Category: Psychology (Page 1 of 2)

Alan Whicker Filmed my Two Futures

October 28, 2026 / Dunwiddie

YouTube knows what it is doing.

I had recently been writing about China, overnight trains and the life that movement had made possible. Alongside those travel posts sat another piece born in Shanghai: Gresham’s Law of Courting, clarifying the dating and relationship world I grew up in.

Then the algorithm reached into the past and returned two old films by Alan Whicker. One connected directly to the trains. The other connected so precisely to Gresham’s Law that it might have been waiting there for me since before I was born.

The first was Whicker’s World: Aboard the Orient Express, filmed in May 1982 on the newly revived service from London Victoria to Venice.

I remembered it.

Not perfectly. I remembered the feeling of it.

My father liked Alan Whicker and I watched him too. Whicker was old-fashionedly pleasant: immaculate, conversational and interested. He could enter somebody else’s world without becoming subordinate to it. People wanted to talk to him. They frequently told him far more than they intended.

The Orient Express film came from a Britain which no longer exists. The passengers are white. So are the train staff, the porters and the audience gathered at Victoria to watch the departure. Porters carry luggage through the station. Passengers settle into restored carriages as the journey from London, across the Channel to Boulogne and onward to Venice, prepares to begin. That journey no longer leaves Victoria. The British leg has gone and the train now begins in Paris. Back then, continental Europe is not reached by airport security, retail corridors and a plastic seat at 35,000 feet. It begins at a railway terminus in London.

The whole thing seemed impossibly exotic when I was young. Sleeping on a train. Dressing for dinner. Crossing countries during the night and waking somewhere with another language outside the window. It belonged to Whicker’s world, not mine.

Then YouTube returned it to me at 55 and I realised that I had become the man who does it.

Not in a dinner jacket on the Orient Express, but on overnight trains through Europe and Asia, travelling towards cities whose names once sounded impossibly distant. The luxury was incidental. The movement was the thing. A railway carriage at night, a border crossed while sleeping, and another place waiting in the morning.

A small part of my father must have understood the attraction. He had once considered joining the Merchant Navy. Instead, he met a woman worth surrendering that possibility for. He married her, built a family and spent much of his life improving the house in which that family lived. His journey became a fixed construction. The horizon was converted into a home.

I tried to make the same exchange.

I did not avoid households, marriage or fatherhood in favour of travel. I constructed several and produced five children. I invested much of my adult life in precisely the bargain my father had made. I believed in it strongly enough to keep allocating years, work, money and loyalty to it.

Those constructions did not hold. Much of the capital had already been spent by the time I accepted that. What remained—time, money, movement and authorship—was placed elsewhere. The life my father considered and relinquished became open to me only after I had spent decades attempting his alternative.

That was the first recognition YouTube gave me.

Then it offered another Alan Whicker film.

The Starter Culture

Swingles Inc. was broadcast on 16 June 1969, more than two years before I was born.

Whicker presents America’s unmarried young adults as a curious new economic force: millions of people with earnings, freedom and few apologies for being single. He visits the Catskills, where men and women gather at a resort to meet one another. He examines a computer dating bureau. He talks to women who intend to work, enjoy themselves and postpone marriage. He talks to men who are beginning to calculate their value differently.

He thinks he has found an unusual American subculture.

What he has actually found is a starter culture.

It sits there in one corner of America like bacteria in a dish, apparently localised and faintly amusing. But the entire new sexual economy is already present: female earnings, contraception, hook-ups and casual sex outside marriage, abortion as the backstop when contraception fails, mobility, weakened supervision, computer records, commercial intermediaries and a growing population whose lives no longer pass directly from the parental home into marriage.

Sexual access is being separated from courtship, childbirth and permanent settlement. This culture will not coexist harmlessly with marriage. It will consume the scarcity, restraint and consequence on which marriage depended.

Once those conditions spread, the culture will convert everything around it into more of itself.

Whicker does not know that. The people he interviews do not know it. They believe they are describing a new American lifestyle.

They are describing the next sixty years.

Before I Was Born

That article owns the full currency argument. What Swingles Inc. added was the date.

I had written about a boy born in 1971, the year the United States closed the gold window. Whicker showed me that the sexual currency was already circulating two years before the boy arrived. The unmarried were a recognised consumer class. Businesses were courting them. Women were deferring marriage. Men were recalculating their value. A computer bureau was storing their preferences and reusing the data for matches, cocktail parties and further events.

I was born after the new system had begun, then taught the rules of the previous one.

Tinder did not invent this market. Smartphones did not invent it. The internet increased its reach, speed and opacity, but the operating system was already running in 1969.

The Catskills weekend was Tinder with physical friction. The participants had to travel, dress, enter a room, dance and speak to one another. Their reputations still existed in a recognisable social world. Opportunities were limited by geography and time. Even the women presented as daringly modern in Whicker’s film likely accumulated fewer partners over years than many women on dating apps now accumulate in months.

The printing press was working. It had not yet been automated.

The Man Who Understood

One man in the film sees further than the others.

He appears to be British, in his thirties, and explains with cheerful simplicity that as he gets older he makes more money. The money increases his appeal and seems to attract younger women.

He laughs.

In 1969 he has already identified the male counterstrategy.

Men and women do not carry the same assets through time. Women begin adulthood holding youth, fertility and sexual desirability. Men commonly begin with little status, limited resources and no demonstrated capability. The woman’s valuable asset is present early and depreciates. The man’s must be constructed and may appreciate for decades.

The old settlement joined those different curves. A woman selected a man whose capability could support a family. A man selected a woman whose youth, fertility, vitality, restraint and character made her worth building that family with.

Once marriage could be delayed, the consequences of delay were not equal.

Whicker remarks upon the glances of women over 25 searching for a man, and men over 30 searching for a woman. The age thresholds sound astonishing now, but they reveal a society which still understood the different clocks. A woman over 25 was consuming reproductive time. A man over 30 was expected to have completed enough economic construction to support a household.

Her urgency came from biology. His clock was different, but his urge to find a woman was not merely convention.

Most men want to find a worthwhile woman in whom they can invest, who will bear their children and give direction to the work of succeeding. The male reproductive window may remain open much longer, but the desire to build, provide, protect and pass something forward is not a social decoration. It is one of the forces which turns male capability into a household and a future.

The market can frustrate that drive without abolishing it. When the probability of finding a worthwhile woman falls while the cost and liability of choosing badly rise, the real-life game offers less reward because effort and outcome are no longer reliably connected. Some men redirect the same competitive and constructive energy into activities where the rules are visible, progress must be earned, competence produces results and the ledger cannot pretend that everybody paid the same price.

