Galloway — investor, entrepreneur, blogger, professor, public intellectual — is as inescapable now as Peterson was in his heyday. The Washington Post bills him as one of the people shaping American society in 2026. He rears his bald head often on Instagram and TikTok; his voice is a mainstay on the podcast circuit. “I’m good at being right”, he tells Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom; “I’m not good at being effective”. Galloway was first propelled into the spotlight back when he used to teach a brand strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business; to become more effective, he has created a brand of his own.

Brand Galloway promises to make young men fitter, happier, more attractive to women. Indeed, his advice is markedly similar to Peterson’s: show up early, have good manners, be a protector. Rather, the difference between Peterson’s “clean up your room, bucko” and Galloway’s “get your shit together”, is one of tone, not substance. The difference reveals something interesting about the two sides of the American culture war: conservatives want their gurus to dress up their life advice in Jungian psychoanalysis and confused allusions to the Book of Genesis; liberals want theirs to be sweary management professors who speak in the language of McKinsey slides — hardly the stuff to keep kids flocking back over the long term.

Before Galloway was a lifestyle guru, he was a finance guru — and reviewing his career, one might reasonably ask why his advice now ought to carry much weight. After all, his knack for bad analysis once caused him to become the butt of the joke. A few years ago, some finance wags came up with the Anti-Galloway Index, allowing punters to earn their fortune by betting against Galloway’s predictions. Since October 2019, the Index tells us, “tech companies that the Professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P 500 and seen a whopping 61.48% return”. The greater part of this was due to the continued growth of Tesla, on which Galloway’s powers of prediction are clouded by personal animus. Galloway believes, incidentally, that Elon Musk has locked him out of X.

Galloway has long presented himself as the enemy of Musk and his ilk. In The Four, published in 2017, he made the case for breaking up Big Tech. Today he speaks with revulsion about those Silicon Valley CEOs who’ve prostrated themselves before the Trump administration, and has launched a campaign against them, called “Resist and Unsubscribe”. Recently, he seriously weighed up running for the presidency.

Life advice is the continuation of politics by other means. Galloway’s tips are spliced with political calls to action — for free education, housing reform, even national service along the lines of the IDF. These are tucked away in his books, hidden beneath a pile of snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom. His works of self-help have big font on small pages; the chapter headings often take the form of equations, like “Credentials + Zip Code = Money”, or “Car < Lion” (which means that you should invest in experiences over things). According to Galloway arithmetic, “1 + 1 > 2”. Instead of just using the English language to tell young men to drink less, we get a picture of a martini = sad face emoji. Perhaps this helps the message stick in the minds of his audience. Peterson, it must be said, always expected slightly more from his readers.

Why, then, is Galloway so popular? Why, given he once said that “taking life advice from a depressed and insane professor may not make sense”, does he get feted by liberal stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic? The answer is simple: for all the mockery he gets from himself and from others, in truth he is one of life’s winners. He looks and sounds the part. He’s six-foot-two, well-dressed and well-spoken. He has that air of competence. Plenty of his business ventures have failed, but enough of them have succeeded. He owns a townhouse in London by Regent’s Park, a home in Florida, and a sumptuous Manhattan apartment. He reckons his lifestyle costs him $350,000 to $425,000 a month.

Peterson’s earthly successes occurred after his pivot from academia to self-help; Galloway’s were present before. The point of Peterson’s “12 rules for life” was not that young men might, by adhering to them, become more like him (and, certainly, Peterson nowadays seldom takes heed of his tenth rule: “Be precise in your speech”). With Galloway, it’s different. His breezy references to his own personal shortcomings are part of that air of humility which successful people are expected to cultivate. He knows that young men would quite like to enjoy a lifestyle that costs $350,000 to $425,000 a month. The object of Brand Galloway is to mentor young men into becoming more like Scott Galloway. In this respect, his way of keeping his audience captivated has more in common with Andrew Tate than Jordan Peterson: he is selling them his own story, a story of success with money and with women.

His story is much enhanced by its rags-to-riches element. His parents got divorced and his mum was poor; he talked his way into UCLA, despite bad grades, where he smoked weed, memorized every line of Planet of the Apes, and “majored and minored in horniness”. When he speaks of his success, he is always careful to underscore — herein his woke credentials — that he won the lottery by being born a white heterosexual male in California, and that this allowed him, along with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, to climb up the ladder. He doesn’t drop his guard on matters intersectional: when expressing concerns about the plight of young men, he is eager to add that the issues and challenges that they face are “especially acute among young men of color”. He doesn’t believe in God, and therefore hasn’t followed Peterson down the torturous path of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Still, he prays as a mark of gratitude, especially for his mother and family. “The reason I am wealthy”, he recently told Esquire, “can be distilled down to one word: women“.

Galloway has thought hard about how his own successes can be translated into general life lessons. Everything in the Galloway universe exists to impart lessons; life is one grand preparation for that job interview where you’re asked about what challenges you’ve overcome. He pays his children to do chores, to instill them with a hunger for work; and then sometimes he mugs them on the way back to their room, “as that, too, is a life lesson”. Everybody in the Galloway universe speaks the way he does, in a series of catchy and obnoxious made-up names for complex human experiences. During the breakdown of his first marriage, he visited a counselor, who asked him: “What city do you want to live in, Marrytown or Singletown?”. This sparked an epiphany. He had already set up shop in Singletown.

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A tough-love tone permeates Galloway’s latest meditation on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man. “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach”, he declares, “big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory”. Peterson, of course, was never quite so crude. But more than that, Galloway’s point is undercut by a certain mawkishness: for it appears that one can grow one’s big-dick energy, according to Galloway, by being kind. Masculinity, moreover, is perfectly compatible with vulnerability. Like Peterson, and like much pop culture directed at young men in the last decade, Galloway is a passionate evangelist for crying. Unlike Peterson, however, he knows to hold himself together in public. It is hard, in fact, to imagine him crying, even though he says he does so often. It is so incongruous with what is ultimately a conventional, alpha persona.

And yet, despite the macho self-presentation, the title on the front cover of Notes on Being a Man appears in a noticeably feminine hand, with rounded curves and flowing loops. Here, perhaps, a clue as to how its publishers have imagined its typical buyer. “My biggest fans are young men”, Galloway tells Triggernometry; “my biggest supporters are mothers”.

The problem for Brand Galloway is this: young men do not want to read things their moms approve of. They would want to read Page 3 or Nuts Magazine, if only they still existed; nowadays they seem to content themselves with Clavicular, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker — and Andrew Tate, who Galloway so tentatively tried to mimic. Jordan Peterson could compete, for a time, but only because he was supposed to be subversive. It never mattered that he was telling young men what their moms were telling them already — clean up your room!; he was popular, in the end, because he was “controversial”, went against the current on trans and gender issues, and totally OWNED Cathy Newman. There was a certain frisson to Peterson at his peak, a frisson which Galloway is unlikely to match — whatever his current popularity with the Guardian or the The Washington Post. The lady in Adolescence was never going to direct the boy in her charge to 12 Rules for Life, but it’s easy to imagine her enthusing about Notes on Being a Man. Much of Galloway’s advice for young men is right, but, in the spirit of the Anti-Galloway Index, you should bet against it being effective. The liberal Jordan Peterson eluded us for so long because it was always a contradiction in terms. 

Zarathustra, coming a mere 24 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is best known for its prophet’s declaration that “God is dead.” The main character’s moniker makes a mockery of the Christian deity — Zarathustra is the Germanized name of the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity that may have later influenced it. With God dead, Zarathustra was to be a counter-gospel.

What was to replace God? Nietzsche explains: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” He goes on: “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.…”

Zarathustra speaks in parables grouped under various headings, often on themes dear to the hearts of reactionaries. “On Women” is a moving, and deeply un-PC, reflection on the animal passions that motivate relations between the sexes, with a bit of trolling thrown in. “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy.” As Zarathustra is about to part from the old woman he is talking to, she promises him a “little truth”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Zarathustra occasionally hits on politics, and when he does, it is to denounce the rabble and peddlers of equality. The Christian and his spiritual descendant, the socialist, he says, preach egalitarianism as a cover for a desire to tear down what is strong, life-affirming, and healthy in man. 

If you think much of this sounds like Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers, you are correct. But Nietzsche deserves full credit for getting there first. 

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While young reactionaries today look back at a simpler time, in which supposedly all normal people had a community, a partner, and a secure job, Nietzsche was already living a lonely, sexually frustrated existence in 19th-century Germany. He might have had sex once at a brothel — where he may or may not have contracted syphilis — but otherwise he either was rebuffed by women or kept them at a distance. The man who effusively praised conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander, and expressed contempt for Christian morality, was constantly sick, felt overwhelmed by social gatherings, and had trouble tolerating bright lights and loud noises. As the intellectual historian Peter Gay wrote in the introduction to The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s “life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior.”

More than a century after Zarathustra was published, I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? Didn’t I see through both Christianity and Left-wing political ideas that denied the obvious truth that some human beings were more valuable than others? When Nietzsche discussed the Overman, I thought he meant me. Or at least, someone I might one day become. 

In truth, just about anyone else in the world would have been a better candidate. Like Nietzsche, I was smart and introverted, with poor social graces. I had ideas about the opposite sex and what women should or did want, but little practical experience with them. To understand Nietzsche as cope for losers, though, would be to miss out on his continuing relevance.

If many of us began thinking of ourselves as Übermenschen without much evidence, the fault was with us, rather than Nietzsche, whose real message was that although life was ultimately tragic, we were to find meaning in the struggle. He stressed resilience, self-assurance, and emotional and intellectual detachment from the mob. In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation. We are naturally unequal, but we can all become something better than we currently are. Nietzsche was, to some extent, a 19th-century self-help guru.

Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness. With the death of God, this world is all we have left, and we must take it seriously. There is profound beauty in the journey toward becoming something better. At the same time, we have no choice but to remain self-aware enough to poke fun at ourselves. (“I no longer trust myself since I aspire to the height, and nobody trusts me any more; how did this happen? I change too fast: my today refutes my yesterday.”) Nietzsche uses humor not in the modern way that avoids judgment or responsibility; rather, his trolling works because the underlying point is deadly serious. He taught that there was hope, and even if you failed, you could get some laughs along the way, many of them at your own expense. What else to make of a man who published an autobiography with chapter titles such as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”?

Nietzsche’s ideas today sometimes seem banal, but only because we have fully incorporated his worldview. I now take for granted that humans are often driven by resentment, and the desire to tear things down rather than any positive vision of the good. Also, people aren’t always honest about their motivations, even with themselves, and this is especially true on sensitive and emotional topics like politics, or what a person looks for in a romantic partner. Freud admired Nietzsche and hit on many of the same themes, as does some of the most up-to-date work in psychology and anthropology.

When people make Nietzschean points on X (formerly Twitter), we roll our eyes at the lack of originality. But Nietzsche showed remarkable foresight in understanding the motivations behind socialism in the late 19th century, before it would come to dominate large swaths of the world. The entire 20th century in a sense stands as a testament to his prescience, with one nation after another witnessing Left-wing revolutions descend into barbarism, despite their association with beautiful words and ideals. Echoes of these instincts can be found among wokes and degrowthers, and in the self-pitying rhetoric of the populist Right. Even many stock phrases in use today originate with Nietzsche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” 

The other great tragic force of the 20th century was German nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, Nazism. Nietzsche’s ideas took off in his native country beginning around 1890, and were an inspiration to militarists up to 1945. Pocket editions of Zarathustra were distributed to soldiers on the front lines in World War I, and according to the historian Steven Aschheim, it was among the three most popular books taken into battle, along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament. His thought also became an inspiration for the Nazis — this, despite the fact that he opposed anti-Semitism, mocked German nationalism, and condemned conformity and obedience to the state.

