're babies, our default mode network has not yet built up the hierarchy and its logical schema of the world: everything is astonishing and from moment to moment new and earth-shattering insights must be accommodated. As Alison Gopnik, a professor of developmental psychology, says, babies are "basically tripping all the time". To be egoless is to be receptive to the world, ready to see old things wondrous anew, ready to adapt to things as they are, not as our models would like them to be.

It happens less often as adults, but sometimes we are confronted with a discovery that cannot but shake the foundations of everything we thought we knew. Sometimes this is a transcendental experience of awe, such as I found walking alone in the woods of Hampshire, or it could be an intensely significant life event, such as the death of a close relative, the birth of your child or learning that you have a terminal, untreatable disease. But there is now plenty of scientific evidence that we can also safely shake the snow-dome of the mind through the judicious use of psychedelics.

Who knows where this might lead? American psychologist Ralph Metzner is not alone in suggesting that one reason we have a strong environmental movement today is because of the consciousness-shifting drugs that tens of millions of people took in the 1950s and 60s. The benefits of taking psychedelics are perhaps only matched by the costs, to people and planet, of not taking them.

5. There are no "good" and "bad" drugs

Eight years ago I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid and my doctor told me that I'd have to take synthetic hormones every day for the rest of my life. Over the first few months of taking these drugs, what most people would call my “personality” changed dramatically. I went from being comatose calm, cold even beside the radiator, sleepy-headed and slothful, to being energetic, carefree and ready to devour the life that had gone missing with my dying thyroid.

All substances have psychoactive effects: lavender is relaxing, sage improves our memory and sugar makes us buzz and crash. The only question is whether the balance of psychoactive effects make the drug valuable to the user. Thyroxine, for me, unequivocally answers the question in the positive – but, though nominally legal, it would probably kill you.

Exactly one year ago, I became a vegetarian. My energy levels dropped through the floor: I just couldn't eat enough. On day five I felt on the verge of dizzy collapse and had to roam the streets at night hunting for vitamin pills. I gradually recovered, but over the following six months I lost four kilograms in weight. This caused a knock-on effect to my medication, flipping my thyroid into over activity. This imbalance led to anxiety, irritability, sensitivity to heat, fatigue and insomnia.

Whether we are aware or not, our biological and psychological well-being is in lock-step with all organic matter – food, drug, drink – we ingest. The unnatural dichotomy between legal and illegal, good and bad drugs is a distinction that I see as increasingly arbitrary and untenable. In my opinion, it would be shocking negligence indeed to dismiss entheogens (psychoactive substances used in a spiritual context) that human beings have used for millennia to explore the buried riches of our psyche and the furthest dimensions of the universe.

6. We are responsible

We are entering a delicate phase in our cultural appreciation of psychedelics. Government regulators are cautiously beginning to allow the scientific community to resume sober examination of the potentially remarkable therapeutic and personal development uses of psychedelic drugs. Psilocybin, LSD and MDMA have shown great promise in the treatment of alcohol and tobacco addiction, severe depression, post-traumatic stress and end-of-life anxiety.

I believe this leaves us all with a great responsibility to educate ourselves and re-awaken a mature awareness of these precious gifts from our more enlightened past. Politicians very rarely lead; they react. During this delicate phase, the work of organisations like The Psychedelic Society is vital to connect the strengths of the scientific academy with individual experiential knowledge and laymen like us.

Only when we have taken personal responsibility and shown our courage, knowledge and maturity will politicians be able to find the courage, knowledge and maturity to change the laws we live by. The signs are promising, but – as the enduring 1971 global ban on psychedelic use shows – it would be easy to screw up.

#20: Three Lessons from a Vipassana Meditation Retreat

2017-01-13T09:05:00.000+00:00

The Dark

I don't mind admitting that a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat with no running, dancing, skipping or cycling, no meat or refined sugar, no speaking or smiling, no alcohol or caffeine, no reading or writing, no email or internet, no music or games, no computers or radio, no news or advertising, no physical touch and no mingling of the sexes at all sent me absolutely bonkers. To be more precise: by the end of the retreat, I was paranoid that everyone hated me. It was HARD.

It seems churlish to object to the peace-loving ethical precepts, and equanimity seems a pretty harmless life goal (if a little dull), but there is a dark side to mediation that isn't often talked about. Meditation can cause mania, panic, depression, low motivation, impaired reality testing, confusion and disorientation, increased negativity, being more judgemental and psychotic breakdown, as well as (no surprise to me) boredom and physical pain.

Among the researchers studying this less publicised aspect of meditation is Deane Shapiro, who found that 17 of a group of 27 Vipassana meditators reported at least one of these negative effects after a retreat and two suffered “profoundly adverse effects”. These were experienced people who had been meditating for at least 16 months and some for more than eight years.

Given that the side-effects of meditation can be so severe, the frequent claim that difficulties are mere obstacles to be overcome on the path to enlightenment sound glib in the extreme. Meditation, just as any practice that messes with your head, should only be undertaken with care and good preparation.

The Light

Nevertheless, in the snatched moments when it wasn't sending me crazy, I did also manage to find some peace in the quiet. Auroral joy would steal over me before dawn, as I stamped my feet in the cold and sucked the misting rain from my upper lip, looking out over the valley and the woods, shadows of rabbits hopping around in a secret pre-breakfast silence.

For ten days and nights, I bore witness to not just every sunrise and sunset, but every moonrise and moonset too. One night, waiting to enter the meditation hall, a group of us formed an auditorium around a nest of spiders, trapping their prey in the spaces between the thorns of a rose bush and a spotlight. With our vow of no killing, there was no sweeping away of cobwebs. Short nights between pillow and gong made for long dreams and, somewhere in between all the madness, I meditated. A bit.

When we were released from our silent commitment, my heart rushed with liberation, my senses sharpened by ten days of constraint, my mind untangling and overloading. I was a schoolboy again, on the last day before the summer holidays: boundless freedom stretching before me, but knowing that it was the ordeal behind me that had laid the groundwork for this pleasure, already gently nostalgic for my comrades and the simple hardship.

Reunited with my possessions, I slung my pack, tripped down the steps of Dhamma Dipa, and hitched a ride to Gloucester. Walking around the town, my first contact with civilisation in ten days, I was particularly struck by the ubiquitous public outcries of pain that we call advertising. The colours on the myriad billboards and posters were garishly unnatural, the screaming supplications for consumer validation were unseemly, unfitting for a noble creature such as man could be.

While I waited for my coach back to London, I sought refuge in Gloucester cathedral, finding peace among the medieval stone columns and the dormant rose beds of the courtyard garden. I sat down and started writing a ten-day back-logged diary, processing three central lessons I have never forgotten from this experiment.