Even video games have become more rewarding because the real one has abandoned the fairness of hard currency.

The modern dating market has inverted the presentation without changing the underlying facts. Women in their thirties and forties place “would like children” on profiles as though it were a durable lifestyle preference. The same interface permits them to dismiss men for frivolous reasons, including men for whom fatherhood remains biologically possible. Meanwhile, they fail to realise how much the cheap issuance in earlier years has really cost them.

They have issued away their most valuable asset: youth, fertility and sexual desirability at their peak. What was once scarce has been spent cheaply, and the bill arrives when they seek a settlement after the asset has begun to depreciate.

The boxes are identical. The clocks are not.

The Englishman at the Catskills has already realised this. If his productive value continues to rise and attracts younger women, time is not forcing him towards the same settlement at the same moment. He can continue accumulating and transact later with a younger entrant.

He thinks he has noticed a pleasant personal advantage.

He has articulated one of the governing asymmetries of the future dating market.

The Database Is the Business

The computer dating bureau may be the most extraordinary part of the film.

This is 1969. Personal details and preferences are being entered into a computer so that men and women can be selected for one another. But the bureau already understands that the database has uses beyond a single introduction. The same people and information can be organised into cocktail parties and other events.

The data is the asset.

Acquire unattached people. Record their characteristics. Sort the inventory. Manufacture encounters. Keep the participants circulating.

The contradiction inside modern dating platforms is already present. A permanent successful match removes two customers. Continued searching preserves the inventory. The intermediary earns from circulation, not settlement.

The resort understood the same market physically. Gather single people in one place, sell them accommodation and entertainment, and offer the possibility of romantic success. Their unmarried state is no longer merely an absence awaiting correction. It is a commercial category.

What makes the film historic is that the new machinery is already operating while the old expectation of eventual marriage remains visible. Whicker has caught the two systems occupying the same room.

Two Futures

Alan Whicker’s manner makes the evidence unusually clean.

He does not arrive to condemn the singles or to celebrate them. He is polite, curious and faintly perplexed. He allows people to disclose the system in their own words. The women describe optionality. The men describe delayed male value. The businesses describe the commercial power of the unmarried. The computer promises more efficient selection.

Whicker thinks he is recording a novelty.

He is standing at the source.

YouTube placed two of his films beside one another for me. The first showed me a future I eventually entered. The second showed me a future which had already begun before I was born.

On the Orient Express, I saw the overnight journeys which once appeared impossible and later became part of my life. In the Catskills, I saw the relationship market into which I would be born two years later: the warnings already present, the currency already circulating, the databases already filling and one perceptive man already explaining why time increases rather than destroys his options.

My father saw a worthwhile woman and exchanged the horizon for a home.

I attempted the same exchange several times. Eventually I withdrew with what remained and recovered the horizon. I will find more Orient Expresses and take the exotic journeys I dreamt about as a child, and the only baggage I carry will be my own.

Whicker saw an American curiosity.

The participants saw opportunity.

The businesses saw a market.

None of them could yet see the world it would reproduce.

But there it is, fully alive in 1969, waiting to spread.

Gresham’s Law of Courting

October 21, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I. Shanghai

Shanghai is a city of commerce without apology.

Money is made, exchanged, counted and reinvested. The towers, banks, shopping streets and endless movement of goods carry the same message: this is a city that understands trade.

It has also quietly emerged as the world’s biggest physical gold exchange.

Walking through Shanghai, a principle from monetary history kept returning to me.

Gresham’s Law.

Bad money drives out good.

Under a gold standard, take two instruments, each denominated at one pound: a paper banknote and a gold sovereign. The sovereign contains the gold. The banknote promises its equivalent. The denomination is the same. The backing is not.

When both must be accepted at the same nominal value, the doubtful banknote is spent and the sovereign retained. The paper circulates. The gold goes into reserve. Its owner understands the difference between a pound printed on a promise and a pound settled in gold.

Shanghai gives that distinction physical form. Paper claims move across screens while gold is weighed, tested, bought and stored. One can be created by extending a balance sheet. The other must be acquired.

I was born in 1971, the year the United States closed the gold window. The dollar’s remaining convertibility into gold was suspended. The suspension was called temporary. It became the new order.

I later entered the relationship market believing men and women still exchanged hard currencies. Restraint and exclusivity would meet loyalty and commitment. I would build my reserves. The woman would preserve hers. Both would bring something scarce to the settlement.

I had little capital and little success. I worked, built a career, accumulated money, bought a house and established a company. Female interest increased. The timing was the evidence.

My personality had not suddenly appeared. What had changed was the backing.

I had become hard currency.

Meanwhile, women had been issuing another currency. Sexual access circulated without the commitment I was still accumulating the means to provide. Other men received it on terms never offered to me.

I remained on the old standard while the new currency circulated elsewhere.

One market. Two instruments. Different exchange rates.

II. Hard Currency

The inherited bargain rested on reciprocal scarcity.

But the starting balance sheets were different.

The man began with an empty vault. The woman began with the gold already in hers.

His task was accumulation. Hers was preservation.

The female currency was femininity, purity, sexual restraint and selectivity, with exclusivity promised at settlement. The male currency was accumulated competence, capital and stability, with courtship, loyalty, provision and permanence promised at settlement. He built the reserves he would offer. She preserved the reserves with which she entered the market. The bargain joined acquired reserves to preserved reserves.

A man spends years building his side of the settlement.

Competence requires practice. Capital requires earnings, restraint and accumulation. Stability requires decisions repeated long after their novelty has disappeared. A reputation for reliability requires a record. The house, the savings and the capacity to provide represent life already expended.

Commitment then adds a claim on life still to come.

A man who commits allocates future time, income, attention and optionality. He accepts obligations that may outlast the attraction which brought him into the arrangement. His offer is backed by both accumulated reserves and future production.

That currency is expensive to manufacture.

Demand does not cheapen that currency or create a claim upon it.

The female reserve was the scarcity and selectivity attached to sexual access. It was not manufactured through years of earnings. It was present at the beginning, and its preservation determined what remained available for the eventual settlement.

Cheap issuance did not add gold to that vault. It spent the scarcity which had given the original promise its value. More paper could circulate while less backing remained behind the denomination.

The old bargain made sense while both vaults could support the exchange. Being chosen for an exclusive settlement meant something when access had not already circulated on easier terms.

The sexual revolution broke that reciprocity.