As with many continental philosophers, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what Nietzsche believed, and if you start with the assumption that writers will see their work bastardized in the popular imagination, it is easy to understand how Nietzscheism in practice came to be co-opted by fascists. Praise for the salutary effects of war and contempt for weakness are staples of his books. Aschheim writes that although Hitler and his followers appropriated other figures from German history, “the particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them.” It is no accident, then, that in addition to being praised and cited by Hitler, Nietzsche today has disciples that include race-obsessed far-Right intellectuals like Costin Alamariu, better known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Left-leaning adherents of Nietzsche blamed his sister’s appropriation of his legacy after his death for the way he was supposedly misread. Some German nationalists agreed. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi theoretician, sarcastically remarked in 1937 that the only things keeping Nietzsche from being a National Socialist thinker were that he was not a nationalist, not a socialist, and rejected a racial worldview. Nonetheless, such critiques were ignored by Nazi dogma, which promoted the philosopher’s love of war and contempt for Christianity. The most charitable thing one can say about attempts to absolve Nietzsche for his impact on German nationalism is that if a thinker gets interpreted wrongly again and again, he surely deserves at least some of the blame. (Though admittedly, the idea of trying to cancel Nietzsche in his grave strikes me as amusing.)

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The truth is that it has been possible for individuals and movements with wildly contradictory views to embrace Nietzsche. There are postmodern Nietzscheans, nationalist and anti-nationalist Nietzscheans, and, in my heart at least, Nietzschean liberals. This last philosophy accepts his insights into human inequality and the psychology of resentment, while remaining skeptical of his attempts to assert a positive vision that can be imposed on society. Celebrating the idea of a heroic struggle, or one man’s will to overcome obstacles, can be useful in terms of self-improvement or even creating a cultural movement, but such impulses are likely to end in disaster if they are elevated to a governing philosophy.

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money. Nietzsche did not spell out the politics he supported, but he did provide an endless number of quotes that can be easily appropriated by those wanting to commit atrocities. And young people on X and TikTok, particularly those attracted to far-Right influencers, are often getting a bastardized version of Nietzsche, twisted to fit a political agenda. Better to go back to the original source. If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it. 

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life. 

If one day the world does reject me, I will return to the void I emerged from, and look back at the whole thing with a laugh. Nietzsche went mad, perhaps from syphilis, but the sense that life is a cosmic joke is so intensely apparent in his writing that I find it difficult to imagine him ever having truly suffered.

That Austen should continue to provoke such rapt devotion in her 250th year is neither new nor surprising. Her novels, modest in scope and domestic in preoccupation, have become talismans. She died at 41 and was never famous in her lifetime, writing about love but remaining alone and staying by herself quietly in the parlor of a Hampshire rectory, immersed in her universe of characters. Her books were published anonymously or posthumously, but she now presides over a trans-Atlantic empire of adaptation, fantasy, and projection.

That empire is remarkable: Austen owns the American book market. Her romantic tome Pride and Prejudice outsells new John Grisham novels, and tickets to the upcoming Jane Austen Society of North America tour cost more than $1,300. They come with afternoon tea, a regency-style dance, and whatever might be involved in the “literary inclusions” advertised on the site. In the breadth and frenzy of her trans-Atlantic legacy, she has no equals. Dickens might be a sharp prose stylist — but you can’t exactly imagine any girls swooning over Great Expectations or adult women getting dressed up in full customs to re-enact Hard Times. Even Shakespeare needed the young, beautiful Leonardo Di Caprio to goad people to the cinema for Romeo and Juliet.

Dismissing Austen’s popularity as mere “fandom” misses its point. Rather, the cult of Austen showcases how America’s fetishization of tradition is at odds with a capitalist culture. For Elizabeth Bennett, the challenge was to find a husband who makes you both happy and prosperous. For Americans, whose country is still a year younger than Austen, it’s the bigger, blurrier project of using your life to find something that feels to you like happiness and prosperity.

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A few months after I moved to America, a sweet friend invited me to her 25th birthday. There, at her apartment in Williamsburg, Sense and Sensibility — the 2008 BBC version, not Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation — played on loop on the TV.  I assumed we’d be drinking a beer and talking over the dialogue. It didn’t take me long to realize that quite a few of the others there could recite almost all of the words. For years, they had watched Sense and Sensibility, taking from it a charming story of love leavened by English humor. But also, I think, they recognized their own desires; not so much just to pursue happiness — a universal aspiration — but to seek something individually fulfilling; as Austen wrote, “to know your own happiness.”

But I shouldn’t have been surprised: it was actually first in America, not England, that the Austen cult bloomed. Serious Austen scholarship emerged not from Oxbridge, but from US universities in the early 20th century. Her biography was serialized in Harper’s and the North American Review. It is the peculiar achievement of the Austen-industrial complex to have made her miniature works of psychological realism into global entertainment products.

By the Nineties, a period in which “Austenmania” came into fashion, it had become apparent that Austen was no longer merely an author; she had been repurposed into something adjacent to a lifestyle brand. Colin Firth’s dripping Mr. Darcy, Keira Knightley’s feral Lizzy Bennet stomping through fields at dawn, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary, the eccentric Disney adults of Austenland — all of it coexisting in the same floating semiotic cloud.

The urge to inhabit Austen’s world is stronger in America than almost anywhere else; but love sells, as does the regency-esque aesthetic of babydoll silhouettes and silken bonnets. Americans, who once threw off the yoke of George III with a revolution, now seem determined to cosplay British class hierarchies in softened, candlelit form. Austen offers a sanitized simulation of aristocracy: just enough status anxiety to titillate, never enough to threaten. Her England is one where money is spoken of, but rarely vulgar; where virtue, if not always rewarded, at least enjoys a kind of narrative dignity.

Last year, a viral personal essay in The Cut headlined “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” devoured my friends and my conversations. The essay’s author, Grazie Sophia Christie, was pure Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park, who marries a very unexciting man, because “a large income is the best recipe for happiness.” The writer described being “daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self” but having found the cure in an older, richer husband, who taught her how to live, to behave, and provided for their life. She watched her friends’ relationships with pity: “If you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things.” The piece elicited both rage and praise – some defended her for playing the patriarchy, others attacked her for falling for it.

Like Christie, Austen recognizes that in these constraints, there is freedom — or at least, the performance of it. Elizabeth Bennet says no to a wealthy idiot and yes to a haughty, emotionally stunted aristocrat. Emma meddles and is corrected. Anne Elliot gets a second chance. The novels contain, over and over again, the fantasy that a character can transcend material reality. But unlike Christie, for Austen’s women, this is their only option.

The idea of transforming oneself through marriage, money, a job — take your pick — is so concrete an American fantasy, that I’ve found it’s only here that people radically “pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do,” to borrow from Zadie Smith. It’s the fantasy that drives Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, who decides to begin “the very kind undertaking” of transforming a less becoming woman to up her standing in society. Austen warns us, of course, that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” but that doesn’t mean her characters can’t try. They move within the limited scope available to any woman in their day; and as far as finding “happiness,” the notion of falling in love was a pretty good start.

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Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Indiscretions,” written in 1924 for Vogue, noted the impossibility of loving Austen appropriately. “We needs must adore,” she wrote, “but she does not want it; she wants nothing; our love is a by-product, an irrelevance; with that mist or without it her moon shines on.” Woolf, characteristically, was half-merciless and half-right. Austen, who lived her adult life in a small house with her mother and sister, now presides, at least paranormally, over a cultural empire whose currency is romantic transformation. She is the patron saint of witty heterosexual courtship, and she is utterly absent from it.

But the courtship she presides over, combined with this sense of American optimization, means that Austen’s charming directions toward love land off their mark here. The hyper-individualist is always transforming: confronted with Equinox ads to “want it all,” to preempt their wrinkles with Botox, to meditate into transcendence while working into oblivion. But Austen knows, even when we try to change everything around us; it doesn’t do the trick, “it must be from within.” It’s why those who have examined her narrative prose in detail, know that she makes no promises. When I watched The New Yorker’s literary critic, Merve Emre, being asked for advice, she knew to quip: “Honestly? Marry rich.” Whether or not serious, it’s still a truth universally acknowledged.

What Austen understood, and her American readers often prefer to forget, is that the ending is never guaranteed. She is a patron saint of love who leaves her characters behind on the altar. Happiness, like love, is provisional. And narrative is only ever an attempt to make peace with that.

It blew my head off. But not in the way I thought it might. There were no hallucinations, there was no Day-Glo assortment of colors. It was something much more profound. Basically, it was paradise, and it was paradise all the more so for being so adjacent to everyday reality.

The first time I did LSD I was in a family house — a house I’d been to thousands of times before. But suddenly, everything about the place was imbued with new layers of meaning. Touching the chairs that my grandparents and great-grandparents had sat in, I discovered a new understanding of these figures who had always been somewhat remote to me.

My thoughts were still recognizably my own, but rather than having, say, three or four at once, I now seemed to have 11 — each occupying its own dimension, as if in some kind of stereo effect. I would be thinking about different phases of my childhood and the music I was listening to and the room I was in and the dynamics I had with each person around me. At the same time, I felt a calm self-assurance. Having spent my twenties (in retrospect) in the grip of different anxieties, I could now, with the aid of the LSD, see myself far more fully, far more richly. I could see that there were worlds and worlds inside myself — as there are for everyone.

Inevitably, I suppose, that started a journey. The lab-created psychedelics such as LSD and MDMA showed the immense resources latent within a person, and the drop of acid, like a scientist putting a bit of fluid onto a slide, illuminated what was already there. The plant medicines, such as ayahuasca, were where it really got trippy, since these were entirely natural compounds. They seemed to be part of an intelligence that existed throughout the natural world. If I took kambo — a frog venom — I found myself seeing the world like a frog; if peyote, like a cactus. Each one seemed to have their own personality, to have a message directed at a particular psychological tangle in my own life.

Towards the peak of my psychedelic exuberance, in 2017, I realized that I was only a small part of a bigger movement, “a breath, sweeping through the cognoscenti”, as I wrote at the time. So many people I was coming across in this space — perfectly sane, balanced people — had psychedelic experiences that changed their lives. And, for a while, it felt like a dizzying scavenger hunt.

After my LSD experience I began to hear about ayahuasca — which, at the time, still seemed like an urban legend. Soon, I would find myself at a beach cafe near a group actually preparing for an ayahuasca ceremony, complete with Amazonian shamans in full regalia. And then when I was exchanging Facebook friendships with these ayahuascans, I discovered that the one friend we had in common was the most interesting guy I knew in college who turned out to be running a group, based in New York, for taking an African plant, iboga. Inevitably, not long after, iboga would blow my head off.

“All these people I meet all seem to be on the same page — with a united outlook, which is very different from how any of us were raised,” I wrote, trying to understand what was going on. “We believe in self-work, a kind of unremitting self-awareness and self-improvement. We are people of faith, which isn’t religious. It’s more that we believe everything anybody has ever said.” We were part of what became known as the “psychedelic renaissance” — a wave of young people, largely millennials, discovering that psychedelics had been seriously misrepresented in the aftermath of the Sixties culture wars and enthusiastically embracing them as a means for self-knowledge and self-growth.

Within the psychedelic community there were a few widespread, entrenched beliefs. One was that, throughout history, psychedelics had been a core part of the spiritual life of many societies. That is, the use of psychedelics was the norm, and our abstinent society was the exception. This was certainly true in indigenous societies all over the world. The classics professor Carl Ruck had very convincingly argued that the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece partook of psychedelic ergot, a fungus that is also in LSD, while a few years ago Brian Muraresku was at least intriguing in claiming that early Christian rites, the Eucharist included, involved psychedelics. In the Fifties, the banker R. Gordon Wasson had been startled to come across a thriving mushroom sect in Mexico, and I experienced a mature, coherent religion in Gabon that centered on plant medicines.

