The kyriarchy

You probably know what the patriarchy is: the system built into our society that perpetuates sexism. Well, the kyriarchy is the same, except it refers to all the different types of oppressive societal systems, such as racism, sexism, heterosexist (homophobia), ableism, ageism, classism, and so on. Any way that a person can be divergent from an agreed norm leads to the chance for some people to be privileged and some to be oppressed, and of course, all these different levels of privilege can be combined in different ways for different people. For instance, I am less privileged because I’m a woman, but I have almost every other form of privilege, starting with being straight and white and middle class. This is what the term ‘intersectionality’ means, and it is well illustrated in this diagram:

For me, being an intersectional feminist means being aware of how these forms of oppression and privilege affect those around me, and doing what I can to challenge systemic injustices and personal biases when I find them in order to be an active ally. If you’ve never thought much about a lot of this, I would recommend this website as a gentle and welcoming starting point.

Effective altruism

There are a lot of problems that need fixing in this world, and in order to cope, we all have to do a certain amount of building boundaries about what we spend time thinking and worrying about. The main thing that has helped me to have a good balance between having compassion for the suffering in the world and not feeling overwhelmed and crushed by it is effective altruism.

Effective altruism is about answering the question of how to do the most good with the resources we have. This leads to a series of philosophical and practical questions around how to determine what ‘the most good’ even means, and they have a very good guide of the core concepts on their website. For me, it boils down to taking the Giving What We Can pledge.

This pledge states that I will give 10% of my income throughout my working life to the most effective charities and causes that I can find. Luckily, the effective altruism movement has set up the ‘EA Funds’ to do the research and hard decisions for me, so in the end my money goes to four relatively-underfunded cause areas:

1. 45% of my pledge goes to Global Health and Development – this mainly focuses on direct healthcare, especially malaria prevention, which is done by distributing bed-nets via the Against Malaria Foundation.
2. 25% of my pledge goes to Animal Welfare – this focuses on helping animals who are not typical pets, for instance those in factory farms.
3. 15% of my pledge goes to Long-Term Future – this is a bit more ‘out there’, but it essentially involves preparing for potential existential crises, such as what might happen when someone invents genuinely independent artificial intelligence. Yes, it feels a bit ridiculous and sci-fi, but it is a genuine threat. This article is what persuaded me to take it more seriously.
4. 15% of my pledge goes to Effective Altruism Infrastructure – this is about growing the effective altruism movement in order to get more people involved in evidence-based giving. It was actually career advice from 80,000 Hours that led to me becoming a web developer.

I made this pledge six years ago, and I recently sat down and calculated how much I’ve given so far. It comes up to £21,800. I find this staggering, as I haven’t found it especially difficult to put this money aside.

What is even more mind-blowing is that, at least for the money that has been given to the Against Malaria Foundation, I can calculate based on their meticulous evidence-gathering that I have saved at least seventy people from dying from malaria, probably mainly children under five and pregnant women.

There is nothing like the feeling of knowing for certain that I have made a significant positive impact on the world. Instead of guilt and powerlessness, I have some peace of mind and hope, and that is worth every material sacrifice (not even that big) of having a slightly reduced salary.

Being vegan

My reason for going vegan comes down to the same reason I find taking the Giving What We Can pledge worthwhile: I can have peace of mind that I am not causing unnecessary suffering, rather than dodging a feeling of guilt every time I eat. This is not only with regards to killing animals, but also to making one of the most significant personal contributions that I could to reducing my carbon footprint.

No one likes to be faced with someone telling them they are inflicting cruelty on others, so I won’t go on about it. Our minds are very good at rationalising why we don’t need to examine or stop doing something that we want to keep doing. If you eat meat or dairy, though, I would challenge you to try and pin down what your reasons are for doing so, and then testing those reasons against this twenty-minute TED talk by ‘Earthling Ed’. Ultimately, I think being a good person means being driven by trying as much as you can to act in line with your own ethical values, so it’s worth putting those values to the test every now and again.

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The Forest app has a very simple premise: it helps you to stop using your phone (or tablet, or particular websites on your desktop) for a particular period of time. How? While the Forest app is running, it’s growing a tree. If you exit the Forest app while the tree is growing, it’ll die, and you’ll end up with a withered tree in your forest. It’s a pretty amazing way to give yourself a break from your device addictions and a good reason to put your phone down for a bit. If you pay for it, you can also narrow it down so that you are still allowed to visit a few select apps while you’re growing a tree (good for multi factor authentication while at work). If you think you will still cheat (or never remember to start growing a tree in the first place), then I would recommend the Freedom app instead.