It did not abolish the old denomination. It introduced a cheaper instrument beside it, then continued demanding settlement at the old price.

III. The Second Currency

The new currency allowed sexual issuance to multiply without a corresponding increase in reserves.

Traditional courtship had pillars: family, church, community, reputation and ceremony. Those institutions imposed friction, kept records and made issuance visible. Modern dating demolished the temple and handed every woman a private printing press. Circulation became opaque. Reserves could not be audited. The ledger became self-reported. Yet every note still arrived marked scarce, exclusive and premium-grade. Every dating profile might as well have stood between two Corinthian columns with an issuing clerk behind the desk.

Hookups, casual sex and situationships allowed sexual access to circulate without courtship, exclusivity or a credible future. Contraception and abortion weakened the connection between sex and childbirth. Feminism recast restraint as repression and judgement as illegitimate, reducing the reputational cost of issuance.

Digital platforms widened the market. Anonymous foreign holidays removed the local ledger: no shared social circle, no lasting reputation and a departure date built into the transaction. A woman could issue freely abroad, return to the man whose commitment remained in place and seal the foreign episode inside a separate compartment. He continued pricing the relationship without knowing a second ledger even existed.

What had required a substantial commitment could be issued for immediate desire.

But increased supply did not mean equal access.

Women directed the new currency toward the men they desired most. Highly desired men obtained it without supplying the old backing. They did not need to offer a house, provision, patient courtship or marriage to receive what other men were still accumulating commitment to obtain.

Men outside that flow continued accumulating. They worked, established themselves and prepared for a relationship market whose advertised terms still required serious commitment.

They encountered scarcity while supply expanded elsewhere.

This was the central asymmetry. The same market could be liquid for one class of men and expensive for another. The men receiving cheap issuance had little reason to buy the old bundle. The men expected to buy the old bundle had received little of the cheap issuance.

They were not the beneficiaries of the inflation.

They became its later counterparties.

The two instruments circulated inside the same market, while feminist doctrine insisted that the exchange rate had never changed.

IV. The Hidden Ledger

Choosing a bank requires more than admiring its frontage.

The building may look solid. Its name may inspire confidence. The banknote may carry a handsome promise to pay one pound. None of that establishes how much gold remains in the vault or how many paper claims have been issued against it.

The question is not whether the note looks respectable. It is whether the bank can support the settlement it promises.

The same examination belongs in the relationship market. A man who has spent years filling his own vault needs to know whether the institution offering him a note has preserved its reserves, or merely continued printing against an old reputation for solidity.

Every bank has an issuance history.

A printed denomination does not establish backing. Nor does the declaration of present exclusivity erase the terms on which access was previously offered.

The ledger records selectivity, volume, recipients and price. Who received access? What did they contribute? How readily was it offered? What is now being demanded from the man approached for permanence?

Extensive prior sexual availability reduces a woman’s long-term relationship value in the male market. The proposition is worth less because the scarcity and selectivity men value have already been reduced. Calling the history irrelevant does not restore them.

Volume matters. Terms matter. Exchange rates matter.

A man who received access through desire alone and a man later asked for resources, legal commitment and years of loyalty were offered different prices. The later offer cannot be valued by its label alone.

Present exclusivity is part of the offer. Its history is part of the valuation.

Concealment adds duplicity, but concealment does not create the dilution. The issuance has already occurred. Hiding the ledger merely prevents the next counterparty from pricing it accurately.

Nor does a higher asking price establish a higher value. A demand for permanence reveals what the issuer wants. It does not demonstrate what the buyer will receive.

The banknote says one pound.

The vault determines what that promise is worth.

Harbin branch of Bank of Communications. Built in 1928 with a magnificent frontage that would impress any would-be depositor. By 1942 it closed.

V. Slagflation

The expansion of sexual currency created a powerful arbitrage.

Women issued cheaply to men selected for immediate desire, then sought permanent settlement from other men in the old denomination: courtship, resources, protection, loyalty and marriage.

One market supplied excitement. The other supplied backing. The advantage lay in taking the benefits of both while denying that the first transaction changed the value of the second.

This is slagflation.

Slagflation is the inflation of female sexual issuance combined with continued demand for premium male settlement.

The consequence was delayed, not abolished. Issuance and settlement had simply been separated by a decade or more.

The new currency expanded while the advertised cost of male commitment remained high. Sexual access became easier to issue. The years required to build a solvent, competent and reliable man did not become easier to compress.

Women observed what other women obtained and adjusted their behaviour. What began as an individual advantage became a market norm. Feminist doctrine then supplied its moral justification: female issuance was private and irrelevant, while male resources, intentions and future commitment remained open to inspection, negotiation and judgement.

The asymmetry entered the accounting itself. One ledger was examinable. The other was supposed to be accepted unopened.

The trade cleared while men still honoured the inherited bargain.

Men continued accumulating against the inherited bargain and failed to audit the market. They assumed that the currency offered to them had been preserved under a discipline resembling their own. Their assets were real. Their understanding of the exchange rate was obsolete.

They had mistaken scarcity to themselves for scarcity in the market. The earlier price had been low. The later price was high. A generation of men had kept accumulating against terms that no longer existed.

Women had circulated paper and requested settlement in gold.

The arbitrage depended on the later man accepting the denomination without examining the issuance. Once he compared the two, the difference could no longer be hidden inside the language of commitment.

VI. The Repricing

No arbitrage survives discovery forever.

Men began comparing exchange rates. They distinguished being desired from being selected to provide. They noticed when substantial obligations were being demanded for an offer previously made without them.

Why release years of accumulated capital and a claim on future life at the historic price when the reciprocal scarcity had already been diluted?

Repricing followed.

Some men offered less courtship, less provision and less commitment. Others extended the audit, watching behaviour before releasing reserves. Some accepted casual terms while refusing permanent liabilities. Others stopped trading.

The responses differed. The effect was the same: hard currency became harder to obtain.

Feminist orthodoxy continued treating the one-pound banknote and the one-pound sovereign as though matching denominations guaranteed equal backing. Men who recognised the difference began retaining their gold rather than exchanging it for paper of uncertain redemption value.

Their competence had not disappeared. Their capital had not vanished. Their capacity for loyalty had not ceased to exist. Those reserves were withheld from transactions that failed to justify their release.

Once men withheld their half, the old reciprocal bargain could no longer circulate on demand.

Women who still wanted the old settlement called this male commitment phobia.

The market has no commitment phobia. It has a bid.

This was a valuation crisis.

The asking price remained high because women still wanted the old benefits. The bid fell because the buyer no longer accepted the old valuation. Calling him reluctant, immature or afraid of commitment did not close the spread.