Another belief was that the culture wars had basically gone the wrong way. After its lab discovery in 1943, LSD had been practiced in clinical settings throughout the Fifties and had been the therapeutic wonder drug of the era (you can see some of the videos of its use on YouTube). The belief was that the genie had escaped the bottle a bit too fast — above all, through the showmanship of Timothy Leary — and that resulted in a severe backlash. In 1970, the Nixon Administration gave LSD a Schedule I status, right alongside heroin, and then for good measure threw in plant medicines like peyote and ibogaine. Baby Boomers spoke wistfully of their LSD trips — a surprisingly large number of Americans claim to have dropped acid at one point or another in their lives — but, basically, the War on Drugs had stamped out both the clinical use of psychedelics as well as a great deal of psychonautic exploration. The belief in the millennial community was that this had vastly set the culture back. So much of the great art of the Sixties, the music above all, had been psychedelically inflected: the Beatles, for instance, dropped acid innumerable times during that period, with Paul McCartney saying “it started to find its way into everything we did, really”. Stories abounded that the Prague Spring had been a psychedelic event, that Kennedy had been turned on to LSD in 1963 and that it had driven his pursuit of peace in the Cold War, and that Silicon Valley was largely created on the back of psychedelic experiences.

I had a similar experience. Even early in my journey, the psychedelics helped me immensely. Writing had always seemed like a massive anxiety attack — it took me months to agonize over a play. But after trying LSD, I found it came easily, I sounded like myself, and writing became a pleasure. I haven’t had writers’ block since (although the anxiety never entirely goes away). My fear had been that psychedelics would cause me to “drop out”, to become some kind of a hippie, but, actually, they gave me a new relationship to work — I could understand much better that a job needn’t be all of my identity. Meanwhile, there were no deleterious effects from the psychedelics. To this day, I’ve never had a bad experience with any one of them.

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The most influential book to make the case for the mainstreaming of psychedelics was Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind (2018). Pollan told the story of the clinical use of psychedelics in the mid-20th century, and the “restart”, which was a series of studies starting in the 2000s by Johns Hopkins University that found that psychedelics could produce mystical experiences, reduce anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients, all with next-to-no-negative impacts. What seemed to have disappeared completely was the bad science of the War on Drugs — for instance, the myth that MDMA created a dopamine deficiency, which was based on a bottle mix-up during a study. Enough people were doing psychedelics, both in clinical settings and on their own, without going crazy or suffering flashbacks. So many of the arguments against the psychedelics just didn’t hold up. And then the clinical benefits did seem very real and were borne out in study after study.

I suppose the peak of my psychedelic journey occurred when I was stone-cold sober. I was working on a documentary about ibogaine — a derivative of iboga — and accompanied a heroin addict from San Francisco to a clinic in Mexico. The place was called “Clear Sky” because, apparently, an addict right after his treatment looked up outside and said “oh a clear sky” — it was the first thought, really, that he had had of the outside world after years of being in the grip of his addiction. My experience was very similar. I had seen how the addict I was accompanying was living — unable to sit through a meal without going to the bathroom to smoke heroin off tinfoil, driving to the airport with a car that would shut down completely if it ever came to a complete stop. And then I saw him a few days later, after the ibogaine trip. He had cut his hair for the first time in a decade. His voice had a different timbre and his eyes had a different light. He had no cravings for heroin at all — it was, in the language of the clinic, an interruption that could allow him to reset his life.

One of the medical practitioners I met during the making of the documentary, a former ER doctor, described the first time he saw an ibogaine treatment as “a miracle”. I felt the same way. There weren’t very good numbers on how well the ibogaine cure had worked but the clinic estimated that the recovery rate was about 40% after a year compared to around 5% in the mainstream recovery industry. If there weren’t good numbers to go by, I was at least somewhat persuaded by what I read in the clinic guestbook. “Take this moment, breathe the air, hug the staff, feel the tears coursing down your cheek. You have waited so long for this.” “I woke up from treatment if reborn, alive with senses I hadn’t felt in years,” wrote another. A third simply wrote: “Ibogaine saved my life.”

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The psychedelic renaissance has since lost some of its momentum. There were a number of decriminalization initiatives in different states, and a number of companies attempting to put psychedelics through clinical trials. A ketamine spray for the treatment of depression was approved by the FDA in 2019 and ketamine treatments have become widespread among therapists. Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) continues to perform well in clinical trials, above all in alleviating depression. Microdosing has become widespread, most famously in Silicon Valley. But California’s governor vetoed a decriminalization bill and, more significantly, the FDA asked the company Lykos Therapeutics to redo their phase 3 trial for MDMA. Lykos’ offense had more to do with the fact that one of the therapists had had a sexual relationship with a patient six months after that phase of the study concluded — but it was enough for The New York Times to more or less declare the drug renaissance dead: “How Psychedelic Research Got High On Its Own Supply,” one recent article was titled. But even avowed practitioners have had to recognize setbacks. “The media pendulum is swinging,” Pollan said in an interview. “The wind has definitely gone out of its sails,” said researcher Rick Strassman.

Psychedelics disappeared from my life as well — and, as it happens, really around the time that the psychedelic renaissance was cresting. I can almost remember the moment when I knew that I wouldn’t have much to do with psychedelics again. It was during the pandemic, and it felt like a tide was going out. I had never had a directly negative experience with a psychedelic, but there were some adverse effects. Through my epiphanic period, I had probably developed a false optimism which turned out to be unsustainable. I had also come across some of the darker sides of the psychedelic renaissance — self-appointed “gurus” and “shamans” who allowed their transcendent psychedelic experiences to inflate their own egos and then enjoyed manipulative control over people who participated in their ceremonies. Looking back — and I think about this every day — it is very hard for me to say whether psychedelics have made my life better or worse.

But if I had a choice I would do it all again the same way. The psychedelics represented a journey into the unknown and the more complicated aspects of the self. They showed me that there was far more to the world than I ever would have suspected. And that seemed to be more or less the same place that the culture-at-large had got to. The sense with the Sixties was that it had been too much too soon — that society wasn’t able to handle the insights of psychedelics. We may have already started to feel the same way about the “psychedelic renaissance”, that psychedelics are so powerful that they can’t be casually disseminated on a mass scale.

That is not necessarily an indictment of psychedelics. They really are, as Aldous Huxley put it, “the doors of perception”. If psychedelics are too much for us (and they often are), that may say more about our own limitations than it does about the psychedelics themselves.

The sole Left-wing voice belonged to Grant Notley, whose wife, Sandra, was the librarian at Peterson’s school, and whose daughter, Rachel, went on to be Alberta’s premier. Peterson worked for Grant and, aged only 14, came within 13 votes of being elected to the executive of his New Democratic Party. But it was Sandra who had the greatest impact on him, by introducing him to the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ayn Rand, and George Orwell.

Conservative intellectuals are expected to have a narrative of their Damascene conversion, and Peterson’s came from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. That book, he says, convinced him that socialists are, as a rule, petty and resentful people, and that the whole ideology had therefore to be rejected. No matter that Orwell had explicitly cautioned his readers against exactly this fallacy: “To recoil from socialism because so many socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face.” For Peterson politics is a matter of character; and he conducts his war against petty and resentful socialism by trying to inculcate good character traits in his audience.

Peterson became the world’s most influential public intellectual by supplying anxious audiences with concrete answers. 12 Rules for Life, his 2018 bestseller, addresses all the usual self-help questions: how to succeed at work, how to find love, how to establish order in a chaotic and disconcerting world. The Peterson of 2018 seemed the right kind of person to provide the answers; he looked and sounded like a man who had his affairs in order. He was adept at playing the stern father figure: “Young people are mostly worthless because they don’t know anything.” The answers themselves were straightforward, practical, and have likely helped many thousands of people. Make friends with people who want the best for you. Clean up your room. Stand up straight with your shoulders back, bucko!

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Now, however, Peterson prefers to ask questions. The distance of 12 Rules for Life from his latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, reflects a shift in Peterson’s public persona. It is a shift from no-nonsense instruction to high-falutin abstraction. It is a shift typified, even, in his manner of dress: the difference between a sleek, business-like suit and a gauche, flamboyant one.

We Who Wrestle with God is a kind of homiliary, a selection of moral teachings based upon Peterson’s reading of the Bible. Chapters start and end with rhetorical questions. He recounts various Biblical stories before following them up with his favourite rhetorical question of all: “What does it mean?” Abraham apparently employs “the longest-term and most comprehensive [mating] strategies possible” — “What does all this mean?” His wife miraculously conceives when she is 90 years old — “What does this mean?”

When Peterson, on occasion, decides to answer his own questions, the reader tends to be left unsatisfied. At the beginning of Genesis, God is “moving upon the face of the waters”: what does it mean? “It means that God is mobile, obviously”, Peterson tells us, before digging deeper; “less obviously, moving is what we say when we have been struck by something deep”. Clever wordplay in English, but I don’t think it works in the Biblical Hebrew.

Peterson was accused of all manner of things when he first shot to fame: he was a “charlatan”, a “dangerous” one at that, teetering on the edges of “fascist mysticism”. But nobody back then accused him of inarticulacy. In one of his most memorable performances, with 49 million views on YouTube, he ran rings around Cathy Newman, who kept trying to pin him down with feeble gotchas (“so, what you’re saying is…”). His voice was clipped and authoritative, always adhering to one of his own 12 Rules: Be precise in your speech.

Perhaps he has now taken that precept too far. His interlocutors — Richard Dawkins, most recently — appear to find it almost impossible to sustain a conversation with him, because he’s so obsessed with defining and redefining terms, often in idiosyncratic ways (“well, that depends what X means…” has become a meme in its own right). He is, as Dawkins says, “drunk on symbols”. He indulges in those off-putting aspects of academic study that public intellectuals are supposed to eschew.

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The hostility towards Peterson at the apex of his fame was always excessive. Was he not exactly what high-status liberals said they longed for? — a male role-model espousing personal responsibility, so comfortable with his emotions that he’s crying all the time. He was cast, unfairly, as a gateway drug to the manosphere. In fact, he was a manosphere-vaccine: the type of angry young man who might otherwise be attracted to the Andrew Tates of the world is precisely the type of person who most needs to be told to clean up his room and stand up straight with his shoulders back.

Yet Peterson increasingly seems to be approaching the old, uncharitable portrayal of his critics. Once he was distinguished by his calm stoicism, but now he is angry: “Up yours, woke moralists; we’ll see who cancels who!” All this naturally calls his self-help credentials into question. Should young men really be taking life advice from someone who eats only meat, salt, and water?

As Peterson the self-help guru recedes from the stage, Peterson the Biblical exegete takes his place. Yet while the self-help guru’s message worked, whatever its faults, most of the arguments of We Who Wrestle with God are dubious at best. Peterson likes to elucidate the Jungian archetypes at play in Biblical narratives by drawing analogies between them and modern pop culture. But that doesn’t work when there is a clear and discernible line of influence, as there so often is. When Superman, like Moses, exhibits the “mythological trope” of the “hero with dual ancestry”, does this really point to something deep-rooted in the human psyche? Perhaps, but it’s a poor example: Superman’s Jewish creators consciously modelled him on the Moses story.