1. Everything is changing, all the time

Much of the meditation focussed on observing sensations in the body, noticing feelings of pain or pleasure arise and then pass away. Our bodies are in constant flux, but usually we scarcely notice. What is true for our bodies is also true for every situation, every emotion, every other person, every animal and life form, and even every molecule in the Universe: all exist in constant flux, in every moment.

If all things are constantly changing, constantly arising and passing away, then change is not to be feared, but observed. This idea is the foundation for the development of equanimity, which can help us make better decisions under pressure and feel more balanced during the natural up and down swings of life.

Before going on the retreat, I was pretty impecunious (hence the attraction of a free ten day holiday). Afterwards, I found it calming to reassure myself that this was just my current financial situation and that it would change over time. Sometimes I might have money, sometimes I might not. This is the nature of existence and I must adjust and accept both equally. As Goenka liked to remind us: “This too shall pass.” Very Stoic.

2. Pain and pleasure are interpretations

From this follows the second lesson. The meditation practice taught us to observe the sensations we felt in the body, with total equanimity and without any reaction. Pain and pleasure were treated with the same neutral emotionless observation. If this is possible (which it was, even for me), then there can be no sensation or situation in the body or out in the world that could dictate to us our emotions or reactions. It is rather the ingrained patterns of my mind that interpret sensations and situations, and consequently direct my emotional reactions of aversion or craving.

This lesson falls directly in line with the body-first observations of modern psychologist William James, or the teachings of ancient Greek Stoic Epictetus:

"Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things."

Personally I think it'd be a shame to face down our joyous emotional reactions to glorious situations with equanimity. But perhaps this lesson can be used to stay present when we try to cling on to magical moments, feeling sadness for their passing before they are over. There is no chance of feeling FOMO if we accept that this situation is no better or worse than any other, and only our controllable reactions dictate to us otherwise.

This lesson also helps tame our impulsive thrill-seeking behaviour, and to resist the empty promises of materialism and advertising. There is no object in the world that can dictate my emotional state: a new phone cannot make me happy because my emotional happiness is entirely independent of external objects.

Equally, this teaching makes the prospect of cleaning the toilet much more pleasant: that mysterious stain on the bowl need not necessarily provoke gagging aversion. There is no reason why I cannot enjoy the pebble-dashing as just another object in the world, like frolicking in the snow, the climax of Finding Nemo, or pancakes for breakfast. In the words of Epictetus:

“If any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.”

3. Hard work is the truest path to success (whatever that might mean)

Goenka's favourite mantra wormed its way under my skin:

“Work diligently, patiently and persistently, and continuously. You are bound to be successful, bound to be successful.”

Written down here, the words are hardly profound, but repeated six times a day, every day, in that sonorous ponderous voice, turned hackneyed positive thinking into the closest thing to truth I found in Shropshire.

This truth balances the potentially acquiescent or appeasing notions of radical acceptance contained in the two previous lessons. Life is not about sitting around and waiting for enlightenment or whatever. Without going at it like a bull in a meditation hall, we must all work hard for the things we believe are worth working for, in a habit boot camp of our own design.

These are all valuable lessons, but do they amount to No Ego? Not really. I have good friends who have found moments of ego dissolution through meditation and I'm quite prepared to admit that I simply haven't worked hard enough. Quite apart from the large part of my ego reluctant to commit to a life-long pursuit of sitting down uncomfortably, there's also a part that feels like I've been looking in the wrong place, by chasing No Ego through a culturally alien practice.

Other activities that can cause dissolution of the ego include sleep deprivation and acupuncture, but the acupuncture only needles me and a week of sleep deprivation results in nothing more than an inordinately clean house. So where now? Notwithstanding our international reputation for self-effacing modesty, it's hard to spot the No Ego in the British culture we have created – our bank-bailing, public-privatising, hyper-consumerist, imperial-monarchic, credit card British culture.

That's when a friend tells me about The Psychedelic Society...

#19: Who, what, where or why is my Ego?

2017-01-13T09:00:00.000+00:00

It's always been there, chattering away up in my head, reflecting on the past, fantasising the future, judging others and working on its autobiography. But who, what, where or why is my ego?

The Science of Ego

Neuroscientists reckon they know. There's one part of the brain's orchestra that seems to act as its conductor, leading into harmony the cacophony of primitive instruments that would otherwise lurch from note to note, score to score, with no sense of direction. It marshals lower order brain processes such as our emotions and memory, and assumes responsibility for our higher meta-cognitive capabilities including self-reflection, chronesthesia (mental time travel), and our ability to empathise and read the minds of others (not literally).

In 2001, neurologist Marcus Raichle claimed the opportunity to name this, the pinnacle of evolutionary neurology (clears throat):

the default mode network.

Talk about deflating my Ego: I sound like a 1980s circuit board.

The Art of Ego

Aesthetically if not scientifically, I prefer the poetry of earlier philosophers and psychologists who attempted the delicate task of pinning to the page the Ego's bubble.

Jean-Paul Sartre, counter-culture French philosopher par excellence, captures the essence of the Ego in a short parable. You are crouched at a closed door, peeking through the key hole, watching two lovers in bed enjoying each other's bodies with rampant abandon. You are totally immersed in the scene, perfectly concealed and relishing your voyeurism. Then you hear a creak on the floorboards behind you. The sudden rush of blood to your face is the belated return of your Ego: your shameful sense of self as distinct from others.

The Psychology of Ego

Whichever you prefer, art or science, to live with No Ego is to forget yourself, to be in the moment and indivisible from the universe. Why on earth would I want such a feeling? Well, quite apart from any ego-driven fantasies of becoming an enlightened being or more earthy desires like not being such a self-centred douche-bag, the activity of the default mode network is what psychologists call mind-wandering and it's not very good for our mental health.

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert ran a study to find out how a wandering mind (thinking about anything other than the present activity) affects our happiness. "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," they concluded. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost." Even when your mind wanders to some pleasant thought, they found, you are no happier than if you'd stayed focused in the moment.

When our egos are in charge, we become dissatisfied with life. There are several ways to turn down the volume on the default mode network, including acupuncture and sleep deprivation, but the two methods I explore are silent meditation and psychedelic compounds. Groovy.

The Psychedelics of Ego

Robin Carhart-Harris is the Head of Psychedelic Research at the Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He describes the default mode network as a conductor of an orchestra, sitting at the head of a hierarchy that manages what we perceive from the sensations we pick up from the world around us.

But when he gave his study participants a psychedelic dose, Carhart-Harris saw a great reduction in blood flow and electrical activity in the default mode network. "It's like the conductor's left the room," he says. What's more, as the default mode network shuts down, volunteers also reported feelings of ego dissolution. The psychedelic experience of ego dissolution is well known and has been established beyond doubt by a comparative survey of the psychedelic, cocaine and alcohol use of over six hundred people.