Nor could additional accumulation solve it. A larger reserve does not improve the terms of a bad exchange. It merely gives the holder more to surrender.

The good money withdrew because its owners could finally see what they were being asked to buy.

VII. Into Reserve

Shanghai understands the distinction.

Paper moves quickly. Credit expands. Numbers multiply across screens. Physical gold must be weighed, tested, acquired and settled.

Its absence from ordinary circulation does not mean it has lost its value. It means its holders understand its value and refuse the offered exchange rate.

The same logic applies to accumulated male capital.

A man who has built resources, competence, stability and the capacity to commit holds assets with uses beyond the relationship market. They can finance movement, experience, independence and a life already worth living. Their value does not depend on surrendering them to someone else’s preferred settlement.

Commitment is available when the return justifies the allocation. Its mere availability creates no claim upon it.

I read the ledger. I examine the issuing bank, its reserves and its history. I distinguish a well-backed promise from a demand that my own gold should make good someone else’s paper.

When the exchange rate is false, I retain my gold.

Bad money has driven out good.

Hard currency will return when the settlement is again backed on both sides.

Inspecting the Colonies: Shanghai

October 21, 2026 / Dunwiddie

Last year, in Malaysia, a Chinese fortune teller informed me with the calm certainty of a man announcing tomorrow’s weather that a visit to China formed an essential part of my future.

Prophecy is generally improved by practical assistance. In 2026, a direct flight began operating from Dublin to Shanghai. Soon afterwards, I discovered that British visitors no longer required a visa for a stay of up to thirty days. Fate, aviation and Chinese immigration policy had reached an unusual degree of agreement.

It would have been almost superstitious not to go.

And so I flew to Shanghai to inspect the colony.

There was, officially, no British colony of Shanghai. This is one of those statements which is accurate without being especially informative. The British merely secured a concession, dominated a great part of the trade, erected banks and clubs of imperial confidence, raced horses and conducted themselves for the better part of a century as though the distinction were a technical one.

The terminology was delicate. The masonry was not.

Along the Bund stand the great commercial temples of the old order. None is grander than the former headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation: a building constructed with the confidence of men who expected their accounts to outlive governments. Around it, the riverfront still carries the weight of the trade which made Shanghai one of the great cities of the world.

Then there was the Shanghai Race Club. What could be more British than arriving in a foreign city and deciding that what it chiefly required was horse racing?

The racecourse has gone. Its great oval became People’s Square and People’s Park, while the surviving clubhouse now contains the Shanghai History Museum. The horses will trot no more. Yet inside the old building there remains a First World War memorial to twenty-eight members of the Race Club who left Shanghai to fight and did not return.

Revolution had cleared the course, changed the name and filled the grounds with the people. It had not quite managed to remove the dead.

The high number of officers suggests the class

The French maintained their own concession and left behind something rather different. It is still one of the loveliest parts of Shanghai in which to walk: long avenues, old houses, guarded gardens and buildings which retain the privacy of another age. The French architecture does not announce itself with the weight of the Bund. It hides behind walls and trees and waits to be discovered.

But the European remains are not confined to the recognised historic quarters. A random walk may suddenly produce an English Victorian building, an Art Deco villa or a piece of 1930s mock Tudor which would not look entirely out of place in a suburban street in England. Shanghai contains architectural encounters which seem implausible until one is standing in front of them.

These houses carry their lost stories silently. It is easy to imagine a European family living comfortably in an Art Deco house in the early 1930s, believing that the arrangements of life were permanent. Then came the Japanese attacks, the great battle of 1937, the isolation of the foreign settlements and finally their occupation in 1941. Many foreigners fled. Others were later interned. A house which had represented confidence and continuity became a witness to how quickly both could disappear.

The buildings survived their owners. Buildings often do.

Shanghai, however, is no museum. It is alive, immense and commercially ravenous. It may yet become the financial capital of the world. It already possesses the world’s largest purely physical spot gold exchange, a distinction which naturally interested me rather more than another avenue of designer shops.

The colonial merchants would have understood the modern city perfectly. The flags have changed, the language of government has changed and the scale has become almost unimaginable. The appetite for trade remains.

Shanghai has also produced what might be called Shallowhai.

This is the Shanghai of conspicuous wealth, where possession seems incomplete until it has been placed before an audience. Perhaps this is inevitable in a country where large private fortunes are still comparatively young, and in a city built upon finance and trade. Whatever the explanation, Shanghai is filled with malls, luxury brands and immense modern temples to Huawei, Apple and Samsung. I had never seen mobile telephone shops on such a scale. They possessed the lighting, proportions and solemnity once reserved for banks and churches.

One afternoon, a man drove past me in a pink open-top Bentley with music announcing his arrival several streets in advance. He may have intended to project success. Unfortunately, he reminded me chiefly of Mr Chow in The Hangover.

The mobile telephone governs the streets. People navigate with it, pay with it, order with it, photograph themselves with it and occasionally appear to experience the physical world only after it has been converted into an image on the screen. Even by European standards, the level of absorption is extraordinary.

Some of the younger women dress as anime characters or in elaborate mutations of Victorian costume. The empire has vanished, but Victorian dress has returned in China as a fashion accessory, photographed on a Chinese telephone and uploaded through a Chinese network. History does not always come back in the form expected.

Then there is Scamhai.

On my first day, nobody hassled me. I concluded that Shanghai was a remarkably safe and orderly city. Shanghai allowed me twenty-four hours to enjoy this conclusion.

The following day, I walked towards the Bund through rain of monsoon proportions, carrying a large umbrella borrowed from the hotel. The streets were unusually quiet. There were few pedestrians and consequently very few available targets.

I was approached constantly.

During that walk I was offered an extensive catalogue of goods, services and activities, the details of which need not detain us. Several approaches ended when I told the person to leave before discovering what was being proposed. Persistence appears to increase in inverse proportion to the number of alternative victims in sight. On a crowded day, I might have passed unnoticed. In an empty street beneath a hotel umbrella, I had evidently become the market.

There was also a restaurant where I strongly suspected that a menu carrying higher European prices had appeared for my benefit. I could not prove it. I could observe that the prices bore little relation to what food had cost elsewhere. I left them to their enterprise having paid a toll and abandoned further restaurant experimentation in this city.

Scamhai is not a separate city. It inhabits the same commercial instinct as the banks and boutiques, operating at the scale of the lone foreigner. Wherever money, strangers and appetite gather in sufficient concentration, somebody establishes a secondary market in the inattentive.