Likewise, are all villains stand-ins for the Cain of Genesis? Sometimes it’s plausible: Scar in the Lion King, who kills his own brother, might be “as close an analogue to Cain as could be conjured in the modern imagination”. But for all Peterson’s insistences, there is nothing particularly Cain-like about Sauron or Voldemort. Nor, for that matter, are real-life supervillains: Karl Marx, says Peterson, is “Cain to the core”, because he regarded the bourgeoisie “in consequence of their success as only parasites, predators, and thieves”. We are left again with Peterson’s reading of The Road to Wigan Pier, his conception of socialism as nothing but resentment. Yet Marx, as all novices know, wrote with admiration for the bourgeoisie, which “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”.

Marxism — the sin of Cain — culminates, in Peterson’s telling, in the greatest evil of all: “postmodernism”. But in his distrust of “ideology”, his deconstruction of every word, his slipperiness on the question of whether Biblical stories are true (“well, that depends what you mean by ‘truth’”), there is something unmistakably postmodern about Peterson. The problem with postmodernism is that it asks questions but offers no answers. Well, I like my books to offer answers; and there might be more intellectual value in one “clean up your room, bucko” than in a thousand echoes of “what does it mean?”.

Now, suddenly, after Pearl Harbour, he was in Washington, writing memos and proposals for the conduct of the Allies. He was being marked out by the most senior generals as one of the most capable men in the American army. His ascent was incredible. In 1936 he was a Lieutenant Colonel, having been a Major since 1924. Six years later, in 1942, he became Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in North Africa. Two years after that, he became a five-star general. And after the war, of course, he became the President. So much for Eisenhower’s retirement.

This story ought to make us pause. Because the self-help industry around life-changes generally divides into two poles. On the one hand, there’s the easy optimism of American-style self-help and its relentless belief that anything is possible — change yourself, whenever, however. On the other, there are the gloomy determinists, who glower that we shouldn’t sell false hope to easy targets. A few weeks ago, Janan Ganesh gave voice to the latter view, attacking self-optimism as a false dream that major life decisions can be corrected. Instead, Ganesh says, the truth is more like an Ian McEwan novel: make a bad marriage or pick the wrong career, and you are unlikely to recover. “Life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.” But this is far too binary. What Eisenhower’s story shows is that the truth is often messier and more complicated than anything you can fit into a pithy line. This is not a subject about which we can make happy generalisations, as I show in my new book Second Act.

Look around and you will see late bloomers everywhere in modern culture. David Nicholls, promoting his new novel, recently told The Times that his favourite writer is Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first literary novel aged 62. The book that many consider to be her masterpiece, The Blue Flower, was published when she was 80. The American footballer Jalyx Hunt recently described himself as a late bloomer when talking about his acquisition by the Philadelphia Eagles after a steady rise through the ranks. Jerry Seinfeld is making his directorial debut aged 70. At this year’s Brit awards the singer Raye became the surprise star, a late-blooming sensation. And whatever you think of Joe Biden’s age, he is a symbol of a workforce that is more and more active as it gets older. Nearly one in five Americans over the age of 65 are in work — nearly double what it was 35 years ago.

This list is not supposed to make you feel like anything is possible. The self-helpists are too credulous. What these later achievements prove instead is that you do not simply wake up one day and discover that you are Toni Morrison. Late blooming is a long, hard slog. But it’s also true that we simply don’t know how many people could change things for themselves — given the opportunity, put in the right circumstances. Instead of polarising between self-help platitudes and cynical epigrams, we need a new mindset about talent, potential, and flourishing in the second half of our lives. And the pervasive spirit of this mindset must be the word “perhaps”. There is no law of late blooming. I am not presenting the biographical examples as incontrovertible, pure, or morally exceptional. What I can argue is that in all fields — including mathematics, where late blooming seems unfeasible — we underrate the potential of hidden talent. And the success stories are remarkably contingent on the chaos of the life lived. Past is prologue, not prediction.

As John Stuart Mill said, the main lesson of history is “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences”. And it wasn’t only Eisenhower who began his second act in the midst of war. Looking at a sample of men born during the Great Depression who served throughout the Second World War and the Korean War, the sociologist Glen Elder found that men from disadvantaged backgrounds became more socially competent and had improved psychological health after military service. They also improved their occupation outcomes as a result of skills gained in the army. As well as going to college on the G.I. Bill, many army veterans completed high school and undertook craft or vocational training. The army was a bridge from one sort of life to another, often coming at a time when their prospects seemed settled. They went from being school leavers with poor prospects to veterans with the chance of a decent life. It had seemed too late to change, but it wasn’t.

For men already established in jobs and families, the military was more likely to be disruptive. But for those who were on the route to a disappointing life, military service improved their trajectory. There were many negative impacts of army service: mobilised men were more likely to divorce, particularly those who saw battle action and were in their 30s when the war started. But this goes to show the same thing — changing your life path is possible, whatever your age or current experiences. The more you change your circumstances, the more you can change yourself. In the United States, delinquent men who were given overseas service, for example, were much more likely to use training opportunities provided by the 1944 G.I. Bill. As one pair of sociologists said: “Overseas duty, which embodies radical change, provides a unique stepping stone to eventual turn-around among those stigmatized with a criminal conviction.” It changed the way people thought of them and changed the way they thought about themselves.

For a lot of people, mid-life is the time when a second act becomes possible or desirable. We find ourselves lost on the path in the middle of a dark wood, as Dante said, or in Robert Frost’s terms, life itself becomes too much like a pathless wood. In these circumstances, anyone would like to get away from earth awhile. The theory of the “happiness curve” will tell you this period of dissatisfaction is normal, biological, nothing to do with your life or your work or your lost dreams, just mere hormones. Apes have the same dips. Don’t try to get away, this theory says. Stick it out. The feeling will pass.

But not only is the data around that claim looking less and less certain, with new studies finding that the happiness curve might not exist at all, it also places everyone too neatly onto an average line. You are the person you are; you are not a statistical event. This is where self-help can be helpful. Aspiration and ambition are how we change the world. Focusing on the outlier success stories isn’t a way of selling a hollow dream to unsuspecting dupes. It’s part of a culture of aspiration of which we have become sceptical through overexposure. But while the transformation we’re too often promised is rare, change is very possible — as long as we get past culture war divides and be open to the immense range of ways an individual life can flourish.

But self-help lets us down when it comes to how we make a change in our lives. There are no simple solutions to help you leapfrog yourself into a new life. Instead, we can take some advice from a great late bloomer, Audrey Sutherland.

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Sutherland was a Hawaiian kayaker. She started exploring Hawaiian coastlines in her forties, and purchased an inflatable kayak, which was mocked by more experienced (and male) explorers. But she persisted and became competent and well-regarded. Then, when Sutherland turned 60, she looked herself in the mirror and said: “Getting older, aren’t you lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.” She quit her job and went on her first solo exploration in Artic waters.

This was a remarkable change. Capsizing meant risk of death. Camping involved bear encounters, alone in the woods. The coastline was ragged from logging. Cabins often required repair before she could sleep in them. But for the next 20 years, into her eighties, she undertook solo kayak explorations of the Alaskan and British Columbian coast.

Sutherland used to give talks at kayaking associations. At the end, she would tell the audience to close their eyes and think about the one big thing they wanted to do with their lives if they were given $5 million dollars tomorrow. Now, she would say, open your eyes and ask yourself: “What’s stopping me?”

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At one event, a man stood up and told her exactly what was stopping him. A job. A mortgage. Children. Elderly parents. A wife to support. This hardly elicited much sympathy from Sutherland, who had been a single, working, mother to four children, living on a moderate income. She replied: “Then you need to ask yourself: What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?”

That was how she did it. One step at a time. Read maps. Acquire cheap gear. Practice capsizing. Do preparatory treks in local terrain. Anything that gets you closer.

The stockbroker Chris Gardner said the same thing. He had gone from being a young black man with no degree, no connections, and no qualifications — with no access, that is, to the white, patrician finance world of the Eighties — to running his own firm. He was homeless for a short period and only got his break aged 27. For anyone who wants to be a late bloomer, he offered this most important piece of advice: “While you’re brushing your teeth, ask yourself: If tomorrow morning you could be doing anything in the world, what would it be? Second, what did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?”

Schwarzenegger can legitimately call himself a self-made man. He came to the US with no money and an unpronounceable name and a skill that was barely viewed as a skill and had no obvious practical application: what are you supposed to do with biceps the size of watermelons? With fanatical discipline and a lot of personal charm — along with the benign bullshitting the Austrians call schmäh — he parlayed his skill into movie stardom and eight years as the Governor of California; he wasn’t that bad a governor, either. If the US had a different Constitution, he might have become President.

If you watch the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that first introduced Arnold to a mainstream audience, it’s clear that even as a neophyte he viewed what he did as self-construction. He compares himself to a sculptor. “You look in the mirror, and you say, ‘Okay, I need a little bit more deltoids, a little bit more shoulders,’ so you get the proportions right. So what you do is you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side. And, you know, maybe he does it an easier way. We go through a harder way.”

Schwarzenegger’s gift for canny, accessible analysis is no doubt present in his new self-help book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. Judging by the book promo, the tools are rooted in common sense. Have a vision of what you want to achieve, work hard to achieve it, promote yourself whenever you can, reinvent yourself. I wouldn’t argue with any of this (well, maybe the self-promotion), and especially not the last. If Arnold is anything, he’s a dedicated reinventor. Consider the penitential regimen of exercise and nutrition needed to transform a more or less ordinary looking adolescent (he began body-building at 15) into a hybrid of animated athletic trophy and anatomical illustration. Then consider what it took to transform such a person into a movie star.

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In this regard, much of his success came from his embodiment of masculinity, or a particular kind of it. Given Schwarzenegger’s staggering proportions, the great knotted wedge of his torso, the arms like thighs and the thighs like trunks, the jaw that might have been designed to crush bones, we should speak of hypermasculinity. The actors who embodied manhood from the Forties through to the Seventies were physically ordinary or extraordinary only in their beauty, such as Paul Newman or the young Brando. John Wayne and Jack Nicholson were actually kind of dumpy. Jimmy Stewart was a weed. It’s true that bodybuilders before Arnold became action heroes — notably Steve Reeves, who played Hercules in low-budget spear-and-sandal pictures — but they weren’t stars. They were barely actors.

If Schwarzenegger began his career as a growling, jut-browed human tank processing over the rubble of his adversaries, he learned to work his size and menace more agilely. Then he learned to work against them. His best acting is in comedies such as Kindergarten Cop, Twins and Junior, in which his character becomes pregnant via an experimental drug. His comedy is the comedy of masculinity placed in milieus where masculinity has little use, and is even a disadvantage. How is a little kid likely to react when a man Schwarzenegger’s size and with Schwarzenegger’s accent asks him “Who’s your daddy?” It’s the comedy of a giant trying to repair eyeglasses with the tiny screwdriver and even tinier screws that are sold as eyeglass-repair kits.

This gameness and deftness with which Arnold parodies his masculinity — maybe all masculinity — actually makes him more masculine. In a post-Freudian, post-feminist age, we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who make too big a deal of their manliness: they’re either closet-cases or sociopaths. Maybe what I mean is that we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who are humourless about it. And, as my wife pointed out, humour is one of the ways men have always made themselves attractive to women (and perhaps to other men). If a couple of guys are chatting up women at a bar, you can tell which one is dominant because he’ll be the one to crack a joke.

It turns out that Schwarzenegger also trained to make a butt of himself. In a recent interview, he reveals that his tutor was the veteran comic Milton (“Mr. Television”) Berle, who bullied him through take after take of a single joke and called him “Nazi”. It is indicative of the humour that offsets Schwarzenegger’s tendency towards self-promotion. (From the same interview: “There’s a schmäh with everything. Sometimes people take schmäh meaning you’re lying, which is not what it is. It’s kind of like, you wrap it up in a more attractive package. In order to sell something you have to have the schmäh”.) But then self-promotion is inherent in the self-help genre. Why would you take advice from someone who isn’t great at what he does — great at life — and how do you know he’s great unless he tells you, over and over and over?