When the default mode network is engaged, patterns of neural activity look compartmentalised: visual regions communicate mostly with other visual regions, for example. Silence the default mode network, however, and the whole brain gets involved in visual processing.

As Carhart-Harris describes it, the brain becomes “untethered” from sensory input, allowing us to “see” visions summoned from the depths of the mind, rather than from the eye's input. "It's a perceptual error,” Carhart-Harris says, “but it's a function of how the perceptual system works. What we're seeing are the brain's predictions, they're just wrong predictions."

Psychedelics are popularly portrayed as chemically inducing these strange hallucinations: that's not true. Carhart-Harris's neuro-imaging results clearly show that the psychedelic (in the case of this study, psilocybin, the active component of magic mushrooms) resulted in less neural activity, not more.

Why Disable the Default Mode Network?

The default mode network definitely helps us get on in the world, but the reality it creates is one of few surprises. As Carhart-Harris says, "Our normal waking consciousness is very habitual and actually it probably forms so that we aren't surprised by the world." By reducing novelty and uncertainty to its lowest possible level, we inhabit a steady, familiar world. That's the best possible world for an organism whose priority is to survive, but Carhart-Harris warns "there may be a danger that our models of our world that we've formed do become too rigid, too ossified".

This rigidity of the mind can become a serious problem in some. People suffering from depression have excessively rigid minds, stuck in negative or hopeless patterns of reality that just reinforce themselves in a continuous loop. What we call addiction is a consequence of similarly repetitive and rigid compulsions for dysfunctional behaviour harmful to the addict's life.

Over the past thirty-odd years of existence, my default mode network has compiled a logical and functional reality for me to live by. Thank goodness it has: just writing these words would be a struggle if my perceptual system saw anew every morning the mesmerising lights of the computer screen. But every sensation I collect passes through my default mode network, every sight, sound and smell is squished and squashed until it will fit through the ego's filtration system and neatly into my existing world view. This all happens without me knowing what's going on: I have no conscious awareness of the way I'm seeing and I literally don't know what I'm missing. This makes our rigidity of mind a problem, not just for the depressed and addicted, but for everyone.

As I hope I've shown through my experiments with mobile phones, supermarkets, aeroplanes and others, we all carry around certain dependencies, certain rigid patterns of the mind, and all of us would benefit from taking a look at those every once in a while. The default mode network, what we might call the ego, is the repository of all our dependencies. And we've discovered chemicals that can switch it off.

Switching Off the Default Mode Network

"What psychedelics may do is to disturb those overly reinforced behaviours which rest on overly reinforced patterns of brain activity," Carhart-Harris says. He describes psychedelics as shaking up the brain "like a snow dome", and after well-mediated sessions one can hope that the snow will resettle into a healthier pattern. "Psychedelics seem to have the capacity to weaken these constraints and when you do that you can potentially be more creative, you've got a more supple mind, you're more open-minded."

In 2016, Carhart-Harris was part of a team who found that 75 micrograms of LSD reliably, and in the long term, increased the personality trait of openness in healthy subjects. This replicated the results of a similar 2011 study at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where participants were given psilocybin.

Slowly being released from the shackles of fearful over-regulation, scientists are finally able to test the outlandish claims of hippies and shamans. What we need are not more fear-provoked and fear-provoking legal bans, but mature, informed encounters with drugs, therapies and medicines that have such potential to create profound, mystical-type experiences of the world. Encounters such as the one offered by The Psychedelic Society: one timeless weekend in a rented house in Amsterdam - but no time to go into that here!

#18: We are all the same

2017-01-06T09:10:00.000+00:00

I'm beginning to suspect, however, that economists would love to live inside a computer model, where human beings are all the impersonal and interchangeable sum of their productive value.

Michael Clemens ran the stats comparing Indian computer programmers who won a visa lottery, emigrated and earned significantly higher wages in the US, with those who weren't so lucky and stayed in India. He examined the differences between the two groups in education and programming skill, reasons for which you might rationally pay someone $60,000 a year more. There were no such differences; they might as well have been the same people. The only difference was location. His conclusion was inescapable: your earning potential is entirely governed by where you are, not who you are. And where you are is, under the current controlled system, almost entirely a fluke of birth.

This is a salutary lesson for those of us standing on the shoulders of our ancestors who had the industry and aggression to make the world their factories. But I can feel the weight of existential crisis bearing down on my shoulders. I can understand why we tend to instinctively reject these ideas.

I want to believe that I have justly earned my education, my opportunities, my three meals a day. I want to believe that I somehow earned the right to be born British. The absurdity of typing that last sentence brings me face to face with the painful truth that the only objections to free migration are political. Unrestricted immigration is a hard policy for politicians to defend when things aren't going great, when you need a scapegoat to distract from your hapless or corrupt economic decisions.

Unfortunately, we humans do have a tendency to hold long-standing irrational prejudices about foreigners and those of a different cultural background. And those beliefs are easily used to either "explain" difficult social or economic problems or to wilfully distract us from alternative solutions. Thus the political response du jour to any economic or social crisis: tougher immigration restrictions.

In 2014, the German Marshall Fund, a US organisation dedicated to international cooperation, ran a survey in which they asked people across the EU whether they thought that there were too many immigrants in their country. In the UK, 54% of people agreed that our country was overrun with foreigners.

There is a twist, however. In some surveys, people were first told exactly how many immigrants lived in the UK. Under this condition, the number of people saying that the UK was full up dropped to just 31%.

Conclusion #1: Our prejudices are surprisingly easy to change through direct exposure to accurate information.

Many people fear a clash of cultures, that with too much immigration the “British way of life” will change beyond recognition, and in extreme cases that the immigrants will “take over” and the British people will be forced to adopt the foreigner's law.

From the same Marshall Fund survey, only 46% of people agreed that newly-arrived immigrants were integrating into British society, but that number leapt to 63% when thinking about the immigrants' children. I wonder how high that figure of approval would rise when considering their grandchildren or great-grandchildren?

Conclusion #2: Where is the clash of cultures if you believe that immigrants are well integrated into UK society?

I see these Marshall Fund statistics as signs of hope, that our prejudices can be challenged and changed. An even more encouraging statistic is that 73% of British people think the government is doing a terrible job on immigration. I agree, although perhaps not for the same reasons as the Daily Mail.

In the second half of the last century, ordinary citizens of the world successfully overturned countless deeply entrenched restrictions on human freedom of movement and self-determination. African-Americans and indigenous Australians now have civil rights in their countries, the controls of the apartheid state of South Africa have been dismantled, and the Berlin Wall that separated east and west in Europe has been bulldozed into history.

If the last thousand years are any guide, slow but dramatic change is not only possible but highly likely. And the policy of No Borders doesn't sound extreme any more, it sounds humane.