The visit lasted longer than intended. It was a national holiday week, trains were difficult to obtain and Shanghai became, for several additional days, less a destination than a position from which I was temporarily unable to advance.

There are cities which improve with enforced intimacy. Shanghai is better taken at speed. Its scale is exhilarating, its surviving history remarkable and its human theatre inexhaustible, but after a time the malls repeat themselves, the telephone screens glow with the same blue light and even imperial architecture ceases to surprise.

Eventually a seat became available. At Hongqiao Station, the long white bullet train waited to carry me 1,329 kilometres north to Qingdao.

The queue for coaches 9-16 of my train. Similar queue the other side for coach 1-8, me

The horses would trot no more. Shanghai now had faster animals.

The Hidden Tourist Tax

July 5, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I went back to Tunisia to test a memory.

I had worked in Tunis in 2010, and the city had stayed with me. Not just as a place, but as an energy: French and Italian bones, Arab life, Mediterranean confidence, cafés, traffic, white façades, old streets, movement, beauty, possibility.

Some cities vanish when you leave them.

Tunis had remained.

So I returned to ask a simple question.

Was it still there?

The answer was yes.

Not exactly as I remembered it. No city waits sixteen years to confirm a private myth. But the charge was still there. Tunis still had that layered, urban, slightly theatrical quality I had carried with me since 2010. It still felt alive in more than one direction at once.

That is Tunisia’s strength.

It is not one thing.

It is Punic, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, French, Italian, African, Mediterranean and modern Tunisian, all folded into the same landscape. Not cleanly. Not politely. But visibly. You can walk a few streets and feel one civilisation’s confidence turn into another civilisation’s afterlife.

That was what I came for.

I wanted Roman stones, sea air, cafés, railway stations, louages, whitewashed towns, old streets, medinas, fragments of empire, and the ordinary theatre of North African life.

I found all of it.

The old French and Italian city of Tunis was, unsurprisingly, one of the strongest parts of the trip. I loved it back in 2010. After all, it is recent history, only being vacated in 1956 by fleeing French, Italian, Greek and Jewish families with their stories of loss blown away by the winds of time. It is not polished heritage. It is better than that. It is a surviving layer. Art Nouveau, Art Deco, occasional 1950s modernist. Balconies, churches, façades, cafés, apartment blocks, commercial buildings, shaded streets, traces of a European Mediterranean world that once assumed it had a future there.

People had lived in those buildings as themselves.

They worked, prayed, argued, made money, lost money, loved, aged, raised children, and imagined that their world would continue.

Then history moved.

The buildings remained.

That is the power of Tunis. It does not give you history as a museum sequence. It gives you layers under your feet.

The cathedrals made the same point in stone.

Nobody builds a cathedral for a temporary mood. A cathedral is confidence made physical. Religious confidence, civic confidence, imperial confidence, cultural confidence. It says: we are here, and our world has weight.

And yet there they stand now in a changed Tunisia, no longer central, no longer commanding the same world that built them.

Evidence.

Not decoration.

The strongest refuge was the Protestant church and cemetery garden.

Outside: traffic, heat, call-outs, movement, negotiation, the small frictions of the street.

Inside: shade, stone, graves, names, flowers, silence.

There were British graves, as expected. But there were also Danish and Swedish names, and those struck deeper because of my years in Denmark. A Scandinavian name in a cemetery garden in Tunis is a small thing, but small things often carry the most human weight.

People had come south. They had traded, served, married, fallen ill, died, and been buried far from the cold north.

That garden was not an attraction.

It was a pause in history where nobody wanted anything from me.

And that mattered.

Because Tunisia also taught me the hidden tourist tax.

Not money.

Attention.

The low-level street approaches were not dramatic. This was not danger. It was not a siege. It was usually small: “Where are you from?” “My friend.” “Taxi?” “Restaurant?” “Guide?” “Come, come.”

The first time, you answer.

The second time, you recognise the shape.

After that, you know the script before it has properly begun.

The cost is not the dinars.

The cost is the interruption.

You are walking. Looking. Thinking. Building a map of the place. Comparing Tunis now with Tunis in 2010. Noticing a façade, a street angle, a church door, a café, a railway board, a piece of colonial geometry under modern traffic.

Then someone inserts himself into your attention.

Now you must classify him.

Friendly? Commercial? Taxi? Guide? Scam? Harmless? Persistent? Do I answer? Ignore? Refuse? Walk faster?

It takes two seconds.

But the thread breaks.

That is the tax.

A tax on solitude.

A tax on observation.

A tax on the direct experience of a place.

So the rule is simple.

No drama. No lecture. No anger.

“No, merci.”

“La, merci.”

Keep walking.

Attention preserved.

Trip restored.

Because the best of Tunisia deserved attention.

El Jem deserved it.

At the top of that amphitheatre, looking down into the arena and out across the ordinary town around it, Tunisia became enormous. Not peripheral. Not minor. Not some footnote to Rome. This land was rich: grain, olive oil, cities, ports, villas, baths, theatres, roads, amphitheatres.

The Roman map of North Africa is crowded with lost significance.

El Jem makes modern arrogance look temporary.

The stones do not perform. They do not sell. They do not ask where you are from. They simply stand there, long after the world that built them has disappeared.

That is real travel.

The sudden perception of depth.

Mahdia deserved attention too.

Sea, walls, old stones, light, space. It did not need to shout. Some places work because they allow the mind to settle. Mahdia had that. It gave the trip a coastal shape that was better than the original plan.

My route changed because Tunisia corrected it.

The first idea had been more ambitious: Tunis, Monastir, Sfax, Gabès, maybe further south.

But travel is not a spreadsheet.

A route can be logical and still wrong.

The better trip became Tunis, Sousse, Mahdia, El Jem, Sidi Bou Said.

Less heroic.

More coherent.

More historical.

More coastal.

Closer to what I actually value.

That is a useful rule.

Do not defend the itinerary against the country.

Let the place speak.

Tunisia spoke in fragments.

A railway board photographed because the internet could not be trusted.

A taxi price descending in stages.

A restaurant bill corrected when challenged.

A host message turning a zero-review hotel from possible phantom into real arrangement.

Old European streets in Tunis carrying the outline of a vanished world.

Cathedrals proving that confident communities become historical layers.

A Protestant cemetery garden where Danish and Swedish names lay quietly beneath North African light.

El Jem rising out of ordinary life like a warning from antiquity.

Mahdia giving the trip sea air and stillness.