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Schwarzenegger’s self-promotion has always seemed heaviest when he is talking about his political career — though, unlike other political self-promoters, he actually matches his claims with political action: see his fleet-footed response to the 2007 wildfires that swept Southern California. Other times, it’s not clear what the didactic purpose of his political career is. Consider his decision, against medical advice, to be sworn in for his second term as Governator with a broken femur. I wouldn’t listen to anybody who told me I should attend a long public ceremony while standing on a recently broken femur, even one that had been bolted back together. To his credit, I don’t think Schwarzenegger has ever said that. But I also don’t think Tony Robbins actually said that his fans should walk on fire, yet it was something he did at his “seminars”, and a number of attendees tried it. (They sued him after they were badly burned.)

But who hasn’t made a few mistakes? If you want a self-help book written by someone who hasn’t made any, that leaves you with the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Vedas, and the Buddhist sutras. And look how well people follow their advice.

Judging by the material already published, I suspect the contents of Be Useful will be unexceptionable, and probably as good as any advice can be that isn’t given in person, by somebody you know who isn’t a god or a saint (or maybe a chatbot). Yes, we’re talking about an actor who became famous for wise-cracking as he pounded someone’s face to jelly and, before that, for declaring (in Conan the Barbarian) that the best thing in life is “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. But we’re also talking about a tough but warm-hearted gym trainer who reads Nietzsche and the Stoics. He’s demanding. If your reps are half-assed, he’ll make you redo them. But he understands failure; he probably even sees the value of it. “Good job, dude,” he’ll tell you. And you’ll be grateful.

Sometimes his leniency is frustrating. I’m thinking of the speech he gave to the American public after January 6. It was an affirmation of American values and a warning against fascism, delivered by someone whose own father had fought for the Third Reich. That’s what makes it so moving. The speech, however, was notable for its refusal to denounce individuals apart from the coup-leader-in-chief. To me, that’s its one failure. The violence the former president inflicted on our nation was abetted by thousands of allies and followers. They should have been called out. But I’m writing as someone whose father was driven out of Austria following that country’s annexation into Greater Germany. Schwarzenegger’s father may have been in the crowds that cheered Hitler as he entered Vienna; he would have been wearing a swastika armband, since he belonged to the SA.

But Schwarzenegger’s forbearance may speak to an essential sweetness of character. A man can have such a character even if he makes a fortune playing a killing machine or sexually exploits women. Maybe what I mean is really childlikeness. The Governator (one can’t really speak of him as the former Governator, can one? It’s unlikely there’ll be others) gave his January 6 speech using a prop that he invoked as a metaphor for democracy. It was the sword from Conan. In a recent promotional video, he uses the same sword to slice open a carton of the new books. Even grown men love their toys. And as schmäh, it’s priceless.

I first learned about therianthropy while talking to Kathy Gerbasi, a social psychologist who specialises in relationships between humans and animals. She has an interest in furries, a fandom that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals. Gerbasi conducted a survey at a furry convention that included the following two questions: “Do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human?”, and “If you could be 0% human, would you be?” Furries feel an affinity with animals, but that’s generally as far as it goes. So, when a few of her respondents answered yes to both questions, she realised that she was dealing with people who were fundamentally atypical.

Since then, Gerbasi has held several discussion groups with therians, who she describes as “very sincere”. “They look like people,” she says. “They mostly behave like people… But if you really talk to them, they’ll tell you that deep inside they are not a person.” My friend the bear, who goes by the sobriquet BearX, lives an improbably normal life. He is married. He has two children. His career in engineering has afforded him a nice house and a comfortable middle-class life. As he says: “If you didn’t know something was up, you wouldn’t know anything was up.”

When psychologists investigate an unusual pattern of behaviour, they look for common attributes that may help explain it, such as age, gender, class or geography. So far, Gerbasi and the handful of other psychologists who have studied therians have failed to find any. While researching my new book, I talked to therians in their teens and in their seventies, of female, male and undetermined gender. The only thing that can be said about almost all therians is that they realise at a young age that they are different in body and spirit from those around them. They feel “off”, separated from humanity, and this estrangement defines the rest of their lives.

“I had an internal sense as a kid that I was supposed to be bigger, heavier,” says BearX. “Later, I worked out that bears fit everything that I felt. It led me to think that maybe I was supposed to have been born a bear and there was some kind of cataclysmic failure in the universe’s sorting system.” Caesar, a communications technician in his mid-thirties who identifies as a coyote, remembers feeling “very animal” as a child. “Maybe the best way to put it is that humans think with their emotions or on a higher level of cognition, but the way I responded to a situation was more instinctual, not calculating.”

As they grow up, therians move from having a general sense of feeling not quite human to a more concrete awareness of the kind of animal they are: their “theriotype”. The most common theriotypes are predator species such as wolves and large cats. As with furries, culture plays a role here: jaguars are more common in South America, and foxes in Japan, whose folklore contains many stories of people being possessed by a fox. Mythical or fantasy creatures are no less valid, though their owners are differentiated in the community as “otherkin”. While researching, I spoke to a couple of dragons.

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By Mary Harrington

Finding your theriotype can be a struggle. Most therians make their decision only after a great deal of research and thought. The community encourages its members to be scientifically rigorous: outlandish claims that would give ammunition to sceptics, such as the idea that it’s possible to physically transform into an animal, are dismissed as “fluff”. On therian forums, moderators frequently rebuke contributors for promoting theories that would break the laws of physics, and they are quick to correct errors in morphological or behavioural descriptions of species, such as the suggestion that wolves have red eyes, or that all canines hunt in packs.

A peculiar and often alarming characteristic of being a therian is the feeling that you have phantom body parts. Blayz, a wolf-dog hybrid, lives with the permanent sensation of a tail that wags or droops on command. “Going around corners, I will alter the movement of my frame to keep my tail from getting caught in doors or swiping cups off the table,” he says. Caesar, the coyote, is often convinced he has outsized ears that he can manipulate like antennae. I spoke with a snow leopard — an American woman in her early twenties — who has been saddled with the full range of phantom phenomena. “Even as a kid, I remember feeling like I had a tail and telling people it was invisible,” she explained. “It’s as much a part of me as my arms and legs, really. I also have constant phantom paws and a muzzle, which can make eating and drinking funny sometimes. I’m likely to miss my mouth if I’m not thinking about it.’

To feel body parts where none exist is not as biologically improbable as it sounds. Studies of people born with missing arms and legs have shown that limbs that have always been absent can still be represented in the sensory and motor regions of the brain. The psychologist Ronald Melzack, an expert on phantom pain, proposed that the brain continuously generates a pattern of impulses that indicate that the body is intact and “unequivocally one’s own”, even if it isn’t. This pattern, which Melzack called a “neurosignature”, is genetically determined and characteristic of each individual. It is not inconceivable that someone born with an atypical neurosignature might experience a body that is out of kilter with the one they possess. So far, no one has systematically examined the brains of therians to see if their neural patterns reflect what they feel.

Therians who are acclimatised to their animal side often find their phantom experiences reassuring, since they confirm an identity they have been trying hard to accept. But it can be a let-down when they recognise they don’t have the superpowers they thought they did. When Caesar realises yet again that he cannot direct his ears to hone in on a distant sound, he has the sobering thought that what he is trying to do is “in direct conflict with my own biology”. Kathy Gerbasi, in one of her studies, asked a therian who felt they had “wings” what it felt like when those wings were fully out; they told her it made them frustrated because they knew they couldn’t fly. Many therians avoid looking in mirrors because it reminds them that they are not what they think they are.

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Some psychologists believe that the distress suffered by therians is similar to the distress suffered by people whose sex at birth does not match the way they feel. The comparison is often made by therians themselves, a minority of whom are transgender as well as “trans-species”, as they sometimes put it. (Not all transgender people are comfortable with this analogy, fearing that it complicates the public discourse and undermines their movement’s drive for recognition.) The obvious difference is that while you can change your gender, you cannot do anything about your species.

For therians, “finding yourself” — that nebulous ideal promoted by the self-help industry — is obligatory. Although discovery may bring relief, it does not help with the bigger question: why am I this way? Science doesn’t provide many answers, so they can only speculate. Therianthropy may be a developmental response to early trauma or a childhood fixation on animals, or it may be a result of abnormal brain wiring. People of a spiritual inclination might think of it in terms of reincarnation or a “misplaced soul”.

In psychiatry, therianthropy is often erroneously considered to be synonymous with clinical lycanthropy — a condition related to schizophrenia, where delusions and hallucinations convince a patient that they have transformed into an animal. In her book Unthinkable, Helen Thomson describes meeting a lycanthrope who periodically believes he has turned into a tiger; her interview with him was cut short when he suddenly started growling and threatening to attack her, a relapse his doctors blamed on his failure to take his anti-psychotic medication.

But therians are not delusional or psychotic. Their animalistic feelings are a perpetual feature of their lives and are not alleviated by medication. They are aware, often to their profound disappointment, that they can never transform into animals. The medical profession’s impulse to diagnose them as lycanthropes has less to do with clinical evidence than the age-old tendency to pathologise behaviours and conditions that challenge social norms. The most we can say about the medical status of therians is that they are neurological outliers — hardly a signal of illness.

In 2019 Helen Clegg, a psychologist at the University of Buckingham, led the first comprehensive investigation into the well-being and mental health of therians. She recruited 112 across a broad range of ages, genders, ethnicities and species. Among them were wolves, foxes, dragons, birds, a snake, a shark and a couple of dinosaurs. Clegg’s team found that a disproportionate number of them had been diagnosed with autism (7.69%, compared with 1.5% in the general US population), though it is not clear how the two conditions could be linked. They also found that, compared with a control group, many therians struggle with relationships and social skills. This could be due to cognitive factors, or it could be because social taboos around therianthropy make it difficult to talk about. When you are forced to hide your true nature, communicating with others can be a challenge.

Their study also noted that many of the therians displayed “schizotypal” personality traits, such as a tendency to have unusual perceptual experiences. But these therians mostly found their experiences enriching rather than distressing. Clegg suggests that this is because they have found a way to integrate their fantastical thoughts into a coherent narrative that allows them to make sense of the way they feel. The therians in Clegg’s study scored just as highly as non-therians on several standard measures of psychological well-being, including personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance. The researchers concluded: “The findings suggest that therians are functioning well.”

Azi, a Mexican wolf living in Tennessee, experiences altered states of consciousness around 30 times a day. Therian friends of his told me that his experience is more extreme than anyone they know — for much of the time, he is more wolf than human. When we initially corresponded, he was apprehensive, fearing negative publicity; when we finally spoke via video call, he was open, eloquent and precise. His perceptual changes arrive suddenly and can pass just as quickly. When they happen, he says, “the human part of me is turned off. Mentally, I’m gone. The wolf mindset is running this body… It’s very dissociative.” He often finds himself growling, snarling, down on all fours, walking on his toes or, if the opportunity presents itself, chasing deer. It can be physically exhausting. Towards the end of our video call, my cat Cecil jumped up onto my laptop and started nuzzling the screen. Azi looked away and appeared to disengage for a moment. When I asked him about this, he admitted that as a wolf, few things are more inflammatory than being stared at by a cat. He has to contend with provocations like this whenever he goes out in public — a loud noise, a fleeing animal, a bothersome human. He must always be on his guard to stop himself shifting to wolf.