Sleep Town app

From the same people as the Forest app, the Sleep Town app has a similar concept. You must hit a button on the app before your bed time to start building a house, and hit the button again before your ‘getting up time’ so that the building doesn’t collapse. Over time, you unlock other buildings and build up a whole city. It works just slightly less smoothly than its Forest counterpart, but is still quite motivating, and anything that helps make going to bed on time (or at least stop using your devices at a certain time) attractive for a while seems worth it to me. Again, if this doesn’t appeal, the Freedom app is a beefier alternative.

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When considering how to live a good life, any self-help resource that doesn’t mention mental health is not considering the full picture. To that end, I wanted to mention how to get an accredited counsellor in the UK. If you are able to pay for sessions (which can be anywhere between about £30 to £60 a session usually, although if you have limited income a lot of counsellors have a few discounted slots in their schedules), then all you need to do is to go to the BACP website. BACP stands for British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, which is the main accreditation body for counsellors. All of these people will have done extensive training and will still be under active professional oversight from other counsellors. You then can filter your search in the directory by location or topic or expertise, and then check each counsellor’s profile to see if you think you’ll like them. Their contact details are provided, so you can text, call or email to arrange a trial session with someone if you think they might be a good fit.

I have had several years’ worth of counselling, and I am still currently working with a counsellor to try and unravel the hold that anxiety and perfectionism has over me. If you can manage to afford it, I would try and push past any misgivings or resistance you feel and do it. Everyone could do with some counselling!

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As a child, teenager and young adult, I spent a lot of time practising violin and piano. As I have discussed elsewhere, I think the approach I took was far too rigid and results-focused, and learning through play and improvisation should nearly always be the preferred method for picking up a new skill. However, I did learn a lot about how to efficiently and effectively practise a physical skill to a high level of precision, and if you are trying to do that too, then here are the conclusions from my own experience.

Essentially, good practice is a blend of mindfulness and experimentation. It takes a lot of mental discipline to maintain this curious, focused frame of mind, but if you can (and you don’t have all the mental hang-ups that I did around feeling anxious about it all), it can be an extremely meditative and satisfying process.

What I mean by experimentation is to apply the scientific method to what you are trying to do. First, isolate a fragment of what you are trying to learn (just one movement of your hand between positions on the piano keys, for instance), then try to do it, and see what your result is. If that result is not what you were hoping for, then analyse what about it was and wasn’t correct, form a hypothesis about what you need to change, and then try again.

I found a good example of this for learning how to draw. This video describes an approach called ‘iterative drawing’, where you repeatedly try to draw just one small thing, and keep checking back in with yourself about whether it looks right or not. You can then draw it again, consciously trying something slightly different (like ‘maybe I need the front leg to be further forward…’) and see how that works. Your brain gives you instant feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and eventually, you figure out an approach that works for you. This is a far, far more solid way to learn than following someone else’s instructions on how to draw something, or even copying a reference image again and again.

The way I (eventually) practised piano was similarly experimental. (I learned this method from the same piano teacher who eventually persuaded me to take a ‘sabbatical’ from piano and violin, as he could see what a toll it was taking on me.) The key point to get the most out of practising this way is to play the piece exactly how you want it to sound in your final performance; at full speed, with both hands, and with the highest degree of accuracy. (The way I had always been taught to practise previously was to learn one hand at a time, then slowly put them together, and then gradually bring the piece up to speed.) How can you possibly play up to a performance standard when you’re just learning the piece, though? By adjusting the variable of how much of the piece you are trying to play. You take the literal tiniest slice of the music you possibly can—usually only two notes, or chords—and zero in on that one single movement of your hands until you can do it flawlessly. Then, slowly, these micro-slices of the piece are stitched together with the surrounding slices, until you can play straight through with perfect accuracy.

If you find learning how to learn interesting, I would recommend reading the analysis of the steps involved that Tim Ferriss wrote in his book The Four Hour Chef. I made a mind-map of his main points here:

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Anki is an app/website for memorising flash cards. Just like with any flash cards, you have a question or prompt on one side and an answer on the other. A common use for flashcards is having a word in one language on one side and the translation on the other.

What makes Anki different from just using physical flash cards is the system built in for when to re-test you on each card. If you found it easy, you will be tested on that card later; if it was hard, it will come sooner. Over time, this becomes a sophisticated sorting system that matches and reinforces your long-term memory formation patterns.

Using Anki was one of the main reasons (along with mind-maps) that I did well in my exams in school and university. Francis and I still use it now and again to learn language vocabulary. If you are learning anything at the moment, please take a look and see if it would help!

