The festive season is upon us, and with it comes the annual quest for the perfect, thoughtful gift. If there’s a hurdy-gurdy player in your life, you know they are passionate about their instrument. But what do you buy for the musician who has everything? This year, give them more than just another accessory; give them the gift of inspiration, knowledge, and a deeper connection to their craft.
“The Secret LIfe of the Hurdy-Gurdy” is not just a book; it’s a treasure chest of wisdom for anyone captivated by the sound of the hurdy-gurdy. It is the ideal present for players of all abilities and interests, from the enthusiastic beginner to the seasoned performer.
Unlock the Secret Life of the Hurdy-Gurdy
Imagine giving a gift that allows your loved one to sit down and learn from the masters. This book holds the distilled knowledge, reflections, and insights from 32 of the world’s most respected hurdy-gurdy players. Each chapter is dedicated to a different artist, providing an intimate look into their musicality, playing technique, theory, and performance philosophy.
This is a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants. The book features writing and interviews with a stellar lineup of artists, including:
Bruno Andersen
Patrick Bouffard
Gilles Chabenat
Germán Díaz
Matthias Loibner
Michalina Malisz
Isabelle Pignol
Steve Tyler
And 24 other leading players!
Knowledge is power. This book will delight, enthuse, and enlighten, bringing more power and passion to every reader’s music-making. It’s the gift that will keep on giving, inspiring new ideas and better playing long after the Christmas decorations are packed away.
What Readers Are Saying:
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s how this book has inspired musicians around the world:
‘Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for the excellent book. It was really interesting to read about the philosophy and approach to playing the gurdy of such a variety of musicians, and it inspired me to play my gurdy, which is never a bad thing!’ Wolfie Fiddler
‘It’s an excellent book. I learn something new from every chapter!’ Kevin Holland, Multi-instrumentalist
‘A fascinating read. Not only for hurdy-gurdy players and other musicians, but with insights from 32 leading players from around the world for anyone who likes people’s stories. Recommended! Nice one!’ Lou Dufy-Howard
Give a Gift that Supports the Artist Directly
By ordering this book directly from the author, you do more than just buy a present.
You directly support the creator. A much larger portion of your purchase goes to the author, rather than the 60% that Amazon takes after printing.
You help build a community. The author can keep a database of readers for future publications and connect with the people who appreciate the work.
You give a billionaire a little kick in the shin! Support independent artists and keep the music community thriving.
Order Now for Christmas Delivery!
Ordering is simple, but don’t delay! With a delivery time of 10-14 days, now is the perfect time to secure your copy for the festive season. And with no duty to pay for EU, US, Canadian, or UK customers, it couldn’t be easier.
To place your order, simply email the author, Quentin Budworth, at quentinbudworth@yahoo.com with the following information:
Your full postal address.
Your preferred payment method (PayPal or Direct Bank Transfer).
Quentin will reply with the payment details to finalize your order.
This Christmas, give the hurdy-gurdy player in your life a gift they will truly cherish. Give them the key to a secret world of music and inspiration.
The festive season is upon us, and with it comes the annual quest for the perfect, thoughtful gift. If there’s a hurdy-gurdy player in your life, you know they are passionate about their instrument. But what do you buy for the musician who has everything? This year, give them more than just another accessory; give them the gift of inspiration, knowledge, and a deeper connection to their craft.
“The Secret LIfe of the Hurdy-Gurdy” is not just a book; it’s a treasure chest of wisdom for anyone captivated by the sound of the hurdy-gurdy. It is the ideal present for players of all abilities and interests, from the enthusiastic beginner to the seasoned performer.
Unlock the Secret Life of the Hurdy-Gurdy
Imagine giving a gift that allows your loved one to sit down and learn from the masters. This book holds the distilled knowledge, reflections, and insights from 32 of the world’s most respected hurdy-gurdy players. Each chapter is dedicated to a different artist, providing an intimate look into their musicality, playing technique, theory, and performance philosophy.
This is a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants. The book features writing and interviews with a stellar lineup of artists, including:
Bruno Andersen
Patrick Bouffard
Gilles Chabenat
Germán Díaz
Matthias Loibner
Michalina Malisz
Isabelle Pignol
Steve Tyler
And 24 other leading players!