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The reality of therianthropy can be hard to live with. Elizabeth Fein, a clinical psychologist who has worked closely with Kathy Gerbasi, observed that acceptance of therianthropy often brings sadness or a sense of estrangement. “It’s like, ‘I’m always going to be different, I’m always going to be kind of separate from humanity. I’m never going to have the right body.’” The scale of the challenge that therians I interviewed face in trying to reconcile their human bodies with their animal minds may be partly a function of the culture in which they live. In the West, for much of the past two millennia, we have considered ourselves distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, elevated by cognition, intelligence, language, morality and culture. The Christian God granted humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, and philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have emphasised our superiority over nature.

But over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the line separating us and other has not always been so well-defined. Many cultures recognise animals as ancestors. A popular Tibetan creation myth maintains that people are descended from a meditating monkey, while in Turkic mythology people originated from a she-wolf named Asena. Meanwhile, stories about people who “shape-shift” between human and animal form have persisted throughout recorded history.

A world in which animals were treated as human and humans were treated as animals would be a lot easier for therians to live in. Their experience and their psychology are so different to most people’s that they often feel profoundly isolated. “Our lives would be immeasurably improved if people accepted it, if it wasn’t considered strange,” BearX told me. Thankfully, therians have each other. The community’s origins lie in the Nineties message boards of an online werewolf fan group called alt.horror.werewolves, and it has since evolved into a vibrant network of discussion forums and advice boards, with thousands of active participants.

Therians do disagree — about the causes of therianthropy, the distinction between therians and otherkin, and whether it is appropriate to discuss the sexual feelings some therians have towards animals. Nevertheless, Caesar the coyote told me that his introduction to the community was “unquestionably one of the happiest moments of my life: finding out that you’re not alone”. Blayz, who spent years trying to figure out his strange canine sensations, came close to dismissing them as “the delusions of a madman, nothing more than a side-effect of mental illness”. When he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it was revelatory. “So many of my own experiences and conclusions were echoed by this group of real people out there in the world.”

“Therians are really weird,” one of the coyotes says to me in a moment of exasperation. But in certain cultures, and in certain eras, they have been regarded as less weird — and among other therians, their behaviour is absolutely normal. Most therians want to be accepted by the wider world. In the meantime, it’s reassuring for them to always be accepted by their own. Life looks different when you’re part of a pack — whether you’re a bear, a coyote, a leopard, a dinosaur or a dragon.

This is an edited extract from Fans: A Journey Into the Psychology of Belonging, out 11th May.

This is a genre of writing that I, a historian by training and an around-the-clock worker by disposition, consume like Lay’s potato chips. I’ve waded through these swift waters accompanied by everyone from former Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion — keenly aware that no moment of immersion is the same as any other and none of them will ever recur. The one thing that history doesn’t do, for good or ill, is repeat itself. What I have sought is something I will never have: more time. Not better nor more meaningful time, as Odell is proposing to find, but merely more, in terms of sheer quantity. Because while I don’t want to live forever, I do hope to live long enough to do everything I’ve committed to do, such as help my daughter enter adulthood and support my parents and spouse in their old age.

Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.

Bubbling below the surface of How to Do Nothing is a sense of climate emergency, or climate apocalypticism. Odell is constantly out and about in nature, and conversant with all the worrywart liberal commentary about the heat death of the planet — which, like Jesus’s return in the Gospel of Mark, is always already imminent. This concern deeply informs Saving Time, giving it some of its urgency; it otherwise does the usual yeoman’s work of citing people such as British labour historian E.P. Thompson on the development of time and work-discipline, Frederick Winslow Taylor on industrial efficiency, and German philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure — all names you will encounter frequently if you have found the time to bathe in the waters of the time genre.

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Odell, to her credit, seizes upon the opportunity to situate the climate emergency in a discussion of the ways ancient Greeks delineated time: Chronos — time as a sort of forward, linear progression — and Kairos — a “crisis” or rupture in time. We all live in linear time, yet experience reminders — floods and famines — of the perpetual crisis in which we have found ourselves. Odell, in prose that betrays the vast condescension of our present, seems to think of this as a 21st-century phenomenon.

It most certainly is not; Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted “Theses on the Concept of History” reckons with a similar dichotomy of time: the “history of organic life on earth” as opposed to “Messianic time, [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”. For Benjamin, the powder keg that was Germany’s war on Europe — which, as an expatriate Jew facing repatriation in 1940, drove him to suicide — was the crisis, his “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” in front of him as he is propelled into the future. Humans from the emergence of civilisation, have always perceived themselves as living on borrowed time — because, of course, we are; we have always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “mortal men doomed to die”.

It is the approach to mortality that separates Odell’s work from, say, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — a title that references the average human lifespan. Odell, an atheist, is concerned with climate damage to the entire ecosystem; Burkeman, who is at least culturally Jewish, is concerned with trying to lead a balanced, moderate life in the amount of time allotted to him. It is the latter view that has always appealed to me — the Earth might be ending, but to those of us raised with anything resembling a coherent religious worldview and now struggling to raise a family, everything is already ending. As Father John Misty sings in “Holy Shit”, “Carbon footprint, incest streams…planet cancer, sweet revenge…but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

It is interesting, yet unsurprising, to see discussions of personal mortality get so little attention in a work like Saving Time. As my father lay on his deathbed — he died in his own bed, at home — he remarked to me that he had always thought it easier to die alongside millions of others in a meteor strike or global conflict than quietly and at home as an old and feeble man. This, he admitted, was a narcissistic strain of thought he inherited from his own father, who despised the civilian life that followed his time as a Second World War submariner, because it offered no promise of a collective death that would serve as a coda to some grand heroic saga. Today, as Odell acknowledges, we are bombarded with daily alerts of one crisis or another. So it requires an act of will to remember that one’s own death is not an event so significant that it must coincide with the end of life as we know it. It will only coincide with the end of life as you know it.

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It seems odd, then, that Odell cites Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper — not his description of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, but the fact that preparation for death is behind everything written therein. This is because, for the devout Pieper, as for Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, life is a preparation for eternity. “As a teacher usually says to the youthful student, who is even now finding the time of schooling too long, ‘Now, just don’t you get impatient, you have a long life before you,’” Kierkegaard writes in The Gospel of Sufferings, “so eternity speaks with more reason to the sufferer: ‘Just wait, do not become impatient, there is plenty of time, there is eternity.’”

I am, per my earlier admission, a workaholic. The clocks that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution rule my every waking minute; right now, as I type this, it is 2:04am in Pittsburgh. I have a Zoom meeting at 9:30am and another at 11am. This is not a complaint; it is the life I have made for myself. I have read Pieper and Thompson and all the rest. I understand how time, per the historian Fernand Braudel, passes both slowly for the unbending structures of society and quickly for individuals like me. But most important, in a way that none of these books on time emphasises, I know I am going to die. My father and mother never ceased with these reminders, which echoed those of Epictetus: “What harm is it, when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?”

When my mother and I would read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth — my favourite book in the early years of my homeschooling — we would linger lovingly over the passages about time. (There are many: one of the main characters is Tock, a “watchdog” with a clock embedded in his torso.) She would point out the inanity of the main character Milo’s early thoughts about wanting time to pass — “wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” — given that each moment we are bestowed by nature or heaven is a gift, the “present” (another cliché, of course). The great takeaway of the book, which brilliantly skewers the ways we waste time, was that we have as much time as we’re going to get: “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.”

For those of us who have already watched our parents and a good many of our close relatives die — particularly for people, like me, who do not share Pieper and Kierkegaard’s belief in eternity — this is cold consolation, but consolation nevertheless: we’re given the time we need to have the time of our lives, and no more. Our lives, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it, are defined by “finitude”, even as “a world is worlding around us”. We exist in a state of “being-towards-death”: a fascinating state, if only to us personally or to our families and friends, that will endure until it doesn’t. There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.

In elections this Sunday, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to triumph over current President Jair Bolsonaro. But the best way to understand the new Brazil, as well as to shed light on the workings of Brazilian politics, may actually be to leave Bolsonaro and Lula to one side and examine another candidate, a life coach and self-described theologian who, thanks to party wrangling, has been left without a legal candidacy.

Pablo Marçal, 35, has four million social media followers, sells a controversial life-coaching course called “The Worst Year of Your Life”, and is best known for nearly leading a group to their death in an ill-prepared trekking expedition in the service of “mental unblocking”. This year, the marketing-cum-political entrepreneur proposes to “unblock the nation”, and to do so from “neither Right nor Left, but from above”.

Marçal fulminates against the two leading candidates. The election, he argues, is like choosing a product: “there’s a car dealership called politics, and they tell you the most popular models are the little red Fiat or the yellow VW [Lula or Bolsonaro], but behind those you find Mercedes, BMWs… and way at the back there’s one no one talks about, a three-million real McLaren.” Encouraging his audience to choose the McLaren, he argues that “some can’t stand people who take risks; if you don’t, you won’t be able to govern, to reach the top”. It is this mix of opportunism, individualism, braggadocio, and indeed faith, that make Marçal emblematic not only of a style of politics, but of deep changes in Brazilian society.

Marçal is a fiery orator and canny operator, worth a declared R$ 96m (US$ 18.5m). With corporate donations banned in Brazilian politics since 2015, the small centre-Right Republican Party of Social Order (PROS, in its Portuguese acronym) signed up Marçal on the promise that he would contribute R$200m to the party. But following a dispute, a legal ruling has now seen control of the party handed back to its previous president. The PROS is back in Lula’s electoral coalition and Marçal’s candidacy is stillborn.

Marçal became famous in January this year after leading a large group up the Pico dos Marins, a 2,420m-high mountain in the state of São Paulo. Facing 100km/h monsoon winds and near-freezing night-time temperatures at the peak, the group had to be rescued by the fire brigade. In a chest-thumping video posted on social media after the rescue, Marçal gave no indication of having needed help to get down the mountain. Instead, he provoked viewers to “stay home and watch [social media] stories” if they did not feel up to taking risks. “There’ll be a bunch of people in your life, like mountain rescuers, telling you what you can and can’t do in your life. But only you can decide.”

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Marçal is also an entrepreneur whose marriage of New Age woo and business acumen recalls the “California ideology” of figures like Steve Jobs. His “IP method” of life coaching, for instance, includes courses on emotional intelligence based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, with a focus on “brain unlocking, identity activation and purpose clarification”.

To this he adds a dash of evangelical Christianity. His mental unlocking sessions have moments that resemble an exorcism — but in the service of professional advancement. “People are going to criticise you… in the name of Jesus, tell them to go fuck themselves,” he boomed when invited to speak at the Community of Faith church. It was met with a mixture of shock, mirth, and applause.

Marçal’s proposition is not so much religious as earthly. His programmes concern professional success and wealth; his presidential candidacy is an attempt to sell change, good management, and economic growth. His worldly pragmatism, however, is infused with the emotional registers of neo-charismatic Christianity.

In a way, this represents the closing of a circle. Neo-Pentecostalism grew out of post-Sixties New Age milieus. So did life coaching. According to Silas Guerriero, a professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, life coaching emerged from a New Age vision in which personal autonomy can be achieved through the development of individual spirituality. Now, evangelicals — in Brazil, but also around the world — are appropriating the techniques and styles of life coaching into their ministry. They blend “counselling, personal consultancy, and psychotherapy” with charismatic Christianity to help followers deal with both religious demands and the challenges of contemporary life.

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With his brand of self-help religiosity, Marçal is representative of the changing face of Brazil. Thanks to budget cuts, Brazil has delayed its decennial census, which should have been due in 2020, until this year, and so we do not know the total number of evangelicals in the country. One recent estimate, however, put it at 31% of the country’s population, up from less than 7% in 1980. As a whole, evangelicals, more than half of whom are Pentecostal, are set to overtake Catholics by 2030.