#17: No Borders is “the efficient way to double world GDP"

2017-01-06T09:05:00.000+00:00

If only we'd listen to our economists, it could all be so different. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, describes No Borders as:

"the efficient, egalitarian, libertarian, utilitarian way to double world GDP"

That's an extraordinary claim, but it's backed up with numbers. Michael Clemens, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C., has collected twelve academic studies examining the "efficiency gain" to the economy from the elimination of various international barriers to trade.

Removing all global policy barriers to the free movement of capital is estimated to have a potential benefit to the world economy of anything ranging from 0.1% and 1.7%. That's not an insubstantial amount of money, perhaps up to $1.3 trillion, an extra $185 a year for each of us – not to be sniffed at considering that over 700 million people still live on less than $1.90 a day.

Removing international barriers to the free movement of goods is estimated to have an even bigger potential benefit to the world economy of anything ranging from 0.3% to 4.1%, perhaps up to $3 trillion a year, or $450 each.

Dismantling all global policy barriers to the free movement of labour, however, has been estimated to give the world economy a boost of between 67% to 147.3%. That's at least sixteen times the biggest gain of any other form of deregulation. Even at the lowest estimate, this would amount to an additional $51 trillion for the world economy, or an extra $7,370 in our back pockets every year.

Now can you see why Bryan Caplan ends his short review of Clemens' work with an unambiguous call to arms for his profession and the wider public:

"If research energy were proportional to the inefficiency of the status quo, virtually every economist would study immigration. And if outrage were proportional to harm, virtually every protest on earth would be in favour of open borders."

You might at this point be imagining Michael Clemens and Bryan Caplan as anarchist academics, the hard numbers corrupted by personal utopian fantasy. In fact, there is almost complete consensus among economists that borders are a terrible idea. A joint Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University survey in 1996 found that 47% of the general public thought "too many immigrants" was a major reason the economy wasn't doing better; only 1% of economists agreed. Economics professor Alex Tabarrok calls immigration "the world’s best anti-poverty program", and even the godfather of modern economics, Adam Smith, advocated not only free trade, but also a free labour market, one where workers could move freely to where they were needed.

Michael Clemens suggests that even just slightly relaxing our border controls could add trillions of dollars a year to the global economy. Michael shows how even mass immigration would support the local economy by drawing on the historical precedent of the millions of women who joined the labour market in a short period of time after the Second World War.

"Women entering the labour force are not exactly identical to men,” Michael says in an interview with Freakonomics author Stephen J Dubner, “so they often complement men in the workplace rather than substitute for them.” Similarly, migrants bring new ideas and skills to their work, complementing rather than directly replacing native workers. “Women start businesses that employ men,” Michael adds. “Migrants do too."

In fact, more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies, the five hundred most successful corporations in the US, were founded by migrants or their children. “Even though there might have been wage-competition between men and women in the ’50s and ’60s, nobody would say now we would make the US richer by banning women from working," Michael concludes.

What about wage-competition in the UK? In 2008 the Bank of England published a paper that claimed a 10% rise in the number of immigrants working in semi- or unskilled jobs would lead to a 5.2% reduction in pay. In late 2015, the same authors issued an update. Not only had they significantly over-estimated the increase in the number of immigrants taking low skilled jobs, but the reduction in pay was far lower than they expected, just 1.88%.

According to economist Jonathan Portes, this works out to be a reduction of about one penny per hour. This is not nothing, but as Jonathan says, “it stretches credulity to suggest that other things – the level of the minimum wage, the decline in trade union power, technological and industrial change – have not had far bigger impacts on pay in these sectors”.

The flip side to this slight reduction in wages is that some of those savings to business owners are passed on to the consumer. Indeed, in 2008 Patricia Cortes of the University of Chicago found that immigration to the US reduced the cost of a typical shopping basket by about 0.5%.

If you want a large-scale twenty-first century experiment in No Borders, then look no further than Europe. In 2004, seven countries from the former Eastern Soviet bloc joined the European Union. Overnight, about 100 million extra people could move wherever they wanted to work. But, despite the huge differences in GDP between countries like Romania and Sweden, according to economist Philippe Legrain only 4% of people have actually moved, and even then most (perhaps 91%) only intend to move temporarily.

Meanwhile, UCL economists have shown that EU immigrants provided a net benefit to the UK economy of £20bn over the decade from 2000 to 2011, and the most irrationally feared East European migrants made up £5bn of that extra wealth. As for the countries these migrants left, they seem to be doing okay: Poland has outperformed the rest of the EU in terms of GDP growth every year for the last decade.

If the economic arguments are so strong, then what stands in the way of open borders? Well, we do.

#16: National borders were supposed to be temporary

2017-01-06T09:00:00.000+00:00

In Britain, the first border controls were put in place with the Aliens Act of 1793, as a drastic measure to prevent French republicans from crossing the Channel and fomenting revolution. A few years later the perceived danger had passed and the controls were lifted.

It's hard to imagine border control as a temporary emergency measure today, but that's exactly how it was originally conceived. Lasting border controls only came to Britain just over a hundred years ago with the 1905 Aliens Act. Some of you might have known grandparents and great-grandparents to whom passports, borders, and immigration were quite novel.

Although not explicit in its wording, it was well known that the 1905 Act was drafted to deal with the “problem” of immigrant Jews, who were fleeing violent pogroms in Russia that killed thousands. The law was, and remains, in essence racist. The same is true for similar ground-breaking border control laws in the US (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and Australia (the White Australia Policy started in 1901).

Following these early racists forays, borders really took off after the First and Second World Wars, with the rise of the nation state. Henceforth, for reasons of geopolitical organisation and economic exploitation, every corner of the earth must have a sovereign master, demarcated with borders from its neighbour. New nation states appeared overnight, defined only by lines drawn on a map. Where on earth was Palestine, where Israel? Where was India, where Pakistan? They were all invented and the borders often arbitrarily drawn by fallible administrators thousands of miles away.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a nation state as:

an independent political state formed from a people who share a common national identity (historically, culturally, or ethnically)

This sounds reasonable at first pass, but the idea that a state-sized territory could have a “common national identity” is ludicrous. It's estimated that at the time of the French revolution in 1789 only about ten percent of the population of France spoke fluent French. France has taken hundreds of years to evolve anything even close to a national identity, and is still riven by historical, cultural and ethnic divisions. So I’m sure you can already see the problems we might run into if, by any chance, those unlucky administrators happened to draw borders in inauspicious places (i.e. almost anywhere).

After the Second World War, entire populations were uprooted and marched a thousand miles, as between India and Pakistan, as earlier between Greece and Turkey. In other places, the fall out was not nearly so “civilised” as population exchange. Rwanda, Palestine, Israel, Armenia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq: scarcely a single new nation state survived birth without bloodshed.