Knowledge is power. This book will delight, enthuse, and enlighten, bringing more power and passion to every reader’s music-making. It’s the gift that will keep on giving, inspiring new ideas and better playing long after the Christmas decorations are packed away.
What Readers Are Saying:
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s how this book has inspired musicians around the world:
‘Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for the excellent book. It was really interesting to read about the philosophy and approach to playing the gurdy of such a variety of musicians, and it inspired me to play my gurdy, which is never a bad thing!’ Wolfie Fiddler
‘It’s an excellent book. I learn something new from every chapter!’ Kevin Holland, Multi-instrumentalist
‘A fascinating read. Not only for hurdy-gurdy players and other musicians, but with insights from 32 leading players from around the world for anyone who likes people’s stories. Recommended! Nice one!’ Lou Dufy-Howard
Give a Gift that Supports the Artist Directly
By ordering this book directly from the author, you do more than just buy a present.
You directly support the creator. A much larger portion of your purchase goes to the author, rather than the 60% that Amazon takes after printing.
You help build a community. The author can keep a database of readers for future publications and connect with the people who appreciate the work.
You give a billionaire a little kick in the shin! Support independent artists and keep the music community thriving.
Order Now for Christmas Delivery!
Ordering is simple, but don’t delay! With a delivery time of 10-14 days, now is the perfect time to secure your copy for the festive season. And with no duty to pay for EU, US, Canadian, or UK customers, it couldn’t be easier.
To place your order, simply email the author, Quentin Budworth, at quentinbudworth@yahoo.com with the following information:
Your full postal address.
Your preferred payment method (PayPal or Direct Bank Transfer).
Quentin will reply with the payment details to finalize your order.
This Christmas, give the hurdy-gurdy player in your life a gift they will truly cherish. Give them the key to a secret world of music and inspiration.
The Engine and the Armour: A Truer Story of Creativity
It starts with profound curiosity doesn’t it? That low-level hum beneath the surface of things. The sense that you can’t quite switch your own brain off. You’re in the supermarket, trying to remember if you need milk, but you’re also cataloguing the precise tone of fluorescent hum from the overhead lights, the discordant percussive rhythmic rattle of trolley wheels, and the quiet, tragic history etched on the face of the man staring at the price of coffee. For many, this is just background noise and mindless distraction. For you, it’s the entire orchestra, and you’re standing right in front of the brass section.
This isn’t a poetic exaggeration; it’s a neurological reality. Your brain isn’t just passively receiving more data; it’s wired for a different kind of processing. We now understand this as a dynamic, chaotic dance between three key neural networks. There’s the Default Mode Network (DMN), the brain’s dreamer, spinning daydreams and forging wild connections. There’s the Executive Control Network (ECN), the project manager, trying to focus and evaluate those ideas. And mediating between them is the Salience Network, the scout that constantly scans the horizon, deciding what’s interesting enough to deserve your attention.
In many creative people, the connectivity between these networks is unusually high. The dreamer and the manager are in a constant, frantic conversation, and your scout is working overtime. This is the very mechanism that allows you to see patterns others miss. It’s also why it feels like you can’t turn it off. But to frame this experience purely as a burden is to tell only half the story. The truth is far more powerful.
Chapter 1: The Addictive Pull of Deep Focus
Here’s the part the tragic artist myth always leaves out. The reason you can’t switch off isn’t just some curse. It’s because, when channelled, that relentless mental energy triggers one of the most powerful and rewarding states a human can experience: flow. Coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is that sacred state of total immersion where time dissolves, your sense of self evaporates, and the act of creating becomes its own magnificent reward. It’s what makes the process autotelic, the joy is in the doing, not the done.
This isn’t just a feeling; it’s a neurochemical cascade. Theories like Self-Determination Theory tell us that we are intrinsically motivated by a need for autonomy, competence, and connection. The creative act is a direct line to satisfying those needs. As you engage, your brain rewards you with dopamine surges in the striatum, reinforcing the behaviour and making it deeply pleasurable. This is what makes creativity addictive in the best possible way, not just an obligatory coping strategy. You’re not just offloading sensory data to survive; you are chasing the profound, intrinsically rewarding high of mastery. It’s a private, powerful truth. Which makes the public lie we’re told all the more infuriating.