These numbers are only likely to rise as the country experiences what is, in effect, an economic lost decade. Brazilian researchers have found that for every 1% fall in the country’s GDP, evangelical numbers increase 0.8%. As Christopher Lord has noted, Bolsonaro, though a Catholic himself, “may well prove to be the first president of post-Catholic Brazil”. After all, if evangelicals were to decide the upcoming election, Bolsonaro would win a first-round landslide; they are one of the few demographic groups in which the incumbent holds an incontestable lead.

The evangelical churches “promise people what they want, now: health and wealth. And this is why it’s the faith of the world’s working poor,” explains Elle Hardy, author of an exposé on the religion’s global spread. We are a long way from sociologist Max Weber’s understanding of the way Protestantism sustained capitalism: hard work, duty, sacrifice and delayed gratification, in the name of rewards in the afterlife. Today, it’s the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Grifting. As Hardy tells me, “these people aren’t reading Luther, they’re reading Elon Musk biographies”.

In a context of wide and deep mistrust in institutions, Neo-Pentecostal churches also reject traditional authorities, be they priests or politicians. Its adherents, feeling besieged by the world around them, are told by pastors that only you, the believer, can dig yourself out of this hole. But the church also provides a community amid this individualism. In a precarious economy, the little microenterprise you set up to make ends meet will find willing customers among the faithful — once given endorsement by your pastor. The appeal here to the poor and struggling is obvious.

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These social transformations have clear political consequences. There is a large, multi-party evangelical bench in Congress: 195 federal deputies (38% of the lower house) and 8 senators. Neo-Pentecostals are a fair proportion of them. According to news outlet Metrópoles, 52 deputies elected in 2018 are Neo-Pentecostals.

These churches have their base in the poorest section of the population, but over the past two decades, the ranks of the faithful have steadily ascended into what is referred to in Brazil as the “new middle class”. The “Lulista” years, from 2003 to 2016, saw strong growth, cash transfers to the poor, an expansion of credit, and new private universities sustained by access to student loans. But this was not equalled by improved public services, while at the same time the rate of unionisation fell precipitously. Stagnating formal job creation has resulted in an informality rate exceeding 40%. For poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians, opportunity coexists with extreme precarity.

The result has been a much more individualistic country in which Marçal’s style of self-help has flourished. “Imagine yourself a baby who is taken from a royal family in the castle and given to a poor family. But as you grow, you look up to the castle and think, ‘I belong there,’” Marçal preaches.

One former Marçal follower has sued the life coach for encouraging her to make this vision a reality — by quitting her steady job and starting her own business. In court, the plaintiff alleged that Marçal told her, “we should not be celetista” (a reference to the CLT, Brazil’s labour code that guaranteed employment rights, and thus shorthand for formal employment), given that we are “born to prosper”. “He believes that everyone should choose to become an entrepreneur, that we should listen to our ‘heart’… and not be enslaved,” she explained, arguing that Marçal preys on the vulnerable.

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Marçal leverages this attitude into politics. “I feel like going to every person and yelling, ‘you’re asleep, you’re zombies, don’t you want Brazil to improve? Don’t you want change!?’ What do I want? I want you to prosper,” he exclaims in one recent livestream.

On his official campaign website, there are five keystones. The first is “every Brazilian a governor”. But this is no democratic slogan, it is an individualist one, dovetailing with his broader gospel discourse about prosperity. This becomes evident in another keystone, “every family a nation” — a slogan that could resonate just as well with Bolsonaro’s conservative, evangelical voters. The family is under threat and needs defence against the hostile outside world. Society is nowhere to be found. There is only “my fatherland, my family”, as yet another keystone has it.

The political echoes of Bolsonarismo should be obvious here. Indeed, the sharp-tongued Marçal calls the president merely an “expired antibiotic”: he did his job but now the moment has passed. “I’ll say it until my last days, until Bolsonaro hands me the [presidential] sash. I’ll get down on my knees and wash his feet and thank him for getting rid of the PT [the Workers’ Party],” Marçal explained.

At the same time, Marçal has sought to distance himself from the chaotic Bolsonaro. “I’m the resistance!”, he says. “None of the other ‘third way’ held on, I’m the third way we all dream of!”

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Indeed, a huge range of other, more established politicians have auditioned for the “third way” — between Lula and Bolsonaro — and failed. Previously, at the 2018 election, these politicians, mostly from the establishment Right, backed Bolsonaro in the second round. This year, they believed they had a chance to be president. After all, Bolsonaro can no longer claim to be an outsider, and his “disgovernment” has repelled many.

But the return of Lula — the most popular president in Brazilian history — has swallowed up the anti-Bolsonaro vote. And Brazilians have no love for the uncharismatic politicians of the mainstream Right. These are “cuckservatives”, in American internet parlance, who have seen the bulk of their voters abandon them in favour of the far-Right. Most of them have grudgingly fallen behind Lula in the search of some temporary stability.

Yet if Lula defeats Bolsonaro as expected, the anti-system new Right, with its base in Right-wing YouTube channels, will need a champion. This is undoubtedly terrain Marçal or someone like him can exploit. For instance, Marçal has already warned that Lula’s promise to reverse a grievous rollback of workers’ rights “will enable huge corruption”. The message here? Embrace precarity, throw yourself into the market, trust only yourself, your family, and God.

And so, across the country, the growing uncertainty of Brazilian life means the country will continue to be fertile ground for the pastor-coach type. Violent crime forces a recoil into a defensive posture inside the family unit. Economic informality means the lure of entrepreneurship pulls harder than that of a steady job, itself a growing rarity. The discrediting of mainstream institutions creates a demand for new sources of authority. The waning of tradition and Catholicism — with its more collective bent — should be providing an opening for progressive, secular politics. But for many, absent some big new idea to fill the void of meaning, it also represents a seemingly existential threat. If the public realm promises little, why not see if a little “mental unblocking” can make you rich?

Its tone was that of a short, sharp, necessary telling off for lovelorn American women: you may have lost your way, it said, but we can get you back on track. And the reason women had fallen from the path to true romance? Feminism. Feminism, which was supposedly telling women they didn’t need a man, even though many women very much wanted to make a life with one. Feminism, which had separated women from the old wisdom of the chase.

Was feminism really so strong at this time? The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution had been dead for more than a decade at this point, so possibly not, but facts never tended to trouble the narrative. You might need to be assertive at the office, but when it came to romance, the book was clear: only by playing the passive, feminine role could women make the right match.

Authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider were uncompromising in their instructions. Their method worked, they said, but only if you followed every detail. That included: “don’t talk to a man first”, “don’t rush into sex”, “let him take the lead” and “don’t expect a man to change”. In the worldview of The Rules, all feminism’s successes had left women lonely. “We didn’t want to give up our liberation,” wrote Fein and Schneider, “but neither did we want to come home to empty apartments. Why couldn’t we have it all?”

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Of course, when I say The Rules was successful, I mean that in the commercial sense. A cynic might point out that if self-help was successful in bringing out all the personal improvements it promised, its vendors would rapidly go out of business. And yet, the market is still going strong, with new purveyors rising up to solve the same old problems.

Today, feminism isn’t just failing to progress — with Roe vs Wade in danger of imminent collapse in the US, and sexual equality law in the UK threatened by the dissolution of the very concept of sex, it seems to be in retreat. And yet, it’s still getting the blame from a new generation of relationship gurus who want women to reclaim their “feminine energy”.

If you’re a straight woman who feels like you’re caught in a romance dead-end, never able to get a man to actually commit, the problem might just be you. This is the argument of “femininity coaches” Persia Lawson and Sami Wunder, who were both recently profiled in the Daily Mail. Women, they argue, are bringing the macho values of the workplace to the bedroom, and they’re paying for it with loneliness.

The first “macho” mistake a woman might make is to jump into bed with a man. Playing it casual, says Lawson, just means you get treated casually. If women want to be valued, they have to play hard to get: “In days gone by, when we understood the importance of femininity, men wooed women and, if they were successful in their pursuit, considered these girlfriends a great prize,” she told the Mail.

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The second mistake is that, even if a woman does manage to get a man to stick around after she’s flopped into bed with him, she’s still liable to sabotage herself by acting like the boss of the couple. Women who are used to being in control at work feel like they need to be in control at home as well, and men are happy to sit back and allow it. Wunder calls this impulse “mothering”, and according to Lawson, it creates “all kinds of tensions and resentments” which ultimately doom the relationship.

Fortunately, and by a stunning coincidence, these gurus can not only tell you where you’re going wrong — they can also sell you the solution. That is, assuming you have deep pockets (and assuming feminine energy is compatible with having pockets). Both Lawson and Wunder command up to £10,000 for one-to-one “femininity coaching”. In this, clients can learn vital womanly lore like “leave the man to do the running”, “resist the urge to plan” and “listen instead of talk, and smile”.

There are clearly women out there who are eager to pay for this advice, according to the testimonials on Lawson and Wunder’s websites. But it’s not obvious that they’re getting anything new: all this, pretty much, can be found in The Rules. Both are the perfect self-help formula: simple, yet complex. Catch a man with this one trick: all you have to do is change everything about yourself. Because for all that “feminine energy” is supposedly innate, it seems to take an awful lot of effort to harness it.

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The relentless self-command and artifice these systems require must be exhausting. But then, the essence of femininity is pretence. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote of how young women were deformed into artifice by a middle-class education:

“while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit… and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners.”

Women, in other words, have always expended a great deal of energy on holding themselves back.

Almost two centuries later, we had the vote and the second wave was taking oppression to task at the social, sexual and economic levels; still, the definition of “woman” was something phoney and cultivated. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer railed against all this:

“I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room … I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.”

In 2021, the ways in which women are expected to impersonate femininity are as creative — and as punishing — as ever. The (horrifyingly dangerous) Brazilian butt lift, to craft outrageous curves of provocation. Lavish lip fillers, which turn female mouths into voluptuous doughnuts clearly meant for kissing and sucking rather than talking. And what can’t be changed on the body can be dealt with using photo editors. The epitome of femininity is a look that no unaltered female body could achieve.

The most depressing take on the modern crop of femininity coaches is that these are women simply doing what savvy members of their sex have done forever: finding a way to monetise sexism, rather than challenge it. From one perspective, it takes an almighty level of neck to make a business of telling other women to pretend to be something they’re not. You don’t need to resolve your conflicts with the man in your life if instead you can remake yourself as the perfect, passive girlfriend.

But, however much I squirm at the political set-dressing of femininity coaches, I cannot — hand on heart — say that all the advice is bad. Smuggled in under the feminism-blaming, you’ll find some stuff that would make even the most devoted second waver give a hearty cheer. Take Lawson’s command that women should eschew “faux casual indifference” towards men. She’s right that, if you’re looking for commitment, it is deranged to pretend that you aren’t, and then be disappointed that men aren’t looking to commit to you. Be clear about what you want, and you’ll attract men who want the same.

Or there’s the rule about not “mothering” a man. The imbalance of housework in heterosexual domesticity is an exhausting statistical truth. That’s not because women are misguidedly wearing the trousers at home, but because despite feminism’s cajoling, men have still not been inspired to pick up the pinny. If you want a relationship where you aren’t doing all the drudgework, don’t start out by doing it. The men you deter would only have been a drain on you anyway.

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All this points to the idea that men can’t be reformed. All you can do is avoid the bad ones. Even the hoary old Rules has a chapter titled: “Don’t Expect a Man to Change or Try to Change Him”. This isn’t a supine injunction for women to fit themselves around a man. Instead, it’s an order for women to stop kidding themselves that their self-sacrifice can turn a deficient man into a decent one: if he sucks when you’re dating, he’s not going to un-suck just because he puts a ring on it. If anything, he’ll probably suck harder once the doors are bolted.