You could confidently argue that this calamitous squeezing of round pegs into square borders is the original cause of the continuing civil wars in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. Even the civil conflicts between privileged and non-privileged in South Africa, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere could be said to be overspill from the decision that each arbitrary parcel of land shall have a sovereign and centralised supreme government, quite regardless of history, culture and ethnicity.

I make these historical observations to show that permanent borders, just like any unexamined habit, were once freely chosen as one solution among many possible solutions to a specific problem. That problem was how best to manage our human affairs in an increasingly connected world.

In the course of a generation, military conflict went from cavalry charges between aristocrats to atomic weapons dropped by flying machines. That’s a radical shift in warfare, one which quite possibly demanded we find an equally radical new way of organising ourselves.

You could even argue that borders and the nation state have been a decent, if crude, solution to that problem. Many millions of people, particularly those in Europe and the US, have been living side-by-side in relative peace since the Second World War. And, considering how that conflict ended, with the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, things could be much worse than they are.

But my point remains: there is no natural law that commands we live with borders. There are people still alive today who remember a time when borders were not necessarily the way we resolved the problems, both real and perceived, of two tribes butting up against each other. I'm worried that we, as a society, are no longer interested in whether or not this current solution actually works, and no longer asking ourselves whether there is some better alternative out there.

The world has changed again, just as radically as it did a hundred years ago, and we must ask ourselves whether solutions chosen in 1905 are still functional.

Protection against terrorism is often put forward as an unanswerable reason for border control. But the tighter we close our borders, it seems, the more terrorist attacks we attract. Terrorism is no longer the threat of republican revolutionaries crossing the Channel from Ireland or France; the biggest terrorist threat the UK faces today is from its own population. There have been seven successful terrorist attacks in the UK since 2005. Every single one was plotted by British nationals, apart from one: Ukrainian far right terrorist Pavlo Lapshyn who murdered a Muslim pensioner and tried to bomb three mosques in the Midlands in 2013. Borders will not prevent terrorism if that terror is perpetrated by UK citizens.

It also doesn't follow that borders could hope to prevent terrorists who do travel. Organisations such al Al-Qaeda and ISIS have amply demonstrated that they have the resources to work around any feasible border control, including the rather obvious tactic of putting “cleanskins” on, say, a cheap EasyJet flight from Egypt. That doesn't mean we should give up on trying to prevent terrorist slaughter, but it does mean that we should change our strategy.

Border control is a hopelessly inefficient and expensive means of solving the problem. It didn't work for the Ming Dynasty of China who lost their Empire when the Manchus were allowed to cross the Great Wall, it didn't work for the French Maginot Line, easily sidestepped by the Nazis, and it isn't working for the Israelis who, despite their military supremacy, are losing a quite different battle of demography with Arab Palestinians.

In a world where we are all increasingly connected through a global web of fibre optic cables, and where corporations and ideologies operate on a transnational scale without impediment, is the crude restriction of the free movement of people really still our best option?

Hello, I'm David Charles the writer!

2017-01-01T00:01:00.000+00:00

I'm best known for writing Foiled with Beth Granville. A comedy set in a hair salon, Foiled had a hugely successful five-star run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016 and is being broadcast as a 4-part sitcom on BBC Radio Wales this summer.

Here you'll also find all manner of scribblings about refugees, migration and the glorious utopia of No Borders. Meanwhile, You Are What You Don't is a collection of writings about my lifestyle experiments. Hot topics include psychedelics, mobile phones, and the joys of terrestrial travel.

I have also published three books of travel writing. You can find out more in my free shop.

If you'd like more, then I run a weekly mailing list, with freshly minted words for your delight and fascination.

Much love,

DC

#15: We all live moneyless

2016-12-30T09:10:00.000+00:00

For Mark Boyle, who lived without money for four years, money is a wedge that separates us from the consequences of our actions - and he's not just talking about material goods.

"For the first time I experienced how connected and interdependent I was on the people and natural world around me. More than anything else, I discovered that my security no longer lay in my bank account, but in the strength of my relationships with the people, plants and animals around me.”

I've only been living moneyless for a week, and in a very limited fashion, but I felt exactly the same. As Mark says, "My character replaced sterling as my currency."

The Moneyless Life

Mark is far from alone in living the moneyless life. Other people who are living or who have lived without money include Daniel Suelo living in a cave in Colorado, retiree Heidemarie Schwermer in Germany, academic Carolien Hoogland in Amsterdam, squatter Katherine Hibbert in London, and computer programmer Elf Pavlik, who ranges all over Europe but whom I met in Austria.

But there's one person I must give special mention to – you. There's one area where we're all guilty of moneyless living: with those we love.

Indeed, we'd be utterly outraged if anyone tried to give us cash in exchange for the dozens of acts of loving kindness that we perform for our friends and family every day. Research by LV has estimated the average cost of raising a child born in 2016 at £231,843, but any parental attempt to recoup the bill from their children would be monstrous.

The fact is that most of life is made up of spider's web networks of cashless exchange, favours and gifts. Yes, I spend money six days out of seven, but I am reliant on friends and neighbours for almost every single moment - certainly all the most important ones.

Debt versus Obligation

Thinking in this moneyless way has profound consequences.

In his critically acclaimed book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explains the difference between a debt and an obligation. Obligation is what I feel towards my neighbour after he invites me to dinner, lends me his power drill or looks after my (hypothetical) kids for the evening; debt is what I feel towards the bank for my loan-funded education, towards work after taking the pay check, or towards Shylock after losing his money in an ill-fated mercantile venture. Obligations bond human beings; debts divide them.

As Graeber writes: “The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified. This requires money.” It follow that, if we remove money from a transaction, it becomes not a debt to be paid but an obligation:

an unspecific generosity,

of similar but crucially not identical value,

to be performed not immediately, but at some appropriate moment in the future, according to the unique needs of the recipient and resources of the obliged.

In this way, exchange by exchange, we could move from the waste economy of destruction to the gift economy of connection. We could move to a society where we treat each other more like family by exchanging gifts, sharing food and doing favours for the love, not the lucre.

Prosocial Spending

If you do have money, the best way you can spend it is on other people. In a 2010 working paper, an international team of psychologists reported on a series of experiments, including a survey of over 200,000 people in 136 countries worldwide, as well as more detailed and controlled experiments comparing selfish and prosocial spending in Canada and Uganda, and Canada and South Africa. Their results were clear:

"Human beings everywhere may experience emotional benefits from using their financial resources to benefit others ... [I]ndividuals report significantly greater well-being after reflecting on a time when they spent money on others rather than themselves".

Two of the psychologists involved in the study, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, have collected dozens of studies into the impact on our happiness of how we spend money and have concluded that effective prosocial spending should satisfy three criteria:

The spending should be our own free choice: enforced charitable donations don't make us happy.