Chapter 2: The Lie of the Lone Genius
Our culture loves a simple hero narrative, doesn’t it? The lone genius, struck by a bolt from the blue, toiling in a dusty garret to produce a masterpiece all on their own. It’s a romantic story. It’s also a convenient and profoundly damaging lie. The truth is that creativity isn’t a solo performance; it’s a team sport. It’s what Brian Eno, a master of these things, brilliantly termed ‘scenius’.
The polar opposite of genius scenius is the idea that groundbreaking work emerges not from a single mind, but from the collective intelligence and energy of a scene. Think of the Bloomsbury Group, tearing up the literary rulebook over tea and fierce arguments. Think of the punk scene in 1970s London, a glorious, feedback-drenched conversation happening in grubby pubs and rehearsal rooms. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in conversation, in collaboration, in the fertile friction of minds rubbing up against one another.
So why does the myth of the lone genius persist? Because it’s incredibly useful. It serves a clear economic and social function. A single, tortured genius is a simple, compelling product to market. A collaborative, messy ‘scenius’ is not. More insidiously, it atomises us. By telling creatives they should be toiling away alone, it keeps them disconnected, less powerful collectively, and far easier to exploit in industries built on precarious, gig-based work. It allows a small group of cultural gatekeepers to bestow the ‘genius’ label, maintaining a power structure that is far from meritocratic. The myth of the lone genius isn’t just wrong; it’s a cage with no bars, designed to keep us from realising our collective strength.
This is why the composition of a ‘scenius’ is so critical. A homogenous scene is a stagnant one. If everyone in the room comes from the same background, shares the same reference points, and holds the same assumptions, you don’t get innovation—you get an echo chamber. The cultural river becomes dangerously shallow. True, world-changing creativity is almost always the product of friction between different perspectives and experiences. Fighting for genuine diversity and inclusion in our creative fields isn’t just a moral good; it is a strategic imperative for any culture that wants to progress.
Chapter 3: An Engine for Growth, Not Just Survival
So yes, the cost can be brutal. That survey finding 73% of musicians experience anxiety and depression is real and it matters. But it’s a profound mistake to see art only as a coping mechanism for trauma. While it absolutely can be a powerful therapeutic tool, its purpose extends far beyond mere survival. To create is to experience a unique form of well-being, what the Greeks called “eudaimonia”—the joy that comes from living a life of purpose and growth.
In an age where artificial intelligence can generate slick, novel content in seconds, this distinction has never been more vital. AI can replicate patterns, but it cannot replicate the messy, embodied, human experience that gives art its soul. It hasn’t felt heartbreak or stood in a supermarket overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of existence. Our creativity, our ability to connect, to feel, to find meaning in the chaos, is not just a nice-to-have. It is our last truly wild resource, and our most valuable strategic asset.
The Pragmatic Path: How to Service the Engine
Understanding all this is one thing. Living it is another. In an economy increasingly dominated by AI, nurturing our uniquely human creativity isn’t a soft skill; it is the most important work we can do to make ourselves indispensable. It’s not enough to validate the feeling of being overwhelmed; we need a practical toolkit to navigate it. If your creativity is an engine, not a curse, then it requires maintenance. This isn’t about suppressing your nature; it’s about learning how to handle a high-performance machine without burning out.
First, practise neurological hygiene. Your hyper-aware brain is taking a constant beating. Mindfulness isn’t some fluffy wellness trend; it’s a direct intervention. Start small. Ten minutes of deep breathing before you even look at a screen creates a vital buffer. A body scan, where you simply pay attention to physical sensations from your feet upwards, can ground you when your mind is racing. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system—the body’s own braking mechanism—and gives you a moment of quiet agency in the storm.
Second, build resilience through radical self-compassion. The “lone genius” myth leaves no room for failure, which is, of course, the most essential part of the creative process. Reframe your inner critic. Instead of seeing a failed experiment as a personal failing, see it as data. Keep a journal of small wins. When you feel that familiar pang of alienation, pause and remind yourself: “This feeling is a known occupational hazard for people like me. I am not alone in this.” This isn’t self-indulgent; it’s a strategic move to build the emotional stamina you need for the long haul.
