Please can it have a nightclub carriage playing this song.

Tchaikovsky no…

There’s a good dozen of great suggestions in the comments here for tips to sort out various things like cooking, etc. (I have saved a few for myself later).

So instead I’ll offer some meta advice for making these things feel effortless:

1. Find the paths of least resistance and chain them together.

Look at the additional activities you want to add on to your day before/after work and figure out what is the most effortless way to trigger starting one activity when the previous one ends.

For example, back in April I wanted to start going to the gym regularly so I did three things: put together a gym bag with enough sets of gym clothes for the week’s exercise, keep that gym bag in my car, and joined a gym as close to my place of work as possible.

By doing this I was able to build “going to the gym” into my commute home from work. I have managed to keep up the habit of three gym sessions a week since then (with the occasional miss due to illness or other life events getting in the way).

2. Make the good habits obvious and the bad ones obscure.

I struggled all my life with something so basic; remembering to brush my teeth both in the morning and at night. So what I did last year was use the IKEA peg board thing and found some holders for my toothbrush and toothpaste. That pegboard is right next to my bedroom door so I have to walk past my toothbrush whenever I leave the room as a visual trigger to go brush my teeth.

Think about how you can position physical reminders in your space to do the activities you want to do.

Or use your phone’s calendar/to do list app of your choice to book in reminders to nudge you into getting started.

3. Just five minutes to get started and if necessary do the bare minimum badly.

Whenever I’m feeling tired but there’s a task that needs doing I ask myself “will this take five minutes or less?”. If the answer is yes, then I just do it there and then.

If it’s something that will take more than five minutes to complete to 100% then I say to myself “ok I’m tired but I’m just going to do five minutes of it and see how I’m feeling then”. This works out great for the gym example. Today on the way home from work I was knackered but I told myself to just do the five minutes as the bare minimum. Once I’d done a few minutes of exercise I felt like I was achieving and then pushed past the five minutes for a good 30 minutes before deciding that was enough for today.

And yes, there have been days when I literally just did the five minutes and stopped. But that didn’t matter, because I still completed what I set as the bare minimum. Those minimums still get me closer to my goals and therefore they’re still a win. So long as I’m getting just one more of these little wins over losing (i.e. not going to the gym) then the progress keeps stacking and the good habit continues to form.

Yeah this sort of “return to a time when men were real men” is a historically recurring meme (in the Dawkins sense) that appears to crop up whenever inequality increases or economic downturns happen or in the build up to large scale conflicts.

“half-chewed thoughts” ooooh another delightful turn of phrase I’m adding to my armoury collection.

Pictured: the most calm person in Birmingham.

This looks staged. As in the whole situation is a set up for content creation.

You haven’t been to enough regions of England mate. I’m only slightly joking when I say it can get bad. Not “it’s a difficult to understand dialect” but “how the hell did you even make it through the state school system?” bad. Genuinely some of the first generation immigrants speak better English than some of the locals.

Source: grew up in one of these regions.

I can’t comment for the whole Anglosphere and I certainly won’t comment on NI, Wales, and Scotland, but for England:

Pick any point on the map and move in any direction. As you move, if the average wage increases, English proficiency increases and vice versa.

I’d say at the lowest level equivalent is France and the highest level equivalent is Denmark.

I like your optimism, but Labour have had it on their manifesto a few times and then once they get in power quietly drop it. Also there was a referendum a decade ago when the Lib Dems threw their lot in with the Tories just to try and get AV implemented.

They lost that referendum badly.

Everyone in this entire thread is hearby banned from entering the UK.

Don’t worry, they’re not missing much, though if things get a bit dicy here, we may need to capture these folks and put them in the stocks to unite the country around a common enemy.

I love Hobbes

Can’t wait for all the “Slutty Copper Merchant” Halloween costumes next year.

Why do I get the feeling this kind of logic is used by modern day economists to justify inflation?

They never will do electoral reform. For most of recent history they’ve been one of the two big parties and the two big parties under FPTP will never implement any proportional representation.

I slightly disagree about the competence because everyone seems to have forgotten the train wreck that was the conservatives post-brexit.

