I’m a marginalian. I live on the edge, at the edge of a road that leads to the end of a peninsula, on an Island on the edge of the Scottish mainland and the Hebrides. In summer, I live at the edge of darkness, where the gloaming momentarily dims during the 24-hour cycle: an Englishman abroad, a blow-in at the edge of village life.

I’ve always been an edge lander, an outsider who prefers my own company while observing the follies and social mores of others. It’s a safe place to inhabit, watching from the sidelines, and being able to observe objectively but never referee. Life is safe and free from failure when you are not an active player on the pitch.

As a toddler, I sought sanctuary and comfort on the satin-edged blanket that was my constant companion. Thumb planted firmly in mouth and index finger pressing its silky-sheened smoothness against, I entered a form of blissful reverie in which everything in the world was right. Over the years, the blanket shrank from a cot cover to a tiny square, which at some point disappeared, probably aided and abetted by one of my parents.

Being edgy while on the edge allows you to hold what some might view as edgy, controversial opinions, as the stakes are lower and the challenges are smaller if you don’t raise your head above the parapet. My Overton window is firmly to the left in a world that would have you believe the far-right are centrists, and my views are borderline revolutionary—an edgy position to inhabit for anyone but a side-lined marginalian.

Repetition can put you on edge, but rhythm provides certainty, reassurance, and groove. It is a hypnotic pulse that runs through my writing, an evocation casting a spell, edgy in an experimental way yet strangely reassuring in a fringe way.

I’ve scratched a living as an artist my whole life, working at the edge of my abilities, following dreams, trying new things, experimenting at the edge of what I thought possible or within my gift. I’m thankful for taking the less-travelled road at the edge of fancy, where interesting things can be found. I’ve had more fun in the long grass than on the well-manicured lawns of suburbia.

When they put the internal insulation into our new old house, all the rooms shrank by a few inches, an inhalation of sorts, a redefining of the edge. Replacing the skirting boards further reduced the room size. The pursuit of warmth in an icy house trumped my need for space in an on-edge tussle between a room to live in and hypothermia.

The landscape around me has an edge defined by mountains, fringing my vision before I look up to star-filled nights and the Aurora Borealis, another edge at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins. Daring to pause, think, and explore our perceptual edges and question our self-imposed boundaries is a liberating gift offering options, choice, and a life free of boundaries, limitations, and edges.

My interactions with the wider world are fleeting, at the edge of acceptable, and I like to keep it that way. The world is descending into madness; there has never been a more edgy time to live. In a world full of distraction, chaos, and outrage, quiet thought and reflection are revolutionary acts of brinkmanship to savour and relish.

Playing music has allowed me to explore life on the edge, an aristocratic castle one minute and a mud-splattered festival the next. My instrument, the hurdy-gurdy, moved from sacred in the medieval period to being respectable in the 18^th Century and then became a footnote on the edge of mainstream music in the 21^st Century. I reside in obscurity corner, an occasional band member and session musician at the edge of glitz and woolly-jumpered folkish sincerity. My father warned me that the music industry would eat me up and spit me out, but the reality was it prodded me, rolled me over and left me at the edge of the plate.

Gamblers experience life on the edge, the dopamine hit of success feeding an addiction that sometimes pushes them over the edge of excitement into bliss. Compulsive gamblers keep going for the hit, long after the known limit has been passed, playing on until the uncontrollable urge plunges them into a world of debt, chaos, and despair. Gamblers know they are living on the edge, failure is a real possibility, and the stakes are high. That is the unstated edgy thrill they seek.

Drug addicts live on the edge, feeding a habit that locks them out from mainstream society and forces them to live in the criminal edgelands of addiction-driven action and thought. We’ll move from these chemically enhanced edgelands to safer, less compulsive ground.

If I’m out walking and see the feral highland herd on the common grazing, I give them space. I skirt the far edge of the road; a cow in calf can be dangerous, and a defensive raging bull can be more so. There is a dichotomy between being edgy and being safe, a less risky, less involved option offering greater perspective and room for evasive action.

Nature abhors a vacuum, but greedy humanity has filled most of its spaces, leaving the natural world with only the edgelands, field borders, cliffs, mountains, marshes and peat bogs. It’s a lamentable state of affairs, yet nature still finds a way to eke out a living at the edge of the obscene Anthropocene. We know and intuitively love the ecosystem at a profound and visceral level; we expend vast amounts of effort seeking it out and enjoying it, escaping the urban world that pushes us to the edge of sanity.

For Refugees, the edge is the thing, a crossing to a hoped-for better life, sanctuary and freedom. Never has an edge been so fraught with hope, hate and inhumanity. The weasel words of the populist right are shaping the thinking of a nation through outrage, othering and vindictiveness. Humans have always been migratory creatures; borders are just a human construct, and movement through, from and over the edge has always been part of our way of being.

The service providers, the precariat, live on the edge of poverty, hoping for the next delivery, gig, commission, eking out a living on a bike, scooter, car, van, or warehouse. It’s a thin life, scratching a living at an edge defined by minimum wage, no fixed hours and a set of terms and conditions that benefit only the employer. Deliveroo, Uber, and Amazon like to be seen as edgy, innovative, and disruptive companies. Still, in truth, they are fracturing lives with their employment agreements and terms of service in a race to the bottom to find out how much people will tolerate, a cutting edge of sorts.

We are in a world that doesn’t want to define the edges between truth and opinion, fact and fiction. It’s a swirling ticker-tape cloud of information, disinformation, and contrary views designed to dizzy and confuse. We can jump into the choppy, murky waters and swim or stand on the bank, observe the flow, and revel in the mental freedom it affords us. Many of us leap in and get sucked into the drama and outrage that the world fills our attention with but the wise stand on the edge and choose their moments and reasons to enter the fray.

We’re all living on the edge of sanity; it’s plain to see that life in the twenty-first century is pushing us to the edge. We have addictive devices that feed us unending streams of algorithmically designed dopamine hits designed to keep us on edge, plugged in and turned on, excited, agitated, entertained, hypnotised and unthinking to sell us shit we don’t want or need to line the pockets of billionaires.

Here’s my big idea: what if we all lost our edge, the constant striving for winning excellence? What if instead of seeking edges we accepted blurred boundaries, loose definitions and ill-formed borders? What if nuance, subtlety and art became what we define ourselves by? What if we transitioned from being black and white in our thoughts to a less edgy, more contextual, embracing reason-based diaphanous greyness, not to become less thoughtful and decisive, but as a way of holding more understanding and empathy and much less edge?