Third, defend your environment. In 2025, our attention is the most valuable commodity on earth, and everything is designed to steal it. You have to fight back. It’s not optional. Establish non-negotiable digital boundaries. Have screen-free times or zones. Crucially, get outside. Spend time in nature—forest bathing, a walk by the sea—to recalibrate your senses away from the urban assault. Counterintuitively, the best way to refuel your creativity is often to engage in low-pressure hobbies entirely unrelated to your main work. Cook a meal, fix a bike, do something with your hands that has no audience and no stakes.
Fourth, actively build your ‘scenius’. Don’t wait for community to find you. Seek out artist groups, online or in person. Share your work, but more importantly, share your process and your struggles. Find a mentor. Offer to mentor someone else. Start a collaborative project with the sole aim of distributing the cognitive load and sparking unexpected ideas. Connection is the antidote to the existential drain of feeling like you’re the only one seeing the world this way.
Finally, look after the machine itself. The link between mind and body isn’t mystical; it’s physiological. You cannot sustain high-level creative output on a diet of caffeine, booze, digital dopamine or anxiety. Prioritise sleep as if it were a critical project deadline, because it is. Move your body in a way that feels good, not punishing. And if the overload becomes chronic and debilitating, seek professional support. Finding a therapist who specialises in the mental health of creative people isn’t an admission of defeat; it’s an intelligent investment in your most valuable asset.
Your creativity is not just your armour against an overwhelming world. It is the very engine that propels you through it. Our job is not to wish for a different, simpler brain, but to learn how to service the magnificent, complex, and powerful one we have.
The far-right’s online dominance is not an accident. It stems from savvy, adaptive tactics that exploit platform algorithms, human psychology, and cultural voids, turning fringe ideas into mainstream forces. While the left should never mimic their toxic elements like hate and disinformation, there is immense value in borrowing their structural and strategic tools to counter far-right gains.
Drawing from recent analyses, the key is ethical adaptation: using their methods to focus on hope, facts, and inclusivity, creating “alt-left pipelines” that radicalise people toward justice, not division.
Here are five transferable lessons for a progressive counter-strategy.
1. Build a Multi-Voice “Roster” for Narrative Dominance (The WWF Model)
The Right’s Method: They succeed with a diverse “ecosystem of creators“—intellectuals, meme-makers, and podcasters—who cross-promote and create social immersion. This “multiplicity of voices” normalises extremism, turning a single opinion into a perceived chorus.
The Left’s Deployment: Create a “Red-Green roster” of 20-50 voices (eco-activists, union organisers, TikTok storytellers) focused on core issues like inequality and climate. Use X Spaces for collaborative “story arcs” and fund collaborations through platforms like Patreon to foster community. The goal is viral, relatable formats that explain complex issues simply, like “why your rent doubled.”
2. Craft Gradual “Pipelines” for Positive Radicalisation
The Right’s Method: Their infamous “alt-right pipeline” hooks users with benign frustrations (e.g., “woke overreach”) then uses algorithms to pull them into echo chambers. This process of self-radicalisation happens without overt pushes.
The Left’s Deployment: Design an “alt-left pipeline” that starts with empowering content, like TikToks on “union wins” or stories of community success. This can funnel users to deeper dives on podcasts or documentaries about systemic issues. Ethically used AI tools could even offer personalised recommendations that target disillusioned centrists with messages of hope, addressing alienation head-on.
3. Weaponise Memes, Humour, and Emotional Storytelling
The Right’s Method: Irony, memes, and “outrage farming” create addictive engagement that polarises audiences and evades content moderation. They tap into real anger but channel it with simplistic, divisive narratives.
The Left’s Deployment: Flood platforms with joyful, subversive memes (“Billionaires vs. Your Rent” cartoons) and powerful, emotional stories, like videos of successful worker strikes. Use social media for provocative but substantive threads that expose hypocrisy. Focus on a “politics of substance” by creating new cultural symbols of solidarity, like remixing old union anthems for a modern audience.