Sidi Bou Said doing what it always does: white, blue, bright, theatrical, beautiful, over-known and still somehow effective.

This is why Tunisia stayed interesting.

Not because every moment was easy.

Because the country has depth.

It rewards attention.

And that became the lesson.

The real currency of travel is not money. Money matters, but it is not the core. The real currency is attention.

Spend it badly and even a cheap country becomes expensive.

Spend it well and a simple day becomes memorable.

A quiet coffee can outlive a famous sight.

A churchyard can restore more than a bar.

A walk by the sea can beat a guided tour.

A ruin at the right hour can outweigh five guidebook obligations.

The travel industry sells flights, beds, meals, transfers and experiences.

But the traveller is really buying conditions for attention.

A good hotel gives rest.

A good café gives a place to observe.

A good walk lets the mind stretch.

A good ruin gives attention somewhere worthy to land.

A good conversation expands the day instead of hijacking it.

A good destination gives your attention back in better condition than it found it.

Tunisia did that.

The street interruptions were noise. Irritating, yes. Revealing, yes. But still noise.

The country itself was not the noise.

The country was the old city of Tunis.

The cathedrals.

The cemetery garden.

The Roman stones.

The sea at Mahdia.

The amphitheatre at El Jem.

The medina walls.

The railway stations.

The cafés.

The energy I remembered from 2010, still alive enough to justify the return.

That was the signal.

Everything else was a tax.

Pay as little as possible.

Keep walking.

Look properly.

The Room With Two Windows

May 18, 2026 / Dunwiddie

There was a room in Ireland with two windows.

One looked toward the sea. The other looked toward the road.

Dunwiddie preferred the sea window.

The road window showed delivery vans, dog walkers, Irish weather, the small democracy of other people’s errands. It reminded him of accounts, appointments, forms, banks, proofs of address, mobile numbers, and the long tail of jurisdictions that did not like to be left.

The sea window gave less away. It showed colour, wind, tide, distance. A man could look at it and think in longer lines.

On the table beneath the window were three objects: a Danish letter, a Moroccan train ticket, and a small silver coin blackened by sand.

The letter had been opened twice and answered once. It was written in the flat language of people who believed that language itself created obedience. It referred to deadlines, obligations, processes, and consequences. It had the tone of a schoolmaster addressing a boy who had not yet understood that school was finished.

The train ticket was for Rabat to Tangier. First class. It had cost more than he expected, which irritated him, but the irritation had passed. Prices rose. Doors closed. Seats disappeared. The point was not to get the cheapest ticket. The point was to move.

The coin had no paperwork.

He had found it after a storm, when the shingle had been pulled back like a curtain. At first he thought it was a washer. Then he rubbed one edge with his thumb and saw a faint rim, a suggestion of an old head, something imperial and half-erased.

The coin was the most honest of the three.

That afternoon a woman sent him a message.

She was younger, prettier in photographs than she would likely be in real light, and she had the polished indifference of a woman who had learned that attention could be converted into meals, lifts, compliments, and temporary male confusion.

“Maybe we can meet,” she wrote.

Maybe.

Dunwiddie considered the word.

In investing, maybe was a useful word before entry. It kept a man alert. It meant uncertainty, optionality, conditional sizing. But after entry, maybe became poison. Maybe I should hold. Maybe the discount will narrow further. Maybe she means it. Maybe the country will be fair. Maybe the system will forget. Maybe the woman will soften. Maybe the letter is harmless.

Maybe was where capital went to rot.

He wrote back:

“Tonight at seven, a drink near the station.”

She replied twenty minutes later.

“Let’s see.”

He put the phone face down.

There had been a time when he would have chased the little thread. Not desperately. He was never that crude. He would have been witty, playful, apparently careless. He would have made the uncertainty feel like movement. He would have enjoyed the chemical flicker of the game, and mistaken the flicker for value.

Now he saw the structure.

A woman who wanted to meet made the meeting easy. A market that wanted to rerate did not require prayer. A country that wanted your presence did not trap you in paperwork. A good holding survived examination. A bad one survived only while unexamined.

He poured a bath.

The water ran hot, clouding the mirror. He placed a glass of wine on the edge and lowered himself in slowly. His body, which he had once treated as a machine for enduring obligations, now seemed more like an estate that had finally been returned to its owner.

Outside, the wind rose.

The phone buzzed again on the chair.

He let it buzz.

For ten minutes he thought of nothing except the heat, the steam, and the strange fact that escape was not dramatic once achieved. It was not a trumpet. It was not a speech. It was a set of accounts closed, a number moved, a woman not answered, a train booked, a small refusal repeated until the old structure lost jurisdiction.

After the bath he dried himself and checked the phone.

The younger woman had written:

“Actually I’m tired tonight. Maybe another time.”

He laughed.

Not loudly. Just enough.

Then he deleted the exchange.

He sat by the sea window with the silver coin in his palm. The old monarch’s face was nearly gone, but the metal had endured. It had passed through pockets, wars, marriages, markets, tides, and the hands of men who all imagined their troubles permanent.

On impulse he opened the Danish letter again.

There was a line near the bottom he had missed.

It said that if he did not respond by the stated date, the authority would proceed on the basis of the information available to it.

He looked at the date.

It had passed before the letter arrived.

For a moment the old anger rose. Then something cleaner replaced it.

He took out a pen and wrote across the top:

Received after deadline. No lawful opportunity to respond.

Then he placed the letter in a folder.

Not because the sentence would defeat anything by itself. It might. It might not. That was not the point.

The point was that the paper had been turned from command into evidence.

That was the twist he had been slow to learn.

For years he had believed freedom came from winning the argument. Later he thought it came from leaving the room.

But real freedom came when the same object changed category in his hand.

A woman’s delay became data.

A market’s rise became an exit.

A state’s threat became a file note.

A lost coin became proof that value could survive burial.

He looked once more through the sea window.

The tide was coming in now, covering the dark strip of sand where the coin had been found. By morning, there would be no sign it had ever been exposed.

That was fine.

He had already taken what was his.

The Leakages

April 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

A man can lose his life without any dramatic fall.

Not in one blow.
In drips.

An hour here.
A payment there.
A form.
A duty.
A house that always wants something.
A job that eats the day.
A woman who takes more than she gives.
A state that never stops asking.

From the outside, he looks fine. Functional. Reliable. But something is leaving him all the time.

Energy.
Time.
Money.
Attention.
Life.

That is the real story for many men.

Leakage.

The Small Leak

Most self-improvement begins at the smallest hole in the hull.

Porn.
Scrolling.
Drinking.
Screens.
Passive entertainment.
Junk habits.