Look at this another way. The “femininity coaches” aren’t solving problems created by feminism. They’re solving problems created by femininity itself — the sex role that puts women in the role of universal caregiver. To reconstitute yourself around someone else’s needs, to never asking for more than the almighty man has signalled that he is willing to give — these are very, very feminine ways to behave, and all part of the mass transfer of labour (both the emotional and the physical kinds) from women, to men. A hefty chunk of the femininity coaches’ advice is actually telling women to be less feminine, while giving the appearance of selling a hyper traditional model of gender.

But no one ever lost money by pinning the blame on women. Think of the safety advice doled out to women after the murder of Sarah Everard: don’t put your hair in a ponytail; don’t go out after dark; even, astonishingly, don’t allow a police officer to arrest you. Not one of these things is practical defence against male violence, but they all came more easily to people’s minds than anything which would actually help. But ludicrous as this stuff is, women find reassurance in it. It gives a feeling of power and security, however illusory: if I can follow these rules, I can make it home safe.

There has always been a voracious female market for news of our own deficiencies. Some women sign up to be told they aren’t “leaning in” enough at work. Some pay through the nose to be berated for the sins of their race. And some simply want to hear that love is obtainable if they can get beyond their unappealing, masculine habits. Talk less, smile more. It might take all your powers to reinvent yourself as someone new and amenable, but it’s still less effort than trying to reinvent the world to be fair to women.

I once saw a television debate between the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor in which they suggested that humankind could be divided into the Tough and the Tender; I think I probably score high on the Tough side of the spectrum. I know that mental illness is real; it killed my son and has blighted the life of my best friend. But I do believe that many people could make themselves better. Resilience is like a muscle which grows weak with lack of use; human beings are born tough, but the fussing of an over-cautious society weakens them.

Mental illness has gone from being an ailment that we dare not speak of to one that we cannot escape; whenever I turn on Radio 4, I guarantee that the words “mental health” will be spoken within ten minutes.

But it’s not just a media problem; Ulrika Jonsson recently stripped off “to highlight the importance of men’s mental health” and to urge fans to donate to the charity StrongMen. What did her naked body have to do with it? I suppose 30 years ago it might have cheered some sad men up. But as it was, it was hard to define exactly who benefited.

Meanwhile, criminals are being spared jail for the sake of their mental health, the most recent example being when a cocaine-crazed driver left a nursery nurse with a fractured skull after running her over while talking on the phone and doing 63mph in a 30mph zone. Yasmin Jenkins was left in a coma and she is unable to return to work. But when sentencing her attacker, Clare Cassidy, earlier this month, Recorder Robert Lazarus noted: “You have a history of long-term mental health problems and I accept you are genuinely remorseful. I also note your mental health problems may deteriorate if sent to prison.” So that’s alright then!

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What I've learned about suicide

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F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that he “avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can”. I thought of him as I picked up the latest book by Matt Haig, who has perpetuated his own troubles very successfully indeed. The Comfort Book is the latest in Haig’s canon of woe, preceded by Reasons To Stay Alive (2015) and Notes From A Nervous Planet (2018). It is, we’re told, “a collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better”.

One of the signs of serious depression is the inability to be creative, but Mr Haig, who attempted to commit suicide aged 24, has been a veritable one-man library-stuffer, writing eleven children’s books and seven novels since he started out in 2004. He has, since then, also been signed up to something called The Mental Health Speakers Agency, along with Love Island’s Dr Alex and Blair Island’s Alastair Campbell. According to his profile, “Matt’s refreshingly honest and composed approach to a heavy topic makes him a hit time and time again” — which made me laugh as it sounds like an escort agency. Still, I’m sure it’s a lovely little earner; singing the blues will soon have you rolling in the greens.

Which brings us back to The Comfort Book. It’s very much what I think of as an UnBook, the sort of thing people who don’t like reading give to fellow illiterates at Christmas. If it were a garment, it would be a onesie. If it were food, it would be mashed potato. If it could speak, it would say “I’m here for you”. Keen not to startle us, Haig soothes us with an almost tangible hush: “You can place it beside your bed or keep it next to the toilet. You can throw it out of the window.” Option three, please!

He also reassures us that “You can tear out the pages”. But where to start? There’s so much to loathe: “We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.” “You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.” “Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles.” “It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.” It’s like that all the way through.

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But do we really need encouragement to be any soppier than we are? We are already a society in which dealing with one’s emotions privately is equated with “bottling it up”, which must surely lead to mayhem in the future. Indeed, this is the central argument of the current war between the Windsors and Sussexes; that processing and mastering one’s feelings alone is some sort of sham. But seeing the photographs of the Queen having a laugh at Royal Ascot last week, and comparing her resilience to the Sussexes’ ceaseless whining, this seems a spectacular own goal. All we see in the wars of the Windsors is an attempt by the Sussexes to “strength-shame” anyone who won’t put their personal problems in the shop window for all the world to pick over.

Of course, the mentally ill have always been with us, and always will be. But surely every other person didn’t have issues until they realised that it would get them attention? Rather like what one does in bed, a person’s neuroses are generally the least interesting thing about them, unless they are profoundly dull. Look at Churchill; a lifelong sufferer from severe manic depression, frequently suicidal — “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through… I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water” — but he never let it get in the way of leading a tiny nation into battle against the might of the Nazi war machine.

When I was a girl, I couldn’t wait to be a grown-up. I imagined that adult life was dangerous and exciting, and I was eager to get out into the fray. But now the craze for over-protecting children (as I write, doctors have just begged parents to stop bringing record levels of children suffering from colds to A&E!) has spread to the adult world with its endless waffle about pampering, self-care and me-time — and “journaling”, of course, so we can all have a chance of producing our very own Comfort Book.

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Talking of which, I must admit that I suffered a touch of “low mood” myself — quickly mutating to high dudgeon — on seeing my adored Stoics quoted in this quivering blancmange of a book. Far from feeling the need to cosset and baby ourselves, Marcus Aurelius said that the strong — which most of us are and which just a few, like my poor son, are not — should positively give thanks for misfortunes: “It’s unfortunate that this has happened? No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it — not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.”

Indeed, if you must seek advice on how to live life, have a look at The Daily Stoic website; just ten minutes of study a day will turn your attitude around, as it did mine. There are even a few good self-help books — The Power Of Now, Feel The Fear And Do it Anyway — which see the world clearly as the big bad beautiful thing it is, and advise extreme boldness in engagement with it.

If you want to live your one and only life in a self-soothing fashion, go ahead. But don’t be surprised when you’re on your deathbed with only half a life to look back on. Because fortune favours the tough — and has a habit of swerving the tender.

Oh well. That, presumably, was then. This is the depressing now, and it’s the people who claim to be on the side of culture who are pressing for the measure of it to be, not “Is it good?” but “Is it useful?”. And because we live in an era of relentless individualism, the only kind of useful that counts is making you — the unique and precious consumer — into a better person.

I came across a splendidly disheartening example of this in publicity for a new book called Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher, which publisher Simon & Schuster says “shows how writers have created… engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.” Sounds terrible, I thought, and so I read some of Wonderworks. And it was even worse than that.

Fletcher wants us to think of literature as a technology. Specifically, as “an innovation for troubleshooting our humanity”. It’s a thesis that comes with a dusting of neuroscientific talk about how “literature’s inventions can plug into different regions of the brain”, and a lot of purple prose. “The medicine men may have run out of unguents and potions; the heavens may have vanished or grown cold,” he writes. “But still, literature could fix hearts and lift souls. That, in brief, is why literature was invented and what it was invented to do.”

Oh really? This is what those of us in the business of literary criticism call “a heck of a claim”. Was the poet who wrote Beowulf  “fixing hearts and lifting souls”? Of course not. What they were actually doing was telling a baller story about fighting a big snake, imbued with reflections on feudal loyalty and vengeance which are semi-impenetrable from the society we live in now. That snake fight is forever, though.

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Was Aphra Behn trying to “fix hearts and lift souls” when she turned out Oroonoko? I am pretty sure that what she was in fact doing was getting rich, given that she wrote for a living and wrote a lot. Were the patrons who sustained literature before the arrival of commercial publishing in the “heart-fixing, soul-lifting” business? No; they were displaying their wealth and culture to other wealthy, cultured people — and good on them, frankly.

It’s not that literature can’t be personally uplifting, or even morally improving; but when you insist that this is what literature is for, you make a claim that sits at odds with the manifest intentions of most writers and readers. Why do I read? Largely because I hate to be bored, and books are my favourite way of not being bored. (Also, a little bit, because I like people to think of me as someone who reads books.)

There is some psychological research suggesting that reading fiction helps people to exercise their empathy, perhaps leading them to act more generously. Whether those findings are robust and well-replicated, I don’t know, and I’m not really sure whether it’s necessary to make any claim stronger than this one on literature’s behalf: reading stories forces you to spend time inhabiting someone else’s subjectivity — Joan Didion, sinisterly, described writing as “an imposition of writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space” — and doing so might make you better at imagining the inner life of other people.

But here’s the kicker: if it works, it only works because you’re thinking about somebody other than yourself. To approach literature in the way Fletcher urges us to — as a shortcut to self-improvement which can help you “unfreeze your heart” with Samuel Beckett and “lessen your lonely” by reading Elena Ferrante (both genuine chapter titles, I swear) — is to approach it thinking only of yourself. It’s a solipsism utterly destructive not just to the enjoyment of fiction, but also to the quasi-medical benefits that Fletcher is touting.

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Still, he’s hardly alone in his efforts to turn art into cure-all. Reading Lloyd Evans’ recent broadside against the “pleasure-free zone” of contemporary theatre, I discovered this quote from Matthew Warchus, artistic director of the Old Vic: “Fiction doesn’t have to be just a diversion or a pastime. It really can change individuals and societies for the better. Intelligent entertainment is a transformative necessity, not a luxury.” Sounds terrible, I thought, although as I haven’t seen the “intelligent entertainment” Warchus was referring to, I can’t give any judgement there.

But also, I don’t want to see anything that’s being touted as a “transformative necessity”. I like being diverted. I appreciate a show that passes the time. Leaving the auditorium and asking myself “did this change me individually and society as a whole for the better?” sounds very, very tiring. Theatres are uncomfortable enough already with the terrible seats and inadequate toilet situation; I don’t see why they should start pressing on my conscience as well as my bladder. Do you know what people actually like? Cats and The Mousetrap, that’s what people like.

Yet the most fun I’ve had at the theatre has often been very uncomfortable indeed. It’s just that the discomfort has been dramatic, rather than didactic: the strain of being made to feel for two different people at the same time, of holding both sides of an argument in your head at once. The next thing I’m going to see is a revival of David Mamet’s sexual harassment two-hander Oleanna. It will probably make me furious. I can’t wait.

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I suspect that any play aiming to “change individuals and society for the better” isn’t going to invoke that kind of tension. Instead, it suggests some of the dreary issue-based theatre I’ve diligently sat through — the kind of play that knows what a good person would think, and is enjoyed by audiences made up of the self-identifying good. You come in agreeing and you leave agreeing, and actually, nothing is transformed.

The “useful” approach to art is the shortest way to hollow it of any purpose at all. If you’re trying to “energise your life” (another Fletcher chapter title, Lord help me) you should probably have a spoonful of peanut butter, and not — as he prescribes — read Frankenstein, which is a novel and an achingly tragic one, rather than a self-help tract. If you want to uplift the state of the nation, don’t watch a play, go into politics.

But if you want to read a novel or watch a play, you should do it for pleasure. It should feel like a luxury, rather than an obligation. It should be something that you invite to occupy your attention on its own terms, rather than conditional on its ability to fix you up — and if it doesn’t occupy your attention, you can bail at the interval or after the first fifty pages. Perhaps art will improve you as a person. But if it can’t entertain you, I don’t see why you should give it the chance.