4. Invest in Local Organising and Power-Building Networks
The Right’s Method: Online tactics are merely the recruitment arm for their offline infrastructure. They channel digital anger into real-world rallies and loyalty, building power from the ground up.
The Left’s Deployment: Mirror this by linking online campaigns directly to local action. Use platforms like Discord for one-on-one recruitment based on what matters to people in their communities. Channel energy into sustained wins, like establishing tenants’ unions or mutual aid groups, rather than chasing fleeting viral moments.
5. Play the Long Game of Institutional Capture and Patience
The Right’s Method: They understand that short-term wins like elections are secondary to long-term cultural entrenchment. They play the “long game,” infiltrating institutions like local school boards and media outlets over decades.
The Left’s Deployment: Shift from reactive online debates to proactive, institution-building. This means creating progressive media co-ops, getting involved in local governance, and controlling the narrative with preemptive framing (e.g., “Before you ask about taxes, here’s how billionaires dodge them”). As mainstream platforms become more toxic, this also means scaling safely on decentralised alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon.
Ethical Guardrails and Risks
Any adaptation of these methods must prioritise anti-hate safeguards and robust fact-checking to avoid the pitfalls of disinformation. The goal is to turn the right’s tactics of scarcity and division into a new strategy of abundance and solidarity. The left’s greatest advantage is substance; these tools can help make that substance go viral.
Feeling powerless is part of the plan. They want you to believe this is all too big, too technical, and too inevitable to fight. They are counting on your resignation as they assemble the cage around you, piece by piece, hoping you’ll be too tired or distracted to notice. But their entire, multi-billion-pound system has a fatal flaw, a single point of failure. That single point of failure is you.
We have options. They require effort, courage, and a refusal to be intimidated. Here’s a breakdown of the response options we have as citizens, from the simple to the deeply committed.
1. The Information War: Know Your Enemy and Spread the Word
First, don’t be a passive consumer of this. The primary battleground right now is awareness.
Educate Yourself and Others: Read everything you can. Understand the technology (Foundry, Gotham), the key players (Palantir, Peter Thiel), and the political machinations. When you talk about it, be informed. Use the facts.
Share Intelligently: Don’t just scream into the social media void. Share the articles and the evidence with people in your life who might listen. Send it to your family WhatsApp group. Talk about it with friends. The aim is to break this story out of the ‘conspiracy’ box and into the mainstream conversation.
Frame the Debate Correctly: When you talk about it, don’t let them frame it as “convenience vs. privacy.” Frame it correctly: Freedom vs. Control. It’s not about faster logins; it’s about the state’s ability to switch you off.
2. Political Pressure: Rattle the Cage
The system might feel rigged, but it’s not soundproof. They still need a veneer of public consent.
Your MP is Your Employee: Write to your MP. Don’t send a generic email; send a pointed one with specific questions. “Have you read Palantir’s contracts with the NHS?” “What are your specific concerns about linking a Digital ID to their software?” “Will you publicly pledge to vote against any mandatory Digital ID scheme?” Go to their local surgery and ask them face-to-face. Record their answer.
Support Advocacy Groups: Organisations like Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, and others are fighting this at a policy level. Support them. Amplify their work. They have the resources to launch legal challenges and lobby Parliament effectively.
Sign and Share Petitions: While they can sometimes feel like shouting into the wind, official parliamentary petitions that reach a certain threshold must be debated. It forces the issue onto the official record.
3. Economic Resistance: Starve the Beast
This is a big one, and it’s where we have more power than we think.
Use Cash: This is the single most powerful act of passive resistance. Every note you spend is a small vote for privacy, for anonymity, and against a fully traceable digital currency. When shops ask you to pay by card, politely refuse where you can. Make cash a visible, normal part of daily life.
Scrutinise Your Services: Look at the companies you do business with. Is your bank a partner in the new identity frameworks? Does your tech provider have a record of collaboration with state surveillance? Where possible, move your money and your data away from those who are building the cage.
Support Privacy-First Technology: Use encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Use privacy-respecting search engines. Ditch services that harvest your data as their business model. The more of us who do this, the more we normalise privacy.
4. The Final Line of Defence: Non-Compliance
This is the sharp end of it, and it requires real resolve.