You should feel a strong connection to your gift or donation. Who you give to (a close family or a stranger?) and how you give (in person or remotely?) both profoundly affect how we feel about our spending.

It should make a positive impact. It's hard to see the impact of a £10 donation to a huge global charity, but spending £10 on lunch with a lonely neighbour will have a clear and immediate positive impact.

Happiness is the Opposite of Selfishness

This experiment in moneyless living has changed the way I see the world for good. Money solves problems, but only problems of distribution: the abundance is already out there, waiting for collection. Spending money, therefore, distances us from the source of our needs and becomes a direct correlate for waste. Indeed, financial transactions between humans creates debt and alienates us from each other in ways that are damaging to our personal health and the health of our communities.

There are two clear alternatives:

We can spend more time in our moneyless economies by treating more people as we already do our family and friends, relying on obligation rather than debt to balance our affairs.

We can do much more prosocial spending. According to the research, around 10% of our spending is prosocial. Could this be higher?

In the end, I'm reminded of the motto of fêted schoolmaster and biographer Sir Anthony Seldon, "happiness is the opposite of selfishness".

#14: Money is waste

2016-12-30T09:05:00.000+00:00

After a week of living moneyless, I've decided I need a new definition of money. The current economic system in the UK, and many other places around the world, creates an abundance, an excess of all kinds of consumer products, from food and clothes to technology and even shelter. All these things are created for sale and you can buy them with money.

But because of the excess, you can also acquire these things for nothing, by intercepting them at the point of waste disposal, either after the consumer has tired of them or before they reach the market simply because they are part of that essential excess built into the system.

That excess is created because money under capitalism is a right to demand. As consumers with money in our pockets, we feel a fundamental right to exchange that money for whatever good we desire, and there is no greater crime for a supplier than to fail to meet that demand.

I'll show you how this works with a classic skipper's example: chain sandwich shops. Sandwiches are cheap to make, but office workers will happily pay a triple mark-up for a sandwich from a shop like EAT. What are they getting for their money? Not the mere sandwich commodity; the real product being sold is convenience. But that convenience only works if they can get exactly the sandwich they want.

A City Solutions Consultant wouldn't pay a triple mark-up if the only option was bread and butter, or if the shop persistently ran out of his favourite wild crayfish and rocket. If either of these things happens, the consultant takes his business elsewhere (or starts making sandwiches at home).

The consequence of this is that the sandwich shop's business model is obliged to over-produce sandwiches; they cannot afford to sell out every day for fear of shedding customers to their rivals. The result: waste, in the form of bags of sandwiches dumped on the side of the street at the close of business. This is well known to scroungers in areas densely populated by chain sandwich shops, like the City of London.

Urban scavenger Keziah Conroy showcases such sandwich shop hauls on her blog: a jalapeño chicken wrap, an all-day breakfast buttie, sourdough toasties, a chicken sunshine salad, and a beef and tomato baguette.

So what is money, if you can satisfy all your material needs for free by changing the way you acquire stuff? Well, now I know: money is just one way of solving a distribution problem. That's all.

My Solutions Consultant pays money so that EAT will bring together all the ingredients and labour required to make, package and store his sandwich. All he has to do is turn up at the conveniently located shop and hand over his money.

This also explains why the sandwich shop business model demands total saturation of an area. There are eleven EAT sandwich shops within a quarter of a mile of Bank Underground station in the middle of London's business district: money is a distribution mechanism, nothing more, nothing less. It reduces the friction of our lives, making our lives easier by “greasing the wheels”.

Positive constraints like No Money increase friction, and my argument is that this is a good thing: friction helps us engage our imaginations, learn how our world actually works and come up with alternative solutions. If we don't want to spend money, then we have to work out different ways of solving the problems of distribution, whether that's by squatting empty buildings, cycling and hitch-hiking, or skipping from waste bins.

However, without the "right of demand" that comes with money exchange, we must also expect less than perfect distribution solutions and be more flexible with what product we end up with (although that often means much richer variety, as I found with New Covent Garden).

The truth is that, if money is a solution to the problems of distribution that creates vast systemic waste, then the expenditure of money itself is a correlate for that same waste. Because there is already excess and waste in the system, every time I spend money, I am being profligate, draining natural resources, contributing to pollution and environmental degradation, wasting labour and energy, and tossing more and more garbage into land fill sites and waste incinerators.

I cannot hide from the knowledge that spending money actively contributes to a wasteful society. My new definition is this: money is waste.

Mark Boyle, who lived moneyless for four years, has written extensively on the implications of our use of money and would agree with this new definition.

"If we grew our own food, we wouldn't waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn't contaminate it."

We don't because we spend money to reduce the friction in our lives by distancing ourselves from these labours. And to serve us our frictionlessness, we conspire to waste on a collossal scale.

#13: Money is not generosity

2016-12-30T09:00:00.000+00:00

I first heard of London's New Covent Garden Market five years ago. A couple of people I lived with sometimes cycled there on their way home after all night raves, coming home with heaps of free fresh food and stories of being run down by pallet truck drivers and robbed by security guards. They laughed, cleaned up their wounds, and made huge hangover soups and smoothies with all kinds of blemished, bruised and half rotten fruit and vegetables. I'd always wanted to go with them, but it had somehow never worked out and they left the house pretty soon afterwards.

In the five years since, the idea of “skipping”, as it's known, had occasionally popped into my head, but with the convenience of my excellent greengrocer just over the road, why would I ever change my habits? I was always put off by the early start, the five mile cycle, my nervous inexperience, and of course by the security guards. But that's the great thing about positive constraints: they force me into doing something different.

So I did what I always do when faced with a daunting challenge: I searched online and found a French blogger who had tried to start an online directory of the best place to skip free food in London. The website hadn't really got off the ground (scroungers are understandably secretive about their grazing grounds), but there was one piece of information that surprised me: the bin men for New Covent Garden Market arrive around eleven in the morning, five hours after trading ends. The Frenchman recommended I turn up any time before ten – so much for the early start!

Emboldened by my Gallic guide, I set off on my bike at eight the next morning, garbed in workman's fluorescent high-vis, an old trick to escape the attentions of security guards, hiding in plain sight. My first difficulty is finding the market. The area is pockmarked with construction, "the greatest transformational story at the heart of the world's greatest city" according to developers. Cranes and steel support the groundwork for towers of five million pound apartments, interiors designed by Versace. And I'm here to swipe a shopping basket of land-fill fruit.

Cycling around the new soon-to-be American Embassy, I finally spot the drivers' entrance, slip past the barriers, dip down under the railway and emerge into the market, a complex of warehouses, lorries, vans and pallet trucks zipping around. I feel out of place on my bicycle, but at least my high-vis fits in.