Cut this. Improve that. Wake earlier. Drink less. Be sharper.

Fine. Some of that helps.

But it is also safe.

Because a man who fixes his habits while staying inside the same draining life is still being drained. He is simply becoming more efficient inside it.

That is why so much advice feels false.

It treats the symptom and leaves the structure untouched.

The Bigger Leaks

There are larger leakages, and they cost more.

Relational

Some relationships return force.
Some take it.

A man can lose years giving energy, money, steadiness, patience, and provision into bonds that return little but demand.

The same is true of family dynamics where duty became extraction.

Not all relationships are a drain. Some are among the best returns in life.

But some are wells with no bottom.

Structural

A house can drain a man.
A commute can drain a man.
A job can drain a man.
Routine can drain a man.

What looks stable from the outside may be feeding on him each week.

Many men are not weak.

They are overtaxed by the architecture of their lives.

Sovereignty

This is the deepest leak.

Governments.
Tax systems.
Bureaucracy.
Forms.
Compliance.
Reporting.
Background vigilance.

A man can spend immense life-force simply remaining legible to systems that have claim over him.

He calls it adulthood.

Often it is tribute.

What I Learned

Over the last year I began cutting major leakage from my own life.

I left corporate daytime extraction.
I left a beautiful old house that demanded tax, maintenance, and constant attention.
I moved away from systems that wanted energy in forms, filings, compliance, and background stress.
I became harder about where my life was going.

That changed more than mood.

It changed structure.

Not all pleasure is leakage.
Not all rest is sedation.
Not all relationships are extractive.

The question is simpler than that.

Does energy leave your life and come back as freedom, love, peace, wealth, memory, vitality, or meaning?

Or does it just go?

That is the test.

The Lie Men Are Sold

Systems prefer self-improvement that does not threaten the system.

A man who scrolls less and drinks less is easier to manage if he stays in the same job, same structure, same dead arrangement, same draining jurisdiction.

He becomes a better-behaved captive.

That is why so much modern advice stops at habits.

It helps men function better inside extraction.

It rarely tells them to leave.

The Real Order

Most men should not start with the smallest leak.

They should start with the biggest.

Often that means:

first sovereignty leakage,
then structural leakage,
then relational leakage,
then micro leakage.

But the rule is simple. Start where the real blood is leaving.

For some men it is the state.
For some it is the house.
For some it is the job.
For some it is the woman.

Find the biggest drain first.

Cut the Leak

In the old stories, the danger was not only the storm.

It was the place that made a man forget his direction.
The comfort that softened him.
The duty that was never truly his.
The delay that became years.

That is how many men lose themselves now.

Not in open ruin.

In slow diversion.

A man gets his life back when he sees clearly what drains him and cuts it without apology.

Not to become purer.
Not to behave better.
But to live.

Then the lost energy begins to gather again.

Thought sharpens.
Motion returns.
The horizon opens.

And what was being fed into maintenance, duty, paperwork, sedation, and dead structures can be turned toward something worthy at last:

women, roads, money, beauty, work of his own choosing, remembered days, and the forward path.

That is recovery.

Not better behaviour inside the cage.

Departure.

Where the Story Thins

April 14, 2026 / Dunwiddie

As second-date suggestions go, walking Trevor Deely’s route through Dublin was an unusual one.

However, it was a mutually agreed one.

It was daytime. Cold, dry, and bright.

Before we started, she told me she had a feeling that somewhere on the walk, something had happened. She said it simply and left it there.

Later, on Haddington Road, I stopped and said that I did not think he had walked beyond that point.

She looked at me and said that this was where she had felt it too.

That was the interesting thing.

Not because it proved anything. It did not. But because sometimes a place refuses the story made for it. You can hear an official version from a distance and it sounds tidy enough. Then you stand on the ground itself and it starts to thin in your hands. One only needs to visit Praia Del Luz, boots on the ground to begin asking questions around the official narrative regarding Madeline McCann. It was the same here.

The canal idea always struck me as obvious tripe. Too neat. Too convenient. Trevor’s last confirmed sighting was on Haddington Road, way past the canal, walking toward the Beggars Bush area, and Garda appeals have long focused on the unidentified man seen near his office and again shortly after him on CCTV.

It was interesting too to learn that it was the weekend Bill Clinton was in Dublin. Accounts of the case say roads and security arrangements were altered, bins and skips were emptied, and manhole covers were checked before any meaningful search for discarded evidence could happen. That does not prove anything in itself. But it adds another layer of strangeness to a case that already resists easy explanation.

And then there was the setting itself. Trevor worked in investment banking, only a few years before one of the greatest financial crashes in modern history. That too may mean nothing. But when an impressionable young man with banking access disappears into a city still flush with late-boom confidence, and the last ground on which he feels real is a short stretch of road in Dublin 4, the imagination does not need much encouragement.

What stayed with me was simpler than theory.

Two people walking through Dublin in the cold sun, and both feeling, at the same point, that the official map had gone thin.

That is rare.

Not proof.
Just recognition.

Sometimes that is enough.

55 : The Gap and The Gain

April 8, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I am 55 today.

“Road to Nowhere” is playing in the background. It fits, but not in the way it once might have.

Not because I am lost.

Because a life lived honestly is never a straight road. It is crossings, weather, wrong turns, departures, and long stretches where there is no map, only instinct. Only later does it look like a line.

A birthday is a good day to take stock.

Not the polished version. Not the public story.

A clean ledger.

What was gained.
What was lost.
What was escaped.
What changed.
What returned.

That brings me to the gap and the gain.

The past year was not cosmetic. It was structural.

I stepped away from old gravity — obligations, expectations, patterns that no longer fit. I made space. Not comfortable space, but real space.

In exchange came something harder, and more valuable:

Freedom.
Optionality.
Control over direction.

Not imagined freedom.

Built freedom.

That is gain.

I sharpened too.

I see faster now:

weak systems
false narratives
arrangements that don’t hold

I leave sooner. I trust the signal sooner. I waste less time trying to keep dead things alive.

That is gain.

Life has also become responsive again.

There has been movement. Energy. Intensity.

Moments where something real is felt immediately, without explanation. Moments that remind a man that life is not behind him, but still very much in front of him.

That is gain.

Confidence has returned with it.

Not performance.

Evidence.

Enough to stand differently in one’s own life.

That too is gain.

And yet the gap remains.

Not everything that matters continues.

Some moments are real, vivid, alive — and still do not become more.

Not failure.

Unfinished.

A note that stays in the air a little longer than expected.