Refuse to Volunteer: When the Digital ID is first rolled out, it will be “optional.” Do not opt-in. Do not download the app. Do not be a guinea pig for your own cage. The lower the initial uptake, the harder it is for them to claim it has public support and the more difficult it becomes to make it mandatory.
Public Protest: If and when the time comes, be prepared to take to the streets. Peaceful, mass protest is a fundamental British right and a powerful part of our history. It shows the government that public anger is real and cannot be ignored.
Build Local Resilience: The more we rely on centralised state and corporate systems, the more power they have over us. Support local businesses. Start community skill-sharing networks. Build relationships with your neighbours. The more resilient and self-sufficient our communities are, the less we need their systems.
None of these is a magic bullet. But they are not mutually exclusive. We can do all of them. It’s about creating a multi-fronted resistance: informational, political, economic, and social.
They are counting on us to be too tired, too distracted, and too divided to fight back. Let’s disappoint them.
If you are an investor you could move holdings from the following funds to more ethical ones:
Top 10 Largest Institutional Holders of shares in Palentir. The following table lists the top holders by shares outstanding, including shares held, percentage of total shares, and approximate value (based on recent market prices around $177–$180 per share).
In the US, online political clashes are often better understood as a battle of internet subcultures. Two major groups on the far-right, while frequently lumped together, are worlds apart: the traditional Christian nationalists and the nihilistic ‘black-pilled’ wing of the ‘groyper’ scene.
The simplest way to frame it is as the ‘builders’ versus the ‘burners’.
The builders—the Christian nationalists—are still trying to construct something. They have a vision for an explicitly Christian nation, founded on order, hierarchy, and a return to what they see as ‘proper’ social roles. Their strategy is institutional: win elections, pass laws, stack the courts, and capture the school boards. Their language centres on ‘restoration’ and ‘revival’. Even when their rhetoric gets apocalyptic, the end goal is to use state power to enforce a particular moral order.
The burners, however, are orbiting a completely different sun. This is a much younger, more terminally online crowd, full of streamers and internet personalities. Their worldview is steeped in the cynicism of incel forums, gamer culture, and a deeply ironic, ‘edgelord’ sense of humour.
The crucial distinction is their profound loss of faith in reform. The black pilled wing is utterly convinced that our institutions, our culture, and even people themselves are beyond saving. The ‘black pill’ is a metaphor for accepting a brutal ‘truth’: that decline is irreversible, making despair the only rational response. If nothing can be redeemed, the only creative act left is to tear it all down. This accelerationism operates less like a political programme and more like a social physics, deliberately pressing on every social fault line—from race to gender—just to see what breaks. It is, essentially, the worship of things falling apart.
The bizarre, cryptic memes are central because, for them, the style is the substance. The meme factory serves several functions at once.
It’s a fiercely effective recruitment tool. A darkly funny, high-contrast image travels much faster and wider than a dense policy document. It’s also wrapped in the Kevlar vest of irony, which offers plausible deniability; if you’re offended, they were ‘just joking’. Finally, it works to desensitise its audience. Shock is used like a muscle. The first time you see something awful, you flinch. By the hundredth time, an idea that was once unthinkable feels perfectly normal within the group. This is why their aesthetic is such a chaotic mash-up of cartoon frogs and nihilistic jokes. The underlying message is that nothing matters.
You can start to see the appeal for those who feel exiled from the traditional games of status—dating, university, a good career. It offers a cheap and easy form of belonging where attention is the only currency.
This helps explain why real-world incidents are often followed by posts loaded with strange symbols. The act itself is a performance for an online audience, where the primary aim is gaining in-group status by turning reality into a toxic, private joke.
This doesn’t make it harmless, not for a second. A politics that only wants to break things can still inspire catastrophe, because its only measure of success is destruction.
The antidote requires us to refuse the seductive pull of nihilism and call the black pill what it is: a permission slip for cruelty hiding behind a mask of sophistication. After that, it’s about doing the quiet, unglamorous work of building real meaning and belonging in our lives—in places where empty spectacle can’t compete.
When you get right down to it, Christian nationalism is a plan to rule; black pilled accelerationism is a plan to ruin. Once you grasp that polarity, the memes stop looking like mysterious runes and start looking like what they are: billboards for a politics of nothing.