The market is based around three double-width delivery boulevards, onto which more than two hundred businesses open their shutters. New Covent Garden is the largest fruit, vegetable and flower market in the UK and according to their website it apparently supplies 40% of the fresh fruit and vegetables eaten outside of the home in London, catering for restaurants, cafés, schools and hospitals, as well as retail markets. And skippers.

I see a few other people on the prowl. One looks like he's been printed out from stereotype, dressed all in black, tattoos crawling up his neck and bits of his face pierced to other bits of his face. There's also an ordinary-looking guy rummaging through the bins, and one very elderly woman pushing a trolley, leeks poking out of the top.

My favourite, though, is a Vietnamese woman, crouched over a slush of cardboard and trodden in lettuce. She beckons me over. "You need lemon?" she asks. "Lemons? Lovely!" She wafts a hand over the other side of the boulevard: "Lemons, lot of lemons."

I thank her for her help and cycle dutifully over to the stacks of crates she'd indicated. I turn over the rubbish thrown on top to reveal a dozen fresh melons. I laugh and pop a couple into my pannier, one honeydew and one bright yellow canary. The skin is a little discoloured and the top of the honeydew is slightly bruised, but when I crack them open later, the flesh is perfectly ripe, amply protected by the hard skin.

After my success with the melons, I toured the rest of the site, chatting with cleaners and shopkeepers, asking what was waste and what was waiting to go into vans. If you're imagining me climbing head-first into skips and rubbish bins, picking through mouldy tomatoes and cigarette ash, then think again. At the market, waste is carefully separated, with plastic and cardboard recycled, and organic peelings and cuttings going into huge vats. The good stuff, the stuff that could be eaten by you and me, is piled relatively neatly on the roadside, there for the taking.

The stories my friends had told about aggressive security seemed very far-fetched. Everyone I spoke to was friendly and seemed well accustomed to the scroungers who made what they could out of produce that could never be sold. One energetic Eastern European fruit packer came out to help me pick through a couple of crates of bruised satsumas and apples. He had a good eye and I wondered whether he was himself a skipper.

My bags were filling up quickly: two heads of broccoli, tomatoes in green, black, yellow and red, lamb's lettuce from Italy, a monster cucumber, horseradish from Austria, parsnips, a swede, pak choi, yellow peppers, an aubergine, ginger root, some limes, a dozen bananas, packed organic rocket, two melons, russet potatoes, green chillies, red onions, four artichokes, eight avocados, a box of lychees and a pomegranate.

On my way out, I stop to flip over a heavy box that had obviously fallen off the back of a lorry: full of spring daffodils. A young worker passes by as I'm wondering whether the daffs will survive the ride home. "You've come too late," he comments. "You should be here at five, six o'clock, then there is so much stuff." I stare at him in amazement: "But my bags are full, what more could I carry?" He laughs and we chat for a while about the waste he sees every day. "These are for luxury hotels and restaurants, so the vegetables must be perfect, absolutely perfect. For example, fifty boxes of aubergines, if there is one aubergine with one tiny scratch – " he shows me a minuscule blemish on his index finger for reference – "they send the whole fifty boxes back to us, and we must put them out."

I'm shocked. This is all good food; its only crime is to fall short of the standards demanded by mindless perfectionists. I ask him if he ever takes the thrown away food home with him, but he shakes his head. "No, it's against company policy. Sometimes they give us a bag of grapes or whatever. It's nothing for them, but for us it's very nice. We're like a family." I'm shocked all over again. Here I am with enough fresh fruit and veg to feed a family of seventeen for a week, and he goes home with the occasional bag of grapes? It serves to remind me that taking food from bins is still, staggeringly, classed as theft.* I offer him a daffodil, but he just laughs and walks on.

Back home, the first thing I do is pile all the produce onto the table, cut away the melon bruises and bin the too-far-gone cavolo nero. I weigh everything and do a price comparison with Sainsbury's online: this "shop" would have cost me over fifty pounds in the supermarket. Then I spend a couple of happy hours cooking for me and two friends, with more than enough left over for my housemates to take a bowl when they get home: a delicious broccoli and potato soup, an enormo-salad with peppers, tomatos, lamb's lettuce and cucumber, and a spicy potato curry, all washed down with a banana and melon smoothie.

Far from bludging from my friends on this week of no money, I have more than contributed my share, and have to give away fruit and vegetables to everyone I meet. The benefits go far beyond saving money, though. Because I can only take what I find, my diet is much more colourful and varied. I'd never normally buy broccoli or parsnips, and until today I didn't even know that earthy black tomatoes existed. I can feel good about my environmental footprint: the lamb's lettuce travelled a thousand road miles all the way from Italy, only to go straight into the bin without getting near the chef's table. That's a tragedy and my interception felt worthwhile for everyone.

Best of all, though, skipping such a prodigious quantity of food means that I can "afford" to be generous. Not only that, but I positively must be generous, otherwise the food would rot away in my fridge before I could eat even half.

It's surprising that living without money has showed me how easy it is to be generous. Before the experiment, I used to feel that I couldn't always "afford" to be generous, but that has been exposed as a dog-in-the-manger mirage. If I'm able to be generous without spending money, then generosity has nothing to do with financial clout. Like any character trait, generosity is a matter of habit. I just wasn't being imaginative enough to see how I could be generous with what I had. Now I can.

Scrounger turns provider, and my cupboards end the week far better stocked than they started it. Win-win.

#12: Supermarket choice is terrible!

2016-12-23T09:20:00.000+00:00

My local Sainsbury's has more than thirty aisles; my greengrocer has just two. There is, without a doubt, a heck of a lot more choice at a supermarket than at a corner shop, but I wanted to know exactly how much more choice.

So I went to Sainsbury's, clipboard once again in hand to do a choice case study on just one foodstuff: soup.

There are, broadly speaking, four different kinds of soup product on sale at Sainsbury's: tinned, potted, fresh and dried. Across these four varieties, there are sixteen different brand labels on sale, including eight for Sainsbury's alone:

Be Good To Yourself

Sainsbury's

Chunky

Basics

Microwave

Simmer Soups

SO Organic

Taste the Difference

Prices range from £0.17 for Sainsbury's Basic tomato soup to £2.29 for some of the fancier fresh soups. This meant that on sale at Sainsbury's there were in total – wait for it – 138 different kinds of soup. If you do your shopping online, then good luck: you've got 314 to sift through.

That, my friends, is ridiculous.

Contrast this plethora of choice with my local shop, where I can purchase one brand (Heinz) at one reasonable price point (£0.89) in only six different flavours. This is absolutely fine by me, considering I only ever buy cream of tomato.