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One of the problems with doing any task (although particularly something technical like coding) is simply how to hold the steps of a task in mind, and remembering what you intend to do next. As we learned when looking at executive functions, having a good ‘working memory’ for what you’re currently doing is a separate process from coming up with these steps in the first place (and both are directly impaired by ADHD). It can be incredibly frustrating to come up with ideas about how to solve a problem and then not be able to remember all the threads at once, and thus lose your direction and have to wait until you can bring your mind to regenerate all the parts under consideration again.

What we need to do is to make sure that we can tackle one thing at a time, so that we can plan out our next steps without losing anything that we were thinking about. This is why I often keep a piece of paper in front of me while I’m working or coding in order to map out all the steps I’m considering taking. I connect these all loosely together like a flowchart (a mind-map could work too, but I find that usually I need something a bit more linear for steps to do in a task), and as I do them I can cross them off in the same way as a to-do list. I often make a little avatar of myself (usually a little stick figure on a scrap of paper with blu-tack on the back) which I can put next to the task or question I am currently doing. This really helps me to reorientate my attention quickly when I am interrupted or my concentration lapses for a moment.

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The Finch app is essentially a phone game where you can look after a virtual pet (a finch, shockingly). The difference is that the whole game has been designed to encourage self-care. You are presented with suggestions for short tasks such as journaling briefly about a topic (e.g. ‘What was a time a friend made you smile?’), or doing a simple breathing exercise. Your bird then gains energy to go out on an expedition for a few hours, learning something new each time. You can also build up in-game funds so that you can buy your bird any number of cool outfits, which is surprisingly motivating. It asks you to rate your mood, your motivation levels, and your satisfaction with your day, and so you get little graphs of how you’ve been feeling at the end of the week. All in all, it’s a really cute and low-pressure way to get a few prompts about looking after yourself, which I find very helpful.

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An unusual app that I use to help myself cope with life is called WhatsMock. (This app looks like a similar one for iPhones.) WhatsMock is used to create fake WhatsApp conversations, which you can then screenshot and share as memes or pranks.

However, I use it as a journaling tool. I act as if I’m messaging a friend, writing down everything that is on my mind, and then I take a moment to read back what I’ve said, trying to act as if I really am an external friend figure, and message back what I would say to them. Even just sympathy or open ‘listening’ can help, although sometimes I will also come up with new ideas for how to tackle the problem and send them back as ‘advice.’ I find it increases the effectiveness of a normal stream-of-consciousness journal session because it encourages that back-and-forth between the distressed and the calmer, wiser parts of my mind, as well as being in the very natural-feeling format of messaging, rather than writing onto a blank piece of paper.

I adapted this idea from an experiment I heard about that was done using virtual reality. In the VR world, the participant would find themselves sitting in a therapist’s office, and they would be encouraged to say what was on their mind. They would then be ‘transported’ into the therapist’s place, and then they would watch back the recording of themselves talking about their problem. They would then respond to themselves as if they were the therapist, which seemed to help people to tap into their empathy for themselves, and to reframe their problems as something worthy of help.

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I am using the Freedom app right now, in order to keep focused on writing this blog post. It lets you block whatever apps and websites you need to, across all the devices you need to, for whichever times you need to. The free version doesn’t let you schedule the times when the blocking will happen, and I have found it well worth paying for the subscription to have that feature. I use it to block me from continuing to distract myself with my phone at bed-time, or wandering off onto social media during work hours.

Unlike the Forest app, the Freedom app does not rely on your willpower to start a session, or to keep it going. You can’t turn it off during a blocking session, and so it can provide a crucial element of structure in my environment that I can’t get from anything else.

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You don’t need any technology or tools to practise mindfulness (although the meditation apps Headspace or Balance are good places to start learning about it). When I was trying to think of things besides Home Scrum which have helped me to tackle life, I know that my mental health and my whole perspective on the world would be much worse without having done periods of meditation practice in the past. I know of no better way to work on fully separating yourself from your own addictions and beliefs in order to access the world as it truly is. The only time I have actually been able to ‘live in the present’ was for about three days after I finished a long weekend at a silent meditation retreat, but the experience proved to me that being mindful truly is the way towards peace of mind and contentment.

Meditation is both easy to start and hard to establish as a long-term habit in your life. I myself have not yet succeeded in doing it on a regular, consistent basis. But even doing it on an ad hoc, occasional basis is still worth doing.

Recently, my friend Alex and I did quite well for a while holding each other accountable with a nightly mindfulness call. We would do some simple everyday action, like drinking a cup of tea, but while trying to hold our attention on the sensations and movements involved.

There is also an added complication that there are many types of meditation, and not all of them are actually focused on mindfulness. Some are more for relaxation, and some have been entirely co-opted for the purposes of spirituality. There are many great free guided meditations on YouTube, including ones specifically for people with ADHD, as well as the apps above, but do keep in mind whether it is helping you to train to focus on the present moment, or more for general relaxation.

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