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 18th Century and then became a footnote on the edge of mainstream music in the 21st 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?
That phone in your pocket? It’s not your friend. It’s a brain-rotting instrument, meticulously engineered by tech oligarchs to scramble your grey matter, decimate your focus, and keep you hooked so they can sell you more shit you don’t need and further a far-right-wing anarcho-capitalist ideology that is killing the planet. It both undermines progressive thought and serves far-right governments, bad actors and authoritarians across the globe. It’s unregulated, unfettered digital anarchy and for sale to the highest bidder, no questions asked. It’s not just you; it’s a societal affliction, this creeping idiocy by design. You feel it, I feel it. We’re all getting a bit too responsive, easily angered, dafter, a bit more on edge, and that bloody phone is usually the prime suspect.
Now, I could parrot the usual advice: buy an old-fashioned dumb phone, look in phone settings and grey-scale your screen, mute notifications, go smell the roses, and chill out. But you’ve already tried that, and it’s a sticking plaster on a gaping wound that just won’t heal.
Why is an artist like me delving into big tech and self-help? The answer is simple: I am appalled by the rot in our society, the political radicalisation, the public apathy, and the hyper-capitalist frenzy gutting our communities and our planet. It’s all amplified, refined, and delivered through that devilish device in your pocket. It’s a weapon of mass distraction and, frankly, mass derangement. So, disarming it, or at least understanding its mechanics, is a political act.
Step One: Recognise your Enemy (It’s Not You, It’s Them)
You know it isn’t good for you, but you feel you can’t live without it. That’s the trap. And how do I know? Because everyone I talk to says the same damn thing. Your time, attention, and sanity are being siphoned off simply to serve you adverts. That’s the grand, pathetic truth. All this psychic damage, this digitally engineered ADHD, this paranoia – it’s so some algorithm can flog you a pair of cheap trousers from a sweatshop via Temu.
That’s the sole purpose of these “social” media platforms: to keep your eyeballs glued long enough to absorb advertising. The brightest minds of a generation, not curing cancer or solving climate change, but figuring out how to make you click on an ad. It’s built on casino psychology – the endless scroll, the intermittent rewards – turning us into lab rats pulling a lever for the next dopamine pellet.
And notice how everything feels a bit… worse? It’s the relentless ‘shitification’ of society, isn’t it? The grim endgame of decades of trickle-down economics that have plundered the working class, with the phone now a key accelerant. These platforms thrive on engagement, and what gets engagement? Outrage. Fear. Division. The algorithms aren’t designed to inform you or make you happy; they’re designed to keep you on the app, even if it means turning you into a raving bigot against, say, migrants, or anyone deemed too ‘woke’ by a right-wing press waging its own relentless war on common sense and decency. Fascism always needs a scapegoat to ‘otherise‘, and they’re adept at finding new ones weekly. Very soon, in the words of the National Lottery, ‘It could be you’.
Researchers and whistleblowers have repeatedly linked platforms like Facebook to real-world violence and even genocide. Social media platforms whip up hatred, fracture communities, and for what? To sell you some plastic tat you don’t need. It’s grotesque. We’re letting them rewire our brains for their profit margins. The phone isn’t a tool anymore; it’s a direct conduit for Silicon Valley’s richest and most morally bankrupt to extract value from your consciousness. The broligarchy is real, and it wants your soul, your vote, and constantly demands your attention 24/7 if you let it.
So, here’s the first practical step: stop blaming yourself. The guilt, the “I have no discipline” narrative – that’s what they want. Instead, get righteously angry. These corporations, these billionaires, did this to us, deliberately, for profit. Channel that anger. It’s far more motivating than shame. There’s a reason it’s called “rage bait,” not “guilt bait.”
Step Two: Reclaim Your Tools – The Humble Computer
You’ve seen the videos: “I cut my screen time by 80%… by using my computer more.” Sounds like a cheat, but it’s fundamental. The phone is the brain-rot machine; the computer, by and large, remains a tool. Computers were built for doing things, not just passively consuming.