Choice isn't Always Good

There was a time when I would have thought having a choice between 138 different kinds of soup was awesome, and the traditional supermarket model depends on the idea that more choice makes us happier. But is this actually the case?

Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, warns us that:

"choice overload can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures."

This can lead to decision-making paralysis, where too many options means you can never bring yourself to choose anything. You fear that there could always have been a better soup.

In the long term, Barry says, this can lead to clinical depression, a product of a culture that tells us “there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless”.

Choice, generally-speaking, is good, but too much choice is toxic. My local shop's six flavours of soup seems like a reasonable level of choice, given that I could (and probably should) make my own soup if I wanted something a little more customised.

Frankly, I find it astonishing that anyone, faced with an aisle army of 138 soups, actually manages to leave with anything at all.

Good Choice Doesn't Mean Good Choices

Okay, you might disagree with me and think that the immensity of supermarket choice is wonderful, but would that even matter if none of them were particularly good choices?

Most mornings, I eat porridge. I like to sweeten this most Scottish of repasts with dates. Supermarkets tend to stock two or three varieties of date: deglat nour, medjool, and perhaps halawi as well. There's one major problem with supermarket dates: quite apart from the fact that they are criminally expensive, they're also not particularly good.

British people don't make a habit of eating dates, so simply don't know better. Turkish-Cypriots, however, do eat dates and my greengrocer is Turkish-Cypriot. He only carries one kind of date, not three like the supermarkets. However, not only does he charge a quarter of the price at Tesco, but his dates are, in his words, "the greatest dates in the whole of the world". And I'm not one to argue.

Mazafati dates are grown at an oasis near the Iranian city of Bam (the same beautiful medieval town that suffered a dreadful earthquake in 2003). They're almost impossible to cut with a knife, melting under pressure like caramel. They're full of healthy fibre, vitamins and come with a jitterbugging kick of natural sugars. (Plus my greengrocer reckons they'll cure constipation, hangovers, heart problems and blindness – not too sure about that.)

I don't know why supermarkets don't stock Mazafati dates, but I do know that supermarket produce must meet very precise standards that include, not only taste, but also size, shape and colour. The product must be available for stores across the entire UK, in all regions. This means that it must store and travel well. It also needs to be instantly familiar to the highest possible number of people and appeal to the broadest range of tastes. This means that it must also be grown or produced in huge, almost unimaginable quantities.

None of these criteria are necessarily compatible with optimum yumminess: there are too many other variables to balance. Perhaps Mazafati dates don't have a long enough shelf life, are more expensive to transport, aren't grown in the industrial quantities required, or simply come in too poor quality packaging for a premium supermarket price point.

It should be obvious, but somehow it had eluded me until now: supermarkets make decisions for their benefit, not ours.

However, in the same way that there's more to price than pounds and pence, there is more to good choice than good taste. Stringent supermarket standards are one reason why Norfolk's orchards alone have lost at least forty varieties of apple, including the Transparent Codlin, Norfolk Paradise and Monstrous London Pippin. In fact, the National Fruit Collection records 1,423 different varieties of dessert apple, but your supermarket will only ever stock half a dozen. There simply isn't the space to cultivate many more varieties of apple in the UK to cope with the supermarket demand for standardisation, and so we have lost important diversity in our ecology.

I'm a hard man to please, aren't I? 138 soups is too much choice, and yet I'd be happy with 1,423 types of apple! But there's a big difference between soup and apples, which I shall demonstrate with a story about bananas.

Every year in the UK we eat five billion bananas, almost all of which are genetically from the same cultivar, the Cavendish. Diversity could not be much lower: 47% of bananas grown worldwide are of the Cavendish variety. What's the problem? Since 1992, 10,000 hectares of Cavendish bananas have been wiped out by a mutation of the fungal Panama disease, and the devastation of crops is spreading across the world. The race is on to save our beloved banana, but Dr Gert Kema from the Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands says: “We have nothing to replace the Cavendish right now.”

Too many varieties of ready made soup might be bad for us psychologically, but too few varieties of fruit and vegetables is potentially catastrophic for our food supply. To return to apples: over a quarter sold in the UK are of the Gala variety, a worrying dependence, driven by supermarkets sales.

The Irony of Supermarket Dependence: Less Choice

Over the last twenty years, the number of independent butchers has dropped from 30,000 to just 6,000 – and it's not because we've stopped eating meat; in fact we're eating more. Our loss of independent butchers is just one example of the impact on our choices of rising supermarket dependence.

I call this ironic because we generally believe that supermarkets represent greater choice, when we actually have less choice today of where we buy our meat: it's a supermarket or nowhere. According to the Office of National Statistics, we do 86% of our food shopping at large supermarkets. That's up from 66% in 1986. Inevitably, as with butchers, so too with independent fishmongers, bakeries, greengrocers, street markets – even hardware stores and bookshops.

The decline of independent shopkeepers has led to the rise of so-called Tesco Towns like Bicester, a small market (ha!) town in Oxfordshire where there was once no less than six Tesco supermarkets. The dominance of Tesco has diminished since this moniker was first applied: Bicester lost one of their Tescos in 2015, but this tiny gap in the market was quickly filled by Sainsbury's, Cooperative Food, Iceland, and finally both Aldi and Lidl. Yowzas.

I'm very lucky to live somewhere that hasn't yet lost all its independent food sellers. I've got Deptford market on my doorstep and the greengrocer only two minutes away. I'm terrified that one day all of these places will disappear and we'll be left stranded in a food desert, with nowhere to shop except at a giant supermarket chain. This has already almost happened in the village where I grew up in Oxfordshire.

When my parents moved to Cholsey in 1980, there was a greengrocers, two butchers, two mini markets, and a bakery. Now there is one Tesco Express and a lone surviving butcher (where my parents still buy all their fresh meat because, predictably, it's of superior quality). To find good fresh food beyond the supermarket chains you have to travel twenty miles to the Wednesday market in Oxford.

My dad remembers when he was a boy growing up in the fifties, walking around the shops with his mum. “We'd visit at least half a dozen shops,” he says, “including both Church's Butchers and Church's Pork Butchers, the International Stores for dairy and dry goods, as well as the huge market on a Monday.” He also remembers the arrival of the first supermarket when he was a teenager. “It was called Fine Fare,” he says. “We walked round it in amazement, but couldn't see the point.” Now, meat and some fresh fruit aside, he does the main weekly shop at the out-of-town Tesco, topping up at Tesco Express in the village or at a local Waitrose.

This tendency towards an "oligopoly" of a few big players, such as we see in the grocery market, is characteristic of mature markets. But where there are fewer options, there is greater dependency, and where there is greater dependency there is increased vulnerability to price and product fluctuations, and exploitation.

Supermarkets aren't convenient or cheap and their choice isn't good. I reckon it's time to give No Supermarkets a whirl - if you still can.