They’re moving ahead with sensible boring policies that don’t get talked about in the media because there’s nothing here to get the population angry about: planning law reforms, Great British Energy (a nationalised green energy producer), Great British Railways (renationalising the railways), and more Metro-mayors reforming local government into a much simpler three-tier system that devolves more powers to local authorities.

The issues are:

1. They keep fumbling the public relations and scoring own goals (see winter fuel payments and the wanking licence, both policies the conservatives set in motion that they could have stopped but didn’t have the spine to).

2. They keep bending over to try and appease Reform talking points instead of standing on their own principles. This won’t win over Reform voters who are already laying all of their financial woes at the feet of whatever enemy Farage and Robinson tell them to be angry about, and it keeps pissing off their left leaning supporters.

3. They’re not willing to tackle the biggest issue: wealth inequality. The party has clearly already bent the knee to billionaires and corporations that attend DAVOS even before Kier got elected.

That last one is the biggest fumble of them all because increasing wealth inequality is what is drives the growing dispair and frustration that Farage feeds off and tells them to direct their anger at immigrants/trans people/whatever minority target they chose.

This is why I hope Zack Polanski can continue to apply pressure from the left and I hope that the Greens are able to assemble their own set of prominent talking heads and potential MPs that get the media attention needed to push public conversation towards the left again, very difficult to do in a Murdoch captured media landscape.

Usually in the form of asking questions:

1. “Does this task take 5 minutes to do and do you have 5 minutes to spare?”

If the answer is yes, then just do it. It has helped me keep things tidy a bit better rather than spending a full day cleaning up everything. Now, if tasks get left, rather than a full day cleaning & tidying it’s only an hour or so.

My space being tidier has brought me some much needed stress relief.

2. “Do you need this item right now? Can it wait until the end of the month when you get paid?”

Struggling with impulse purchases so this question has helped me stop spending as recklessly though I do relapse sometimes but nowhere near as bad as I was.

3. “Got paid? Great! Have you money-potted your paycheck?”

Further aiding my financial responsibility efforts, every time I get paid I use my bank’s money-pot feature to portion it out to make sure rent, bills, phone, food, transport, subscriptions, activities, etc. are budgeted appropriately. The rest is stuffed into savings to resist the temptation to spend it.

4. “What would a healthy and active person do?”

To lose weight and improve my fitness, everytime I want to get something unhealthy for lunch or dinner I ask “would someone who’s trying to lose weight eat that?” or “would a healthy person chose that fizzy drink or have water instead?”. On my way home from work I go to the gym and on the days when I don’t feel like it I ask “Would someone who’s active skip going to the gym? Sure they would if they’re feeling unwell and sick, are you feeling ill and sick? Ok you’re tired, but can you at least do 5 minutes on the treadmill?” because I don’t want to be breaking that habit that has been going really well for the last 8 months.

Honestly at the moment my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster so I’ve not been asking myself these questions and been slipping on the good habits recently, speaking of which…

5. “Did you keep the habits up? No, that’s ok you stumbled a bit there. Now what small changes can you make to make the good ones easier to do and the bad ones harder to do?”

At the end of the day, I’ll take the path of least resistance so I’ve got to make sure that path is the one that will lead me to the outcomes I want. I’ll be having a think about these this weekend because I am determined to get back on track, so I’m going to sit myself down and work through it like a friend would.

Which leads me to the final question:

6. “Would a friend talk/act that way to you?”

I struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Some days I really feel like I just have no value and the self-loathing is immense so when I get overly critical and verbally/physically beat myself up I try to hold onto a moment of calm and ask that question to myself. I don’t need to answer it because I know the answer and just need a moment to just breathe and chill to try and break the negative thought spiral.

Even though we call bread rolls something different, I think we can both agree: London’s shite.

Ay! Lancashire finally gets acknowledged in a meme! Suck it Yorkshire, we got one now!

Buying stuff from the US? That’ll most likely return though at slightly reduced numbers because it doesn’t hurt to have multiple suppliers.

Investing in US facilities? Depends: Distribution for consumption, sure, minimal risk so long as the economy is doing ok there’s a large consumer market to access.

Manufacturing facilities? Much more risky and less likely to return.