Think about “apps.” If, back in 2007, Twitter had said, “To read these short messages, you must first download and install our proprietary program,” we’d have told them to sod off. You’re a website, mate. But on phones, this became normal. We stopped visiting websites and started living inside these corporate-owned, walled gardens. Each app’s sole purpose, remember, is to keep you in the app, away from the open internet, so they can farm more data and show more ads. Click an external link on Instagram? “Are you sure you want to leave our lovely, data-rich environment? How about our terrible in-app browser instead, so we can track you further?” It’s insidious.
On a computer, you have the whole messy, wonderful internet. Plus, actual programs you can (sometimes even legally) own and use. You can still doomscroll on a PC, but it’s less appealing, less immediate. And crucially, you can do other things. My survey showed most use phones for mindless entertainment. But for creative pursuits – music, writing, coding, art – it’s the computer that truly serves as a tool for active engagement, not passive consumption.
The early internet was a “Wild West” precisely because these tech feudal lords hadn’t yet enclosed the commons for profit. You can still find that spirit on a PC. That’s how I learned most of what I know – by stumbling across something interesting online and giving it a go.
Worried about DMs? Apps like Beeper or Texts can pull all your messages onto your computer. You see the funny tweet your mate sent without falling down the Twitter rabbit hole for an hour. The point is, on a computer, you can walk away. It’s not physically tethered to you.
And enhance your computer’s defences:
Unhook for YouTube: Kills the recommended videos, stopping the endless rabbit hole.
uBlock Origin (or similar for Reddit): Block those distracting, addictive homepages.
SelfControl (or equivalent): When needed, hard blocks sites and reclaims your focus.
One tool is absolutely non-negotiable: AD BLOCKER. If Chrome phases them out, switch to Firefox. Seriously. Once you experience ad-free internet, going back is like being waterboarded with commercials. This is about reclaiming your mental space from corporate bombardment.
This fights “algorithmic complacency”, that passive acceptance of whatever Zuckerberg or Musk decides to mainline into your brain. Don’t let them be your curators. Actively choose your information. That’s freedom of thought. On a computer, you have more agency. You could scroll Twitter, or you could open a tutorial and learn something, create something, or engage with something real.
Step Three: Sundry Practical Defences
Screen Time Passwords: If you use them, get a trusted friend to set it, or do it with your eyes closed and forget it.
Replace Bad Habits with Less Bad Ones: Instead of Twitter, try Sudoku, chess puzzles, a language app, or even an e-book from the library. Something engaging but not soul-destroying. Replace mindless scrolling with things like general knowledge or puzzles.
No Phone in Bed. Ever. It’s the devil’s work. It’s the mind-killer. Keep it charging in another room. Your alarm can be a cheap, old-fashioned clock.
Fidget Wisely: If you’re like me and your hands need to be busy, find an alternative. Draw, write, play a tune, sing, have a conversation, go for a walk. Anything to stop that reflexive phone grab.
Embrace Full Albums: A night listening to actual, complete albums, perhaps with a nice cup of tea or a glass of wine, if that’s your thing, is infinitely better than doomscrolling.
A Final Word on Accessing Culture (and Sticking it to the Man)
Are you really going to subscribe to Disney+, Netflix, HBO, Now TV, and whatever else these media conglomerates cook up, especially in this economy, while writers and actors get shafted? Consider where your money goes. Typing ‘TV show online free’ or exploring alternative ways to access culture isn’t just about saving a few quid. It’s about questioning who controls information and art. The knowledge that Jeff Bezos or some other media baron isn’t getting another cut, while you still get to engage with culture, is liberating. Think about supporting independent artists, local venues, or buying directly from creators, rather than padding the pockets of massive corporations who increasingly treat art as mere “content” for their streaming wars.
Ultimately, this is about reclaiming your mind, time, and agency from systems designed to exploit them. It’s a small act of rebellion, but it is vital for your sanity and, dare I say, for the health of our democracy and planet. Use your tools wisely. Don’t let them use you. Your mind is the last uncolonised territory; defend it.
Switch off data roaming on your phone and Wi-Fi while you are at it. Make your use of the devil in your pocket a conscious choice, not a dopamine-fueled automatic reflex that feeds the machine. Look at the world outside; see the beauty of life beyond the tiny screen in your hand.
Quentin Budworth 