That is the gap in its most human form.

The error is simple.

Allowing the unfinished to outweigh the achieved.

Letting what did not fully come to shore obscure what clearly did.

That is not a moral failure.

It is an error of accounting.

So the ledger at 55 is this:

The gain:

a life structurally changed
greater freedom and control
sharper judgement
renewed energy
forward momentum
proof that life still answers when engaged properly

The gap:

not everything resolved
not everything carried forward
not every moment became a chapter
gains not always fully realised or optimally banked
occasional hesitation at the point where action was required

The position now

No delusion.

No self-congratulation.

Just accuracy.

I do not need to be finished.
I do not need to be settled.

At 55, the correct posture is simple:

under sail

Not drifting.
Not docked.

Moving.

This is not the end of the journey.

But it is not open sea either.

It is one of those islands a man is glad to reach.

A place where life answers him again.

He does not stay forever.

But he does not deny that he arrived.

The gap remains.

It always will.

But so does the gain.

And at 55, I would rather live like a man who knows the difference.

Wag the Dog

March 1, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I watched Wag the Dog in 1998.

It was released in 1997, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, but I encountered it a year later — and it stayed with me far longer than most films do.

At the time, I thought it was clever.

Later, I realised it was instructional.

What the Film Actually Shows

A president faces a scandal days before an election. The solution is not defence. It is distraction. A war is manufactured — complete with imagery, music, a hero, a narrative arc.

The public sees it on television.
The media amplifies it.
Politicians align behind it.

The war exists because it is broadcast.

What unsettled me wasn’t the satire. It was the mechanics.

The film shows that in modern systems, narrative is not commentary on reality.

It is architecture.

Watching It in the 1990s

When I saw it, the Balkans were not abstract.

The Kosovo War and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia were unfolding. Iraq was already in a cycle of sanctions and intervention, culminating in Operation Desert Fox.

On screen: a fabricated Balkan conflict used for domestic political containment.
In real life: televised Balkan conflict accompanied by political crisis.

I’m not interested in simplistic causation.

What struck me was structural similarity.

Crisis appears.
Media synchronises.
Emotional imagery floods the screen.
Consensus hardens before analysis completes.

Deniers are denounced.

Once you see that sequence, it becomes difficult to consume headlines innocently again.

Manufactured Symbols

The film’s brilliance is that it doesn’t rely on grand conspiracy.

It shows small things:

A song engineered to stir patriotism.
A refugee image staged for emotional impact.
A slogan crafted for repetition.
A soldier turned into a moral totem.

Meaning is assembled deliberately.

The public doesn’t require truth. It requires coherence.

That realisation never quite leaves you.

The Ending That Lingers

At the end, Hoffman’s producer wants credit. He hints he may expose the entire operation.

He dies.

Not dramatically. Not theatrically. Just… removed.

The system continues.

The film never lectures about hidden hands. It simply demonstrates incentive structures: when exposure threatens continuity, continuity wins.

That ending always reminded me of how certain figures — political, financial, inconvenient — sometimes exit at remarkably convenient moments.

No outrage here. Just pattern recognition.

Why I Don’t Watch Breaking News

One of the lasting effects of that film is behavioural.

I no longer watch breaking news at all.

I learn about events after the fact, usually through conversation. Stripped of soundtrack, graphics, urgency, and emotive framing, the event feels different. Slower. Cleaner. Less hypnotic.

Breaking news is theatre with a live orchestra.

Remove the orchestra and you can inspect the stagecraft.

Timing and Markets

Another pattern I’ve noticed: how often major geopolitical flashpoints seem to emerge on weekends.

When markets are closed.

When equity exchanges cannot react in real time.
When price discovery is delayed.
When institutions already positioned can adjust quietly before Asia opens.

Does that prove orchestration? No.

But incentives matter.

If information moves markets, then timing information when markets are shut reduces chaotic repricing and limits uncontrolled losses. It also preserves opportunities for those already hedged.

Gold was already moving upward last week. Was that anticipation? Quiet positioning? Or simply macro fragility expressing itself? Markets often signal stress before headlines catch up.

Correlation is not confirmation.

But patterns are data.

Iran This Weekend

When events flare in places like Iran, the script is familiar:

Energy spikes.
Gold bids.
Volatility expands.
Media harmonises tone within hours.

The first 24 hours are emotional.
The first week is positioning.
The first month reveals whether escalation was strategic or theatrical.

I’m not claiming events are fabricated.

I’m observing that events are leveraged.

Narrative velocity now precedes verification. And whoever controls narrative velocity controls perception, which in turn influences capital, policy, and public mood.

That machinery has only become more sophisticated since 1997.

“The real revolution, if it ever happens, will not be televised.”

That line has echoed in my mind for years.

If real structural change ever occurs, it won’t arrive with theme music and sponsored graphics. It won’t be pre-packaged with slogans and expert panels.

It will likely happen quietly, outside the broadcast frame.

Which is perhaps why I stepped outside the frame myself.

Not in protest.
Not in paranoia.

Just in recognition that sovereignty begins with what you choose not to watch.

Who Moved My Cheese?

February 20, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I first read it in 2007.

It felt slight. Obvious. Almost condescending. I understood the metaphor and set it aside.

At the time I was still inside the maze.

Still negotiating.
Still adjusting.
Still convinced that effort would restore balance.

There was still something to extract — or at least the belief that there was.

A book about leaving sounds trivial when you are still invested in staying.

Years passed.

The environment shifted in ways that were gradual enough to ignore and cumulative enough to matter. Incentives changed. Effort rose. Return diminished. The arithmetic no longer worked.

There were no explosions. Just erosion.

When I picked the book up again in 2024, it required no interpretation. It wasn’t profound. It was simply accurate.

The cheese had not moved temporarily.
It had gone.

What struck me wasn’t the call to move. It was the attachment of the characters who remained. They weren’t foolish. They were loyal — to routine, to history, to the memory of previous reward.

I recognised that posture.

Staying had once been responsible. Then it became reflex. Eventually it became cost.

There is a point at which endurance stops being strength and starts being delay. It does not arrive with drama. It arrives with arithmetic.

Energy expended. Nothing replenished.

The question changes quietly. Not “How do I make this work?” but “Why am I still here?”

When that question lands without resistance, movement follows without theatrics.

I did not understand the book in 2008 because it did not apply. In 2024 it required no belief. It described a condition that had already formed.

Some texts are instruction. This one is timing.

You either read it while there is still something left to protect, or you read it when the room is already empty.

In the second case, you do not argue with it